I find it amusing that our Indian friends are in denial of their military's simple yet brilliant effort. It failed only by a bad stroke of luck, an initiative by a Pakistani NCO and excellent marksmanship of a G-3 wielding soldier. But still I have to give it to them; it was innovative approach.
To start with, debate of what is military hardware and what is not is futile by default. It's the purpose for which a hardware is being used that makes it military or non military. So you want to know what is happening just across the fence? Sure you could bring in expensive high tech gear but if you send in, say a Searcher class UAV there are problems. It can be shot down or just crash leading to loss of face to political leadership. They have already embarrassed themselves recently with some ill-thought statements. So you buy a commercial Quad-copter. It takes good pictures and records 4K video which is good enough to take out 6MP+ stills. It won't be picked by enemy radars because it has a tiny RCS, flies too low and too slow. And the best is you can always deny it. And to deny it, you do some homework like get a Chinese one and preferably something that iss operated by, let's say Pakistani police. So far so good. You get your pictures and you have got the denial part covered. But things start to go wrong here on.
Firstly Bhimbar is a far off area, rural, neglected and militarised. Places like these and police won't even have enough handcuffs let alone a Quad-copter. And even if they do they dare not fly it over military. Our Indian friends really don't know how it works between PA and Pak Police especially in catonment area. Then there is problem with streaming of captured media. You can't do it and hence the data is their in the copter and would be retrieved. Now it is entirely possible that Pakistan flies unmanned objects of its own in the area, whether of military or commercial area but for military purposes. However if it crashes, you tell the world, it was the experimental drone being tested by Rangers or we lost control over it and for some strange divine reason it headed straight to Indian airspace etc etc. But here you see Indian High Commisioner being summoned. You don't do it if it was one of your own. You just downplay the incident.
So please my dear friends, let's see the irony here. It was a good plan but then again there were some good soldiers on the other side and fate had that big crooked smile on its face!
