The IAF Counter-UAS exercise Rotor Clap III has brought helicopter units of the Indian Air Force together in Rajasthan to rehearse the hunting of hostile drones. The service announced the drill on Saturday, framing it as an effort to validate operational concepts against emerging aerial threats.

Its theme is counter unmanned aircraft systems, the layered task of spotting, tracking and killing small drones before they reach what they were sent to strike.

Inside the IAF Counter-UAS exercise

Rotor Clap III is the third edition of a series the Air Force has built around rotary-wing counter-drone work. It ran in the desert sector, with helicopter units flying live-firing missions and launching missiles and rockets at simulated targets in the air. A photograph put out by the service shows a Mi-17 firing a salvo of rockets in a shallow dive, the smoke of the launch still trailing behind it. 


The helicopters flown

The airframes have been identified in reporting on the exercise. Attack helicopters including the AH-64 Apache, the Mi-25/35 and the indigenous Prachand joined the Chinook heavy-lifter along with the Mi-17 and Dhruv in transport and utility roles. The Air Force's own statement referred only to its helicopter units.

Why helicopters for the counter-drone mission

A counter-drone helicopter offers something fixed ground-based air defence cannot always promise. It fills gaps in static cover, deploys at short notice, and works out of remote or confined sites without the runways and airfield infrastructure that fixed-wing fighters need. Against a slow, low machine skimming the terrain, a rocket or gun-armed helicopter that can reposition in minutes is a useful link in the kill chain. Indian counter-drone training has widened well beyond the Air Force, with paramilitary units running their own counter-drone courses for troops guarding critical sites.

A drill shaped by the western border

Rajasthan sets the IAF Counter-UAS exercise along India's western frontier, where unmanned incursions have grown into a routine security worry. The armed forces have been fielding and trialling a widening set of answers, from jammers and directed-energy weapons to kamikaze drones and loitering munitions built to seek out and destroy hostile machines aloft. The Air Force's senior leadership has, for its part, pressed for faster progress on unmanned systems and their integration across the force.

The drill also caps a busy stretch of IAF flying, coming weeks after its Rafales took part in the multinational Exercise Pitch Black in Australia.

An indigenous gunship in the mix

The Prachand's place in the line-up carries an Aatmanirbhar Bharat marker. Designed and built in India for high-altitude and desert flying, the light combat helicopter hands the Air Force a home-grown gunship to fold into work of this kind.