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, has 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, and to the detriment of strategic stability. Militaries in South Asia foresee the potential deployment of lethal autonomous weapon systems in anti-access or area denial operations deep within the adversary’s territory, and Suppression of Enemy Air Defences (SEAD) operations across the Kashmir border. Fully Autonomous weapon systems, based on their capability to autonomously track, select, and engage targets at superhuman speed, with an opaque human-machine interface, will have transformative effects on stability in South Asia. The central research question explored in the paper was whether autonomous weapons pose a challenge to Stability in South Asia.