Description
South Asia is a distinctive geostrategic environment characterized by a perilous geography, intractability of the longstanding rivalry, a fraught border, short launch-to-impact times, and three geographically contiguous nuclear weapon states (NWS) persistently engaged in testing each other’s resolve to confirm whether escalation is both ‘controllable and calculable’.The dynamics of interaction in South Asia particularly between India and Pakistan have been characterized by an absence of nuclear use, along with the persistence of sub-conventional warfare and limited conventional conflict which have been explained theoretically through the ‘stability-instability paradox’. With the sharpening of rivalries in the broader pursuit of escalation dominance, both India and Pakistan have continually sought new advantages and technological breakthroughs to improve their position. Fully Autonomous weapon systems (AWS) based on their capability to autonomously track, select, and engage targets at superhuman speed, with an opaque human-machine interface, without taking into account the human fail-safe, at reduced personnel costs in denied environments, will have transformative effects on stability, human decision-making and command and control in the South Asian context. The central research question explored was whether autonomous weapons pose a challenge to Stability in South Asia.
