India entered the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the second decade of the 21st century when various organs of the government, civilian think-tanks and military officers started discussing and writing about machine intelligence.
The official reports generated by the various ministries of the Indian government, the doctrinal papers published by the three branches of the Indian armed forces and the publications by military research institutes (the United Service Institution of India, for example) are all important sources for piecing together the trajectory of the Indian government and the armed forces’ discourse about the potential military uses of AI. Alongside military officers who contribute to professional journals (such as the Journal of the United Service Institution of India, Indian Defence Review, etc.), civilian and military researchers from various Indian think-tanks such as the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) and the Centre for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS) have also written about the potential of AI to transform warfare in the near future and its likely impact on the Indian armed forces.
This PRIO paper reviews the written output from these sources to discern the main lines of Indian engagement on the strategic and ethical dimensions of AI deployment in the military sphere.
