Recent wars have been about air power of a different kind: large numbers of missiles and drones have been used with precision to destroy targets over extremely long distances.
This has been enabled by a sophisticated technology stack that employs massive numbers of sensors with enormous computing power, bandwidth and artificial intelligence. It requires a manufacturing base that can produce flying objects of the most basic to the most advanced kind. Add a live- stream video camera to a lethal flying machine and you score big on the information front too.
Small wonder that armed forces and defence analysts around the world believe that air power of this kind is the future of warfare.
They are not wrong. But we should be careful in claiming that autonomous drones and precision missiles will be decisive in future wars.
After the Gulf War of 1990-91, a lot of people believed that air power of the kind the US employed against Saddam Hussain’s Iraq would swing the scales of war, only to find that the next two decades were mostly about the ground-based grind of counter-insurgency. The logic of strategy is paradoxical: the adversary knows how you plan to fight and aims to outwit you by fighting differently.
Even so, whether or not drones and missiles live up to their hype, we cannot escape the fact that they are likely to be used by our adversaries against us.
After Operation Sindoor, Pakistan has followed the Chinese example and placed its conventional missiles under its Army Rocket Force Command, separate from the Army Strategic Forces Command that controls its nuclear arsenal.
We can interpret this to mean that Pakistan intends to use conventional missiles against India while staying under the nuclear threshold. Indian cities 750km from Pakistani launch sites are thus within its range. The next war might not be limited to border areas.
Together with the advent of drones, this changes the meaning of air defence. Vehicles, buildings and cities have been targeted in Ukraine and West Asia. So we can no longer think of air defence as only batteries and guns at military bases that defend our national airspace from intruding aircraft and missiles.
Air defence has already become a municipal subject. It is conceivable that we will have a plethora of air defenders, from private security companies guarding buildings, to municipal and state police securing cities, to army, navy and air force units protecting their assets and a national air/missile defence shield at the highest level. They will all need to have clear areas of responsibility, a shared situational awareness and close operational coordination.
That’s just air defence. Once missiles and drones become the primary means of war-fighting, the questions of what, who, how, when and how much need to be asked afresh by defence planners.
Perhaps it is just as well that India’s formation of theatre commands has been delayed, because it is not clear how rocket forces, drones and air defence are best organized in the Indian context. At the very least, we might have to organize theatre commands differently. At most, we might come to the conclusion that we need an entirely new structure for wars of the future.
This might infuriate analysts and policymakers who have advocated a theatre command system for well over two decades, but technology has advanced far beyond what anyone in 2006, leave alone 1986, had imagined.
Unlike theatre commands or integrated battle groups, there are no pre-existent mental models that India can rely on for future-readiness. How then do we proceed? A proposal advanced by participants of the Indian Air Force’s recent Warfare and Aerospace Strategy Programme (WASP), where I have been a guest faculty member, is impressive.
A joint team of mid-ranking officers proposed setting up a national battle innovation hub that would discover appropriate structures through experimentation.
The specific proposal is debatable, but WASP has succeeded in creating intellectual capacity among actual war-fighters that can offer properly-baked answers to questions that have long vexed the strategic establishment. Such initiatives need to be strengthened across India’s armed services.
For now, all the three services have stepped up procurement and induction of drones and missiles. At last year’s Aero India show in Bengaluru, at least two halls were filled with domestic drone companies. After the Sindoor experience, it is not surprising that exports of Indian-made missiles are part of New Delhi’s outreach to Southeast Asian countries. These are important starting points and suggest that the new kind of air power confers geopolitical benefits beyond battlefield advantage.
There has also been a surge of innovation within engineering units of the army and the navy, and they are also talking to startups and domestic manufacturers. This is an improvement, but I still do not have convincing answers when venture capitalists ask me to identify timeframes for startups to secure firm orders.
We can either build or buy the range of fantastic flying objects that define the exercise of air power today, but India’s defence requires an appropriate organizational structure, operational systems, doctrines and plans.
The author is co-founder and director of The Takshashila Institution, an independent centre for research and education in public policy.