Author: Mr Prahlad Kumar Singh, Research Associate, Centre for Aerospace Power and Strategic Studies

Keywords: Special Representatives talks, Expert Level Mechanism, India, China, Transboundary River Cooperation

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Author: Air Vice Marshal Prashant Mohan VM (Retd), Additional Director General, CAPSS

Keywords: Conventional War, Air Power, Drone Warfare, New Normal, AI-Fused Targeting

Since February 2026, the United States, Israel and Iran have fought what most call a “war”. This label is nothing else but a conflict fought without any formal declaration. Shifting American goals. This paper resists that habit. It asks two narrower questions before drawing any lesson. Does it meet the standard tests of “conventional war”? Does its air campaign meet the standard tests of “conventional air warfare”? The answer to both, this paper argues, is qualified. The conflict sits close enough to the conventional category on some counts, and far enough from it on others. What follows tests that claim, then draws out what are the departures, the “new normal” it previews, and what it means for India.

Testing the Conflict Against the Definition

Conventional war has been defined as organized, armed conflict between political entities such as states. Two features stand out: organization and political purpose. War is not a random brawl or a spontaneous act of violence. It is deliberate, planned, and directed toward achieving specific goals. Emphasis on organization is important which separates war from a riot, or ordinary criminal violence. A war requires structured groups with leadership, resources, and the capacity to sustain conflict over time. In another place it is described as state-on-state conflict between organized, uniformed, professional military forces using massed firepower in open space away from civilians with the aim of destroying each other to gain and hold ground. Irregular war, by contrast, is fought by non-state or hybrid actors below that threshold.

The current understanding of irregular and conventional warfare envisions them as two distinct, mutually exclusive categories. Measured against that continuum, this conflict sits closer to the conventional end than an insurgency or a proxy war would, but well short of a textbook state-on-state war.

The conflict began on 28 February 2026, when Israel and the United States launched air-strikes against Iranian military and nuclear-infrastructure sites, without any preceding declaration of war. Direct combatants eventually included Israel, the United States, and Iran, along with non-state actors like those in Lebanon and Yemen, a structure not clearly a bounded state Iranian army. A ceasefire was announced in June 2026; Washington declared the conflict over in July; but the endpoint remained contested. A diffuse start, a mixed coalition and an ambiguous end. The conflict’s own factual record supports a mixed verdict.

The Case For

The conflict looks recognisably conventional in several respects. Two sovereign states, Israel and Iran, deployed regular armed forces against each other’s territory, with the United States joining as a third state actor rather than an irregular partner. The stated objectives were conventional in nature: destruction of Iran’s nuclear-enrichment capacity and its ballistic-missile and air-defence infrastructure. The weapons employed were conventional in class too. Israeli tempo of 2,500 sorties delivering more than 6,000 munitions against Iranian targets within days, is consistent with a state air force fighting a state adversary. Iran responded with large-scale ballistic-missile and drone salvoes. CENTCOM’s own description of the resulting air situation, citing air dominance and near “impunity” over Iranian airspace, is itself the language of a conventional air campaign.

The Case Against

The case against is at least as strong. No formal declaration opened the conflict, and no treaty has formally closed it; a June ceasefire and a July American declaration that the war had ended did not stop intermittent strikes afterward. That ambiguity is not cosmetic. Can one say that a state of war exists- really confusing.

The coalition structure is equally asymmetric. Israel and the United States fought as a combined partners. Iran fought largely alone, reinforced by non-state partners and by alleged big power support. A conventional war, in the textbook sense, assumes two sides of broadly comparable organisational character, even where capabilities differ. This conflict paired a formal alliance against a single state leaning on informal, deniable support.

Non-kinetic and covert tools did at least as much work as declared strikes. Israeli operations reportedly combined HUMINT penetration, sabotage by smuggled precision munitions with air strikes well before the declared opening of hostilities. A covert campaign already under way and a war said to have started in February. It is fighting one hybrid war that includes conventional elements.

Conventional War Assumptions Busted

Several assumptions long treated as settled did not survive this conflict. The first is that escalation, once begun, follows a roughly predictable ladder that combatants and observers can track and manage. Instead, strikes, ceasefires and renewed incidents overlapped in a pattern closer to a fluctuating pressure gauge.

The second is that proportionality can be judged by territory changing hands, the traditional yardstick of a conventional war’s scale. Much of this conflict’s effect was instead measured in degraded capability: roughly eighty per cent of Iran’s air defences destroyed, and a ninety per cent fall in Iran’s ballistic-missile attack rate over the campaign, figures describing capacity destroyed rather than ground taken.

The third is that troop numbers and force ratios remain the primary predictor of outcome. Precision-strike capacity, and the intelligence architecture cueing it, did far more explanatory work here than raw force size on either side.

The fourth, and most consequential for how future conflicts get named, is that a “war” is a discrete event distinguishable from a “: sustained strike campaign.” This conflict was, for long stretches, indistinguishable from the latter: rolling strikes without a fixed order of battle, punctuated by ceasefires that did not hold.

The Air Campaign: How Far from Conventional

The air campaign is where the conflict departs furthest from a conventional model. From Israeli and US side manned aircraft, not drones, still carried the overwhelming majority of ordnance. What changed was not who flew the aircraft but what fed them target data, and how fast.

Target identification and battle-damage assessment leaned heavily on artificial-intelligence fusion tools layered over traditional sources and open-source reporting into a single picture at a pace not matched earlier. Israeli and US reportedly used AI to compress a targeting cycle, and a continuously updated picture.

Independent open-source researchers, drawing on commercially available imagery, published battle-damage assessments and order-of-battle updates on a timeframe comparable to official military releases, and in some cases ahead of them, running a parallel, unclassified verification loop alongside the campaign. Iran, for its part, drew on satellite support attributed to China to offset its own reconnaissance deficit.

Loitering munitions and low-cost drones employed by both sides, operated at a scale a conventional air order of battle rarely accounted. Blurring what had been a reasonably clean line between an air force’s crewed order of battle and an irregular actor’s improvised arsenal. None of this required a genuinely novel weapon. It required the fusion of AI processing, commercial space access and low-cost strike platforms once available almost exclusively to states with large defence-industrial bases.

Conventional Air-War Assumptions Busted, and Why

Four specific assumptions about conventional air warfare did not hold, each tracing to the same driver: the low-cost availability of artificial intelligence, commercial space imagery and drone technology to actors who previously could not have fielded them.

The first is manned-aircraft primacy as the organising assumption of an air campaign’s centre of gravity. Aircraft still flew the missions, but the campaign’s tempo was set by AI-fused targeting pipeline, not by cockpit availability.

The second is that ISR in a modern air campaign remains a state-monopolised function. Commercial satellite operators and open-source researchers ran a verification loop in near-real time alongside the official one. Commercial space assets partially substituted for a weaker state’s own reconnaissance shortfall. The same category of artificial-intelligence vendor underpinning military targeting pipelines has itself become an object of state supply-chain risk assessment.

The third is that strike economics remain roughly cost-proportionate, expensive interceptors matched against expensive threats. Iran’s asymmetric playbook, reportedly sharpened by its own use of AI to optimise drone and missile employment against Israeli and allied defences, exploited exactly the inverse economics: cheap mass against expensive point-defence.

The fourth is that an air campaign has a definable front line in the way a ground campaign does. Strikes, sabotage and drone incursions occurred against targets scattered across Iranian, Israeli and regional territory without a contiguous air-defence boundary either side could treat as settled, a pattern closer to the diffuse geography of a cyber campaign than a conventional air war’s bounded contest for defined airspace.

The New Normal in Air Warfare

The four claims motivating this question, that speed is displacing stealth, that layered air defence is proving a myth, that air superiority is no longer a panacea, and that a static target will eventually be found, are thanks to this conflict’s record. Coverage of Iran’s Kheibar-class missiles in this conflict makes the same point in reverse: the edge lies less in raw velocity, since conventional ballistic missiles already exceed Mach 5, than in sustained terminal maneuvering that compresses an interceptor’s reaction time. As one assessment put it, Iran’s approach is “not about raw speed… and more about sustained maneuvering,” which turns every engagement into “a moving-target problem at extreme speed”. By late March 2026, Israel had begun rationing its top-tier Arrow interceptors and pushing lower-tier David’s Sling and Iron Dome batteries to engage threats they were not designed for, after Iran launched more than 400 missiles and hundreds of drones over four weeks. The system, built for flexibility rather than sustained high-volume warfare, saw direct hits on Dimona and Arad after intercepts failed. Even as Israel claimed air dominance over Iranian skies, an F-35 reportedly took a hit from an Iranian strike on 23 March 2026. The International Crisis Group’s Ali Vaez drew the wider lesson: “even an F-35 is not invulnerable in a dense, adaptive air-defence environment,” while cautioning that no credible evidence yet shows a basic surface-to-air system achieved it alone. Taleghan 2, a known nuclear-linked site struck once in 2024, was reinforced with additional concrete and soil. It was struck again on 11 March 2026, with satellite imagery showing three precisely placed bunker-buster penetration holes despite the hardening.

Three further shifts sit beside these four. Mass built from attritable, networked systems is displacing the assumption that fewer, exquisite platforms win by quality alone. The electromagnetic spectrum is now as decisive as kinetic strikes. And transparency is double-edged: flooding a command chain with sensor feeds does not automatically yield faster decisions, and can slow them, since reconciling contradictory inputs takes time a compressed targeting cycle no longer allows.

Learnings for India

None of these findings depend on how the conflict is ultimately labelled. The democratisation of AI-fused targeting, commercial-satellite ISR and low-cost drone technology is now a planning fact for India regardless of the conflict’s final classification.

The clearest lesson concerns procurement balance. India’s own commentary on this conflict has already flagged that exquisite, expensive platform when faced with mass, cheap, AI-cued strike systems, may not be true battle winners. High-end platforms require a parallel, lower-cost counter-mass and strike capacity.

The second lesson concerns institutional capacity to absorb AI and cyber tools at speed. Standing service cadres alone may not be the answer. A dedicated national cyber reserve force, drawing on private-sector and reservist technical talent could be what India needs. Prepare against a conflict’s actual character, not its label.

The third lesson concerns the open-source ecosystem itself. As adversarial use of AI for ISR and espionage grows more sophisticated, India’s cybersecurity and counter-ISR posture needs to evolve at a comparable pace, treating commercial-satellite and open-source monitoring as a contested domain rather than a benign civilian sideline.

A fourth lesson is organisational. A targeting cycle compressed from days to hours only pays off if the force around it can decide at the same pace. A responsive command architecture is the precondition for absorbing the fast-cycle campaign this conflict has previewed.

Conclusion

The U.S.-Israel-Iran conflict is not, a conventional war in the fullest sense, nor is its air campaign a conventional air campaign in that sense. It resembles both closely enough. It also diverges from both sharply enough making the comparison qualified. The findings should focus the conditions that produced its departures from the conventional model, and the wider air-warfare “new normal”: AI-fused targeting, commercial-satellite ISR and low-cost, high-speed strike technology, now available to actors well beyond those with large defence-industrial bases. India’s planners should take the conflict less as a template to replicate and more as an early demonstration of that shift. The next conflict India fights is unlikely to resemble this one in detail. It is likely to share its defining feature: a fight decided as much by who fuses information fastest as by who fields the larger force.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Centre for Aerospace Power and Strategic Studies [CAPSS])

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Keywords: Quantum, Computers, Sensors, Communications, Nuclear Security

Quantum technologies (QT) are set to transform the world. The ideas behind them are not new, and the basic concepts of quantum physics date back to the earliest years of the twentieth century. Over the last century, the transition from a conventional to a quantum view of the physical world was marked by the first quantum revolution, during which scientists discovered that matter and energy behave very differently at the atomic and subatomic scales. Here, light behaves as both a wave and a particle, electrons can exist in multiple locations simultaneously, and two particles can remain mysteriously connected despite the vast distances between them. This marked a significant shift in our everyday understanding of reality.

Understanding these properties gave us lasers, transistors, magnetic resonance imaging, and semiconductors. Now, a new quantum revolution is underway: instead of simply relying on quantum effects, scientists are learning to control them directly by using properties such as superimposition and entanglement to build new kinds of computers, sensors and communication systems.

These advancements are set to transform the way we live and work in a myriad of ways, and and the nuclear field is no exception. In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) and its nuclear connections have taken centre stage in conversations about emerging technology, and understandably so. There are real concerns surrounding AI, with the rapid pace of its development, the inadequate and slower pace of its governance, and the loss of meaningful human control over nuclear command and control systems being among the most consequential. However, while most (if not all) eyes are on AI, quantum technologies are also gathering pace and could prove to be just as – and possibly more – significant for the nuclear field in the years ahead.

This explainer sets out what quantum technology is and how it is likely to affect the nuclear field.

The Quantum Basics

Although it was once considered to be something out of a sci-fi novel, quantum mechanics is now universally accepted as the most accurate description of the microscopic world. It is the physics of small things: atoms, electrons and photons. Quantum technologies seek to exploit this corner of physics to provide some advantage – whether it’s in computing, or an increased advantage in sensing or an advantage in how information is transmitted.

They achieve this by leveraging two properties that have no equivalent in everyday life: superposition and entanglement. Superposition means that a quantum particle can exist in multiple states simultaneously, rather than just one or the other, and only settles into a single outcome when measured. The common rough analogy is a coin spinning in the air, which is neither heads nor tails until it lands. Entanglement is a form of correlation between particles. Once two particles become entangled, they remain connected even when separated by vast distances, and the state of one cannot be described without reference to the other. Einstein famously described this as “spooky action at a distance,” and the experiments that confirmed it won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics.

These strange behaviours allow quantum technologies to do things conventional technologies cannot. A classical computer stores information in bits, which is either a 0 or a 1. A quantum computer uses quantum bits, or qubits, which exploit superposition to hold both states at once. This lets it work through an enormous number of possibilities at the same time rather than one after another, and thus allows for quantum computers to easily find the most efficient pathway through multiple destinations. In practice, this could mean breaking a common form of encryption – also known a 2048-bit RSA key – would take a classical computer around 300 trillion years, while a quantum computer could (in theory) do it in under eight hours. This same key protects medical records, financial transactions and national secrets.

Alongside quantum computers, experts believe we’re now at the dawn of an age of widespread quantum sensors. Quantum sensors detect and measure changes in magnetic fields using quantum effects that make the sensor extremely precise and sensitive. These sensors can be used for a whole range of applications, from early warning of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions to next generation brain-imaging that could provide ground-breaking insights for battling dementia. Finally, there is quantum communications, which uses the principles of quantum physics to secure and enhance communication protocols. Here, the challenge is how to protect the information that is being transmitted today from a future in which an attacker has collected encrypted information to decrypt later, in what is called “harvest now, decrypt later.”

The Quantum-Nuclear Nexus

Quantum technologies have now largely moved out of the lab and into the focus of commercial companies and investors. States have collectively committed billions of dollars to quantum research, and analysts expect defense applications to arrive before commercial ones. The importance of treating quantum technology as a strategic asset is already being emphasised, and proposals are being put forward to secure the specialised electronics, cooling equipment and rare materials on which quantum hardware depends. Most recently, in September 2026, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) released a public summary of the quantum technology roadmap its Allies approved in July, setting out how the Alliance intends to understand and integrate quantum computing, communications and sensing. Few fields have more at stake in how this situation develops than the nuclear sector, where these technologies affect deterrence, peaceful applications and verification alike.

It is uncertain as to how soon this becomes a practical problem. No machine capable of breaking today’s encryption exists, and estimates suggest that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer could arrive by the 2030s. It is useful to think about the risks by weighing three periods against each other: how long information must stay secret, how long a migration to new encryption takes, and how long before the threat materialises. This presents a sobering calculation when applied to the nuclear field. As these technologies mature, they present new types of challenges as well as opportunities to the field of nuclear disarmament, arms control and non-proliferation. For example, quantum cyber threats could pose risks to nuclear facility systems, where information confidentiality and authentication are paramount. Future quantum computers could allow adversaries to compromise the encryption used to protect sensitive nuclear information.

Sensing poses a different kind of challenge, and it is closer at hand. In the same way that radar changed air warfare in Europe during World War II, quantum sensors will change air and sea warfare. Quantum magnetometers and gravimeters could “make the ocean transparent” and be used to detect submarines, thereby compromising the survivability of the sea-based deterrent. In fact, these sensors impact all nuclear weapons systems that rely on stealth. It could also locate concealed tunnels and bunkers, and identify nuclear materials. However, it is worth noting that much of the anticipated capability remains theoretical. Current technologies are limited by noise and interference, and evasion techniques are advancing alongside detection capabilities.

There are opportunities too. Quantum-assisted navigation could enable submarines to remain submerged and on course for longer, thereby strengthening sea-based deterrents. Quantum communications, and quantum key distribution in particular, offer new ways to protect sensitive nuclear systems against the very threats that quantum computing creates. Quantum computing itself could accelerate reactor design and the modelling of nuclear materials, work that would benefit civilian energy programmes, including for future fusion reactors. Additionally, quantum sensors – which are much nearer to commercial deployment – could aid non-proliferation and disarmament efforts through strengthened verification efforts.

When, Not If

The question is no longer whether quantum technologies will reach the nuclear field, but when, and on whose terms. Right now, however, there is a gap between promise and practice. This gives the nuclear community something it did not have with AI: time to prepare. Managing the risks will largely fall to governments and national regulators, some of which are already exploring more anticipatory approaches to keep pace with technological change (as NATO’s roadmap shows). Quantum should not be considered in isolation either, since its interaction with AI could compress decision-making timelines and raise the risk of miscalculation in a crisis. Ultimately, a simple principle must be kept in mind: humans must remain the central and final users of such technologies.

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Author: Gp Capt RK Kashyap, Senior Fellow, CAPSS

Keywords: Operation Epic Fury, GCC, Aerial Policing, Air Control, Richard Armitage

The stated aims of the United States of America (USA) for action on Iran, as defined by its Secretary of War, Peter Hagseth, were: “The mission of Operation Epic Fury is to destroy Iranian offensive missiles, Iranian missile production, destroy their navy and other security infrastructure, and (ensure) they will never have nuclear weapons.” The effect so far has been to neutralise Iran’s Navy and security infrastructure, as well as eliminate air opposition to US forces, which are operating with effective impunity in Iranian airspace. The US Air Force has lost only two manned aircraft due to hostile ground fire in the air, with another eight heavy and transport aircraft damaged or lost on the ground due to missile attacks. The entire stated loss of unmanned aircraft has been 24 MQ-9 Reaper Drones and one MQ-4C Triton long-endurance maritime surveillance drone. These multi-mission surveillance and strike drones have borne the brunt of the losses to the integrated Iranian air defence systems. The Iranian’s have launched approximately 4,500 one-way attack drones and missiles at US forces and its regional allies since the onset of the conflict in late February 2026. The vast majority of these launches (roughly 83 per cent to 90 per cent) targeted Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states, and some hit US military installations in Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar. It has also damaged international shipping in the Gulf of Hormuz.

Looking back in history at a paper by Admiral Edmond Slade on the Petroleum Situation in the British Empire, one finds it illustrative of the entire Western thought on this subject even today, recalling then Imperial Britain’s wartime aims to obtain possession of all the oil-bearing regions in Mesopotamia and Southern Persia. After World War I, the League of Nations mandate over Iraq was assumed by colonial Britain and its occupation was devoted to harvesting the newly found oil through conscription and heavy taxation, which led to a unified Sunni-Shia uprising sometime in May 1920. As tribal militias besieged British garrisons, even destroying a column near the town of Hilla, Britain responded with overwhelming force. The Royal Air Force (RAF) conducted relentless bombing and machine-gunning of insurgent positions and urban centres, causing approximately 6,000 Iraqi deaths and ultimately quelling the rebellion by late 1920 through Aerial Policing and Chemical Weapons. Despite this, the British found the occupation too costly to sustain, even as it was being funded by revenues drained from colonised India.

At the 1921 Cairo Conference, Winston Churchill, then the United Kingdom’s (UK) Secretary of State for the Colonies, devised a strategy of “Air control.” Under the RAF Iraq Command, the military substituted large ground garrisons with airplanes. Whenever a tribe refused to pay taxes or rebelled against the authorities, aircraft were dispatched to bomb and strafe their encampments and livestock. Historian David Omissi documents that honourable British commanders, including a young Arthur “Bomber” Harris (who would later lead World War II’s Bomber Command), regularly deployed delayed-action bombs and even considered the use of mustard gas to subdue resisting populations.

The world, since then, has moved towards the necessity of avoiding civilian deaths in armed conflicts. The rise of civil media and the spread of representative governments have also given rise to the belief that most democracies do not have the stomach for body bags. In light of this, Western interventions in Asia and Africa in pursuit of their peaceful interests have also, post-World War II, led to the coalescing of European interests in applying the US military sword arm against the so-called recalcitrant unfortunate nation. The US logic “If you are not with us, then you are against us” applies conversely too: when no nation opposes US military actions, it also shows acquiescence to US actions. It is under such circumstances that the ability of the US military power to force this subjugation of Iran has become tottered.

The commentariat is also favourable to the modern David, i.e., Iran, treating any launch of drones and missiles, however minimal the damage to US forces, as a victory against the modern Goliath. The regime change in Iran was never the stated aim of the US (it may have hoped for regime folding like Venezuela), though most of Iran’s military hierarchy along with its political leadership was neutralised in the initial days of war. The American hope has been that the replacement Iranian leadership will be amenable to a grand bargain with the US government and a nuclear-defanged Iran, like a neutered bullock, will be gradually allowed its sovereignty under guardianship with the old game of harvesting its vast oil reserves. This task is ongoing and may still come through with the supine brokership of cohorts like Asim Munir. Munir is the perfect candidate, as some 20 years ago, Richard Armitage had delivered the “Bomb back to stone age” ultimatum to another military ruler of his country and who else can teach the Persians the folly of thinking otherwise, especially after the second and threatened further rounds of kinetic punishment through air targeting of infrastructure and whatever is left there to target in Iran.

Pacification through air is what will happen in further rounds of air strikes on Iran, and more may follow before the recalcitrant behaviour is modified to everyone’s satisfaction. When the founding Supreme Leader of Iran decrees that removing Israel is a religious necessity, then a nuclear Iran is not in the world’s interest of peace. While what is being witnessed is not pleasant, this is how the conduct of warfare has evolved from outright occupation, which has proved to be a costly affair for the occupier in terms of boots on the ground (and associated casualties), against the groundswell of opposition in a dogmatic society where a white man’s burden holds no charm or applause. US has probably learnt from its experience in Iraq, and old friend Britain notwithstanding, what others may pretend to know about it. Meanwhile, more strikes are available at short notice in Trump’s World.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Centre for Aerospace Power and Strategic Studies [CAPSS])

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Author: Ms Gowri R, Research Associate, Centre for Aerospace Power and Strategic Studies

Keywords: Generative AI, Deepfakes, Disinformation, Synthetic Media, Democratic Resilience.

The post Generative AI , Truth, and Democracy appeared first on CAPSS India.

Author: Dr Priyanka Yadav, Research Associate, Centre for Aerospace Power and Strategic Studies

Keywords: BRICS, Quad, China, Strait of Hormuz, Indo-Pacific

India, at the helm of the BRICS chairmanship, hosted the 18^th BRICS Summit from September 12 to 13, 2026, in New Delhi. This year’s summit came against the backdrop of the West fighting wars in West Asia and Europe, United States (US) President Trump’s imposition of harsh unilateral trade tariffs against nations, and more broadly, the visible rupture of the international order that the US had led for decades. Western narratives have often portrayed the BRICS grouping as an anti-Western bloc¹ due to the deep ideological and security divide between Western nations, notably the US, and non-Western nations such as China and Russia. However, India’s interests in BRICS go beyond bloc politics, particularly as new security and economic challenges emerge. These include China’s control over critical minerals, emerging vulnerabilities in strategic chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz, and the growing role of artificial intelligence (AI) in political, economic, and security domains. Most of these pressures originate from the grouping itself, which makes India’s position peculiar: it continues to occupy a significant middle ground, embedded in US-led regional groupings such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), while shaping and influencing non-Western-led institutions like BRICS from its chair.

This article examines whether India’s engagement with BRICS may shape or alter its long-term strategic objectives in the Indo-Pacific. It also examines how India balances its participation in BRICS with its commitments to the Quad and its broader Indo-Pacific interests, without compromising its foreign policy principle of strategic autonomy.

India and the Quad

India’s Indo-Pacific objectives are centred on protecting its maritime security, securing vital sea lanes and energy routes, and maintaining a stable regional balance in the Indo-Pacific. India holds a significant position in the Quad grouping with the other three major powers, the US, Japan, and Australia, to strengthen its defence and strategic partnerships. For instance, in May 2026, India hosted the Quad Foreign Ministers’ meeting in New Delhi, where the member nations jointly launched the USD 20 billion ‘Quad Minerals Initiative Framework.² Alongside this, it anchored India as a strategic processing and recycling hub, securing the high-tech supply chains essential to the clean energy and defence systems of all the Quad nations. India’s defence agreements with Japan³ and Australia⁴ in mid-2026 also centred on boosting defence cooperation with naval co-development, enhancing maritime domain awareness and interoperability to build a better, more resilient Indo-Pacific architecture. It indicates that India’s Indo-Pacific security commitments are growing as defence ties among these nations deepen. Thus, India’s position in the Quad is not at the expense of the Western powers but primarily to ensure its own interests in the Indo-Pacific theatre, including the Indian Ocean.

The Indian Ocean lies in India’s backyard and holds substantial significance of its own because it comprises a multitude of shipping lanes, along with notable India-led initiatives such as Look East (strengthening cooperation with Southeast and East Asian nations), SAGAR (Security and Growth for all), and MAHASAGAR (Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Regions), strengthening defence ties with Southeast Asian nations⁵ (notably the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam), and conducting regular joint military exercises and patrols to preserve the existing regional order. Through these initiatives, India indirectly seeks to monitor China’s coercive tactics against smaller nations in the region and to counter China’s aggressive naval buildup, investments in maritime infrastructure, and alternative connectivity corridors under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). India’s geography aligns more closely with the Indo-Pacific; therefore, outcomes in the Indian Ocean and the broader Indo-Pacific directly affect India’s territorial and maritime security, energy supply routes, and its regional standing.

India’s Position in BRICS

While India’s objectives in BRICS differ from its security objectives in the Indo-Pacific. This year, hosting the BRICS Summit, New Delhi provided a platform for defence and diplomacy among nations, strengthened economic cooperation, bolstered the Global South’s voice in global governance, and collectively shaped decision-making. This also aligns with India’s principle of strategic autonomy and non-alignment, which allows it to work with Western nations while securing a platform for consensus with major powers such as Russia and China within BRICS.

India has been wary of rigid geopolitical alignments, and it demonstrated this by abstaining from the BRICS-linked naval exercise “Will for Peace” in South Africa, clearly dismissing China’s intent to develop BRICS maritime cooperation into a securitised framework among member nations.⁶ Prior to the BRICS Summit, in July 2026, India also hosted the BRICS Seafarers’ Forum in Mumbai, issuing the Mumbai Declaration 2026, which focused on seafarer safety in conflict zones, addressed crew abandonment, and emphasised maritime sovereignty.⁷

Additionally, India has also maintained distance from any understanding of a common BRICS currency and de-dollarisation⁸ efforts in the near term, which has often been a source of worry and angst for US President Trump regarding the BRICS grouping. Instead, India kept the focus on a technocratic approach involving interoperable payment systems, settlements in local currencies, and maintaining cooperation based on national priorities.

It is essential to note that the BRICS agenda spans a range of issues, including terrorism, global governance, agriculture, technology, climate, health, education, culture, and finance, making it a strategic convergence mechanism for all participating nations rather than merely another security bloc. The nations of this grouping do not share a similar regional threat perception; thus, it does not directly serve as a basis for a security-led alternative mechanism.

Here, India also has an advantage in BRICS due to Pakistan’s absence, as it provides more room for close cooperation among member nations on issues such as terrorism, which directly hinders India’s sovereign interests. The BRICS New Delhi Declaration,⁹ signed on September 12, 2026, by all nations, including China, which often portrays its relations with Pakistan as an ‘all-weather friend,’ condemned the April 2025 Pahalgam attack. Such attempts have repeatedly been obstructed by Pakistan on other international platforms, which remains a perennial security concern for India, emanating from cross-border terrorism. Despite the ongoing conflict and divergences in West Asia, New Delhi also managed to bring Iran and the UAE to a single consensus text at this year’s BRICS Summit. At the same time, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to India for the BRICS summit added strategic weight, given the strained relations between the two nations since the 2020 border crisis. ¹⁰

For India, BRICS serves as a platform to engage with China in a multilateral setting, while other non-Western economies pursue objectives that broaden the scope of the international order and deepen cooperation on a range of issues such as supply chain resilience, digital systems, climate adaptation, health, and food security.

India’s Choices

India’s strategic choices are shaped by a multidimensional China challenge: a competitor to its interests in the Indo-Pacific, a dominant force in BRICS owing to its technological and manufacturing edge, and an adversary along the contested Himalayan frontier, where border skirmishes continue to strain ties.

Although India’s BRICS and Indo-Pacific objectives are not inherently contradictory, tensions can arise between them. The main concern is China. India seeks to engage China through BRICS while strengthening Indo-Pacific partnerships to respond to China’s growing regional presence. A stronger security role for BRICS could work against India’s interests, as pressure for bloc solidarity may force it into positions that strain its strategic partnerships and limit its room to counter China along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

Navigating its choices across different platforms also gives India institutional leverage, room for strategic manoeuvring on a range of issues, and more negotiating ground to build bridges with China in a multilateral setting. It also leaves enough room for India to participate in Western-led forums such as the G7 and G-20 without friction. Weakening international forums such as BRICS could undermine a platform that can echo the concerns of developing nations from a vantage point.

The New Delhi Declaration notes that the outcome stems from practical cooperation among member nations, despite their different positions on the international stage. The 2026 BRICS Summit was not about who gets to write the rules, but who is represented when the rules are being written. The Quad’s concerns centre on ensuring maritime security and effectively balancing China by building robust multilateral partnerships within the Indo-Pacific. India’s challenge will be to ensure that cooperation within BRICS does not develop into bloc-based security commitments that restrict its long-term strategic choices. As long as India retains this flexibility, its growing role in BRICS is more likely to strengthen its strategic autonomy than dilute its long-term Indo-Pacific objectives.

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Author: Dr Shrawani Shagun, Research Fellow, CAPSS

Keywords: Climate Change, Himalayan Security, Military Readiness, Earth Observation, Environmental Intelligence

Introduction

On September 04, 2026, India placed EOS-05 (Earth Observation Satellite) into orbit, adding another important capability to its Earth observation capabilities.¹ Designed for near-continuous imaging from geosynchronous orbit, the satellite has applications in disaster monitoring, weather analysis and environmental observation.² But its significance for national security extends beyond what the satellite itself is designed to do.

The military operates in the physical environment that such systems observe. Roads disappear under landslides, runways become unusable, rivers alter routes, communications infrastructure fails, and weather can constrain movement and resupply. The question, therefore, is not simply whether India can see a changing climate. It is whether that information becomes part of how the military prepares to operate in it.

The Bhote Koshi flash flood in Nepal on August 26, 2026 offered a stark illustration. When a cascading Himalayan hazard damaged critical infrastructure, the problem was not only humanitarian.³ It was also operational: establishing what had happened, identifying viable routes, locating affected populations, and moving relief when the authorities required it had themselves been disrupted. The episode raises a larger question for India: can its military remain operational when the physical environment on which its mobility, logistics, and communications depend becomes increasingly unpredictable?

Climate as an Operating Condition

Nepal does not establish a simple causal relationship between climate change and any one disaster. The immediate trigger of the Bhote Koshi event remained under investigation, with official and scientific accounts considering snow-and-rock landslides, ice collapse, and upstream water impoundment mechanisms.⁴ Yet the episode demonstrates why Himalayan hazard chains matter for military planners: they can rapidly destroy infrastructure, cross administrative boundaries, and create immediate demand for high-end state capability.

The Himalayan military climatic concerns combine glacier instability, permafrost degradation, landslides, avalanches, flash floods, and glacial lake outburst risks. India, Nepal and China are linked by mountain systems, river basins, roads, border infrastructure and ecological processes; a hazard can create downstream or cross-border effects. India is also expanding strategic roads, bridges, airfields, and connectivity in difficult terrain. A Himalayan hazard can set off a recognisable sequence: infrastructure disruption generates humanitarian and disaster-response demand; that demand absorbs airlift, engineering, medical, communications, and logistics capacity; and diverting those finite assets can pressure conventional readiness.

While rapid air mobility and advanced technology offer unprecedented speed, they cannot rewrite the rugged terrain. The facts of physical geography will remain critically significant in shaping distinctive strategies for the armed services.⁵ Although modern warfare is increasingly joint in some technical respects, physical geography is not; military forces are structurally obliged to tailor their technical and tactical approaches to function within highly distinctive geophysical environments.⁶ In the high-altitude Himalayan theatre, this physical grammar is unyielding. Planners cannot treat the mountain landscape as a passive backdrop to be bypassed by orbital sensors or aircraft; they must respect and adapt their operational designs to a changing geophysical reality in which melting permafrost and shifting slopes dictate what is physically possible on the ground.

Flooding, slope failure, severe weather, or heat can shut down bases and infrastructure: runways, roads, bridges, storage sites, power supplies, and communications nodes. Forward positions often depend on a limited number of routes. Disruption creates problems of redundancy, stockpiling, alternative access, and repair capacity. High-altitude and heat-exposed forces confront physiological strain, acclimatisation demands, water stress and more difficult evacuation or resupply conditions. Temperature, humidity, precipitation, dust, ground instability and power loss can affect platform performance, maintenance and network availability. Disaster response uses many of the same scarce assets—airlift, engineers, medics, helicopters, logistics and communications—that may be required for conventional missions.

Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) preparedness is not the same as preparing the military to operate in a climate-altered environment. The former treats disruption as an episodic emergency the force responds to. In contrast, the latter treats it as a persistent operating condition around which forces, infrastructure, logistics and information systems must be designed.

From Earth Observation to Military Readiness

Once infrastructure is disrupted, information becomes the first operational requirement. Commanders and civil authorities need to know where the water has gone, which roads remain usable, which bridges and structures are stable, where personnel or civilians are stranded, how terrain has changed and whether the hazard is still evolving. That requirement applies during disaster response, but it also applies to ordinary military mobility, infrastructure protection, route planning, logistics and operational awareness.

India already has an Earth observation ecosystem that meets this requirement. Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) Earth observation programme supports environmental monitoring, agriculture, water resources, forestry, ocean observation, urban planning, and disaster management.⁷ The National Remote Sensing Centre’s Disaster Management Support programme provides satellite-based inputs on hazards, including floods, cyclones, landslides, earthquakes, and forest fires.⁸ EOS-05 should be situated within this wider ecosystem: it is a reminder that the capacity to observe a changing physical environment is becoming a very important national asset.

The military question is not whether India needs Earth observation for climate and disaster applications. It is whether environmental intelligence enters the operational picture through which the armed forces plan, move and sustain themselves. The same data that identify a flooded corridor, unstable slope, damaged runway or disrupted power line can support route selection, logistics planning, base protection, engineering priorities and the allocation of scarce airlift and rescue assets.

This is where EOS should be considered alongside India’s emerging defence-oriented surveillance architecture. Public reporting describes Space-Based Surveillance Phase III, or SBS-III, as a 52-satellite programme intended to strengthen persistent surveillance, intelligence, and reconnaissance, as well as secure communications and land- and maritime domain awareness.⁹ EOS and SBS-III should not be misconstrued as a single system: the former is a national environmental information infrastructure with broad civilian uses. At the same time, the latter is a defence-oriented architecture. But a climate-ready force increasingly needs both pictures at once—the physical-environment picture and the adversary or domain-awareness picture.

This dual requirement demonstrates the precise utility of space power within what Bleddyn Bowen conceptualises as the ‘cosmic coastline.’ Earth orbit is not an isolated high-ground sanctuary, but an adjunct and a flanking environment defined entirely by its proximity and usefulness to Earth.¹⁰ Satellites and their communication streams are strategic ‘tethers of modernity’ that have no intrinsic value; they are only as valuable as the state’s capacity to exploit them to shape political and physical outcomes on the ground. Integrating EOS-05’s environmental data with SBS-III’s threat-tracking capabilities is the logical operationalisation of Bowen’s thesis that outer space must be treated as an information layer designed to enable physical and operational survival on the terrestrial shoreline.¹¹

Integration means a common operational picture combining environmental, meteorological, terrain and threat information; data products designed for route viability, infrastructure condition, flooding, slope risk, weather windows and logistics prioritisation—not only post-disaster mapping; procedures and command arrangements that allow relevant civilian, military and commercial data to move quickly into operational planning; and training that treats environmental intelligence as routine operational input, alongside conventional intelligence.

Space is therefore not the sole basis of climate resilience. It is an information layer that increasingly enables other forms of resilience. Without timely, reliable awareness of terrain, weather, and infrastructure conditions, even well-provisioned forces may struggle to move, communicate, or concentrate capability when it matters most.

Strategic Autonomy and Information Dependence

But an information architecture is only as resilient as its sources, ground infrastructure, communications links, processing systems and contractual access. EOS provides existing domestic environmental information capacity, including civilian and disaster management uses. SBS-III adds a growing defence-oriented surveillance and communications architecture. Commercial systems add capacity, revisit rates, analytics, connectivity, and innovation, but also potentially entail greater contractual, technological, and geopolitical exposure.

This exposure is fundamentally a hardware reality. Critical information infrastructures have become strategic assets in a global contest for technological dominance.¹² Even technologically advanced militaries remain vulnerable to concentrated semiconductor supply chains.¹³ For India, the lesson extends beyond satellite design and launch: space systems depend on specialised processors, sensors, radiation-hardened electronics and other components whose supply chains can remain globally concentrated even when the satellite itself is domestically designed or assembled. Strategic autonomy therefore cannot stop at the satellite bus; it must extend to the critical technologies and supply chains that sustain the orbital information architecture.

The more military readiness depends on persistent information, the more the resilience of that information architecture becomes a component of strategic autonomy. A force may have access to excellent commercial imagery or communications in peacetime but face different conditions when a disaster, conflict, network disruption or geopolitical dispute produces simultaneous demand and restricted access.

Regulatory continuity is not the same as contractual priority; contractual priority is not the same as operational assurance. Indian Space Policy 2023 and the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre’s (IN-SPACe) implementation framework provide authorisation, supervision and government emergency-control mechanisms for non-government space activities.¹⁴ Specific defence contracts can define what access, data delivery, service continuity, surge capacity, redundancy and priority use a provider owes when demand spikes. Even a strong contract cannot overcome a disabled ground station, a damaged fibre link, a cyber-incident, an inaccessible foreign component, unavailable launch or replenishment capacity, or an overwhelmed data-processing node.

Commercial Earth Observation (EO) and communications can add redundancy and capacity. The relevant strategic question is whether the state has designed the contracts, ground infrastructure, data arrangements and contingency plans needed to convert commercial capacity into assured availability during a combined environmental and geopolitical crisis. Strategic autonomy is therefore more than owning satellites or manufacturing hardware domestically. It is the ability to preserve critical information flows and use them operationally when physical, technological and geopolitical systems are under simultaneous pressure.

Five Changes India Should Make

India is not starting from zero. It has established procurement processes, climate and environmental testing capacity, an Earth-observation ecosystem, a growing defence-space architecture, and an expanding commercial space sector. The gap is not the absence of relevant institutions; it is the absence, in the public record, of a systematic mechanism linking climate projections to force design, acquisition, infrastructure, exercises and space-enabled information. This resembles what Anit Mukherjee describes more broadly as an “absent dialogue” among India’s political, bureaucratic and military institutions—a useful lens for understanding the coordination challenge between civilian space organisations and military planners.¹⁵ The published membership of the Space Commission includes senior civilian, national-security and space officials, including the National Security Adviser and the IN-SPACe chair. Still, it does not list a standing Defence Space Agency or Ministry of Defence representative. It is argued that defence stakeholders should receive more formal representation in India’s space-governance structure.¹⁶

This does not necessarily mean the Space Commission must be reconstituted immediately. A more modest first step would be to establish a standing Defence Space Agency or a Ministry of Defence representative, observer, or formal liaison mechanism for matters involving military space services, environmental intelligence, and continuity of critical infrastructure. The aim would be to create a continuous civil–military dialogue without creating another large bureaucracy.

1. Test equipment against projected conditions, not only historical conditions

India’s defence-quality system already uses climatic and environmental-testing standards, including the Quadripartite Standardisation Agreement (QSTAG) 360 and the Military Handbook (MIL-HDBK) 310.¹⁷ The objective should be to incorporate forward-looking regional climate projections into the operating-environment assumptions used for long-life platforms, supply-line roads and high-altitude infrastructure. Procurement should account for higher thermal thresholds, altered precipitation, permafrost degradation, slope instability, and changes in water availability over an asset’s expected service life. This does not require a new testing bureaucracy; it requires updating the risk baseline within existing requirements, trials and life-cycle planning. The Defence Acquisition Procedure (DAP) and existing quality-assurance system provide an administrative route to do so, but the public record does not show that projected climate conditions are already being applied systematically.

2. Integrate environmental intelligence into existing space architecture

India does not need a separate climate-satellite constellation to improve military resilience. It needs environmental intelligence to become an operational complement to the space architecture it is already building. Public reporting describes SBS-III as a 52-satellite programme intended to strengthen persistent surveillance, intelligence, reconnaissance, secure communications and land-and-maritime domain awareness.¹⁸ EOS and SBS-III should not be treated as interchangeable systems: EOS represents national environmental-information infrastructure with broad civilian and disaster-management uses, while SBS-III is a defence-oriented surveillance architecture. The objective should therefore be a controlled, tiered information interface, not unrestricted fusion of civilian and classified data. Environmental products such as route-viability assessments, flood overlays, slope-risk maps, runway-condition reports and weather windows could be made available at the appropriate classification level to engineers, logistics planners and operational commanders, while sensitive threat data remain compartmented. Antariksha Abhyas 2024 offers an existing institutional precedent: the DSA conducted the exercise with the armed services, ISRO, Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and other security organisations to examine operational dependence on space services and vulnerabilities caused by disruption or denial.¹⁹

3. Climate-stress conventional exercises and wargames

Environmental hazards should become active operational variables rather than remaining administrative HADR afterthoughts. Joint exercises should test a conventional border crisis occurring simultaneously with a glacial-lake outburst, landslide, flood or extreme-heat episode that destroys a supply bridge, degrades communications and generates an urgent civilian disaster-response demand. Such scenarios would test redundancy, decentralised mission command, alternative routes, logistics prioritisation and the ability to maintain the command cycle under physical disruption. India’s Joint Doctrine for Multi-Domain Operations provides a useful framework because it calls for coordinated employment of military and non-military capabilities across land, sea, air, space, cyber and cognitive domains through a Whole-of-Nation Approach.²⁰ No comparable public evidence was located of Indian conventional wargames systematically combining these climate-stress variables. That is an observation about the public record, not proof that such planning does not occur.

4. Guarantee continuity of commercial space services

India’s general civilian space-regulatory framework is not a substitute for defence-specific service assurance. IN-SPACe’s authorisation framework permits the government to impose controls on satellite, payload and ground-station operations during conflict, natural disasters or declared emergencies.²¹ That is an emergency-control power; it is not the same as guaranteeing military priority access, uninterrupted data delivery or surge capacity. Defence contracts for commercial Earth observation, satellite communications, data processing and geospatial analytics should therefore specify crisis priority, data control, surge capacity, redundancy, alternate ground stations, delivery timelines and continuity of service. The objective is to convert commercial capacity into operationally assured capability, rather than assuming that commercial availability in peacetime will automatically translate into access during conflict or disaster.

5. Secure the microelectronics supply chain for orbital hardware

Strategic autonomy in space and climate resilience is incomplete if the processors running India’s orbital and ground-control systems depend on a concentrated global fabrication base. ISRO has already begun addressing this: in February 2026, it announced plans to produce space-grade semiconductors domestically within four years through its Semiconductor Laboratory in Chandigarh, which has already developed the space-qualified Vikram 32-bit processor.²² This effort sits within the government’s broader SEMICON India Mission, which has committed roughly INR 76,000 crore to reducing import dependence on chips.²³ The relevant policy task is not to invent a new procurement mechanism inside DAP—India’s Buy (Indian-IDDM) category sets indigenous-content thresholds, not production-quantity guarantees, and does not currently establish any equivalent for semiconductor manufacturing runs.²⁴ The task is instead to ensure that SCL Chandigarh’s space-grade output, and any future defence-relevant fabrication capacity built under SEMICON India, is scaled and funded to the specific volumes SBS-III, EOS follow-on missions, and secure ground infrastructure will require—rather than leaving that demand signal implicit.

Conclusion

The Bhote Koshi disaster was a reminder of how quickly a Himalayan hazard can turn infrastructure failure into an operational problem. It did not prove that every such event is caused by climate change. It showed instead why a military cannot assume that roads, bridges, airfields, communications networks and information systems will remain available when they are most needed. The issue is not whether climate change is an environmental concern for the armed forces. It is whether India’s forces can remain operational when the physical environment in which they are based, move and communicate becomes less predictable. A climate-ready military is therefore not simply one that can respond to disasters. It is one designed to remain operational in the environment those disasters help reshape.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Centre for Aerospace Power and Strategic Studies [CAPSS])

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Author: Dr Shalini Chawla, Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Aerospace Power and Strategic Studies

Keywords: Mecca Pact, Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, Pakistan Saudi Arabia Türkiye, Defence Pact, Pakistan and Mecca Pact, Gulf Security Architecture.

The post Pakistan and The Mecca Pact: Between Opportunities and Risks appeared first on CAPSS India.

Author: Ms Priyadarshini Baruah, Research Associate, Centre for Aerospace Power and Strategic Studies

Keywords: Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), Cryptocurrency, Terrorist Financing, Terrorist Propaganda, International Counterterrorism Cooperation, South Asia

The post Clicks, Crypto, and Caliphate: Strengthening International Counterterrorism Cooperation appeared first on CAPSS India.

Author: Air Vice Marshal GK Mohan, AVSM (Retd)

Keywords: Drone Warfare, Air-Mindedness, Distributed Air Power, Joint Doctrine, Integrated Air Defence

Introduction

A cheap, expendable aircraft is no longer a contradiction in terms. In February 2024, six small Ukrainian uncrewed surface vessels sank the Russian missile corvette Ivanovets in the Black Sea.¹ No sailor risked capture. No pilot risked a shoot-down. A platform costing a fraction of its target achieved an effect once reserved for a submarine or an air strike. This is not an isolated curiosity. It is the leading edge of a broader shift: drones are becoming, in effect, Special Forces industrialised, and every service that owns one is quietly acquiring a sliver of air power, whether it says so or not.

That claim needs unpacking before it can be tested. It is not an argument that drones have replaced Special Forces, or that they have replaced manned aircraft. It is narrower and more useful: a drone that infiltrates contested space, observes, deceives, or strikes is performing a Special Forces-type mission using an air-power toolkit, at industrial rather than boutique scale. Understanding that toolkit, not simply buying the airframe, is what decides whether the mission succeeds.

The Special Forces Analogy, Tested

Special Forces earn their reputation through scarcity: exceptional selection, years of training, and a readiness to accept extreme personal risk for a disproportionate effect. Drones borrow the effect without the scarcity. In the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, Azerbaijan’s Bayraktar TB2 drones and Israeli-made loitering munitions destroyed more than one hundred Armenian main battle tanks, degraded Armenian air defences, and fed live imagery into unguided artillery fire, on a defence budget under two billion dollars.² No Special Forces operation in that conflict produced comparable effect, at that price, without a single soldier crossing the line of contact.

The Russia-Ukraine war has pushed the logic further. Ukraine manufactured an estimated 1.2 million first-person-view drones in 2024 alone, at a unit cost as low as a few hundred dollars, against artillery and armoured systems worth millions.³ Independent analysis attributes roughly two-thirds of destroyed or damaged Russian equipment to drone strikes rather than conventional artillery or armour.⁴ Production has climbed further since, with think-tank estimates suggesting Ukrainian output could approach five million drones in 2025.⁵ That is not a boutique capability. It is an industrial one, and it behaves like one: attritable, replaceable, improvable between production batches rather than between generations.

Two features distinguish this from ordinary attrition. First, ambiguity: a drone lost over contested territory rarely triggers the diplomatic and domestic costs of a captured or killed operator. Second, reach across every domain at once. Houthi forces in the Red Sea have deployed aerial, surface and, since February 2024, underwater drones against shipping and naval escorts, forcing navies to defend against a threat that can approach from above, alongside and beneath the waterline simultaneously.⁶ A Special Forces team cannot occupy three domains at once. A distributed drone force, in principle, can.

A System, Not a Gadget

None of this works if a drone is treated as an isolated object. Its intelligence, target data, navigation, communications, and electronic-warfare support all come from somewhere else, and that somewhere else is the wider air-power architecture: sensors, networks, mission planning, manufacturing and, increasingly, software updates pushed to platforms already in the field. Strip that architecture away and a drone reverts to what critics have long feared it would become: expensive, disconnected flying artillery.

The United States Air Force’s Skyborg programme made this logic explicit. Rather than build an exquisite platform meant to last decades, it designed uncrewed aircraft with lifespans measured in months, deliberately accepting attrition in exchange for lower cost and faster iteration, feeding directly into the Collaborative Combat Aircraft programme, which now targets more than a thousand such aircraft.⁷ The value was never the airframe. It was the willingness to lose the airframe without losing the capability it represented.⁸

Air power has a cultural habit that reinforces this logic, and it predates drones by decades: the debrief. After every mission, fighter pilots gather to interrogate what happened, why it happened and how to fix it, holding themselves to what one former fighter pilot has called “tenacious honesty, not against each other, but against themselves.”⁹ Ukraine’s drone units have, in effect, industrialised that habit, iterating designs and tactics between production batches faster than an adversary can adapt to any single version. Loss becomes data, not merely damage.

The Doctrinal Test: Air-Mindedness

Buying an airframe is easy. Employing it as part of a system is not. Analysts tracking India’s own drone build-up have flagged exactly this gap: fragmented command arrangements across services, and the absence of a single, unified doctrine for how uncrewed systems should be fought rather than merely fielded.¹⁰ A tri-service issue brief published in early 2026 went further, recommending a dedicated joint procurement and doctrine authority, precisely because current arrangements risk duplicated effort alongside genuine gaps in coordination.¹¹

The risk is not hypothetical. A drone employed without reference to a wider air picture can wander into another formation’s engagement zone, trigger a friendly air-defence system, or duplicate an asset already tasked against the same target. None of these is drone problems as such. They are coordination problems that happen to involve drones, and no amount of platform ownership resolves them on its own.

For India, geography sharpens the stakes. A force that must plan simultaneously against Pakistan and China cannot afford three services independently rediscovering the same coordination failures on two active fronts. A drone doctrine written once and applied consistently across both is cheaper than relearning the lesson under fire on the second front after already paying for it on the first.

India’s Working Precedent

India already has a partial answer, tested under fire rather than worked out in a seminar room. During Operation Sindoor in May 2025, the Indian Air Force’s Integrated Air Command and Control System, the Army’s Akashteer network and the Navy’s Trigun system operated together as, in the government’s own description, “a joint operational backbone,” producing a unified, real-time operational picture that let commanders act quickly while reducing the risk of fratricide.¹² The Integrated Air Command and Control System (IACCS) itself fused radar, airborne early-warning and ground-sensor data to track incoming threats and assign them to the appropriate interceptor, compressing a decision cycle that would otherwise have depended on manual coordination between services.¹³ Akashteer performed the equivalent function for Army air-defence units, integrating radars and weapon systems that had previously operated on separate, slower loops.¹⁴

This arrangement worked not because one service subordinated its assets to another. Ownership stayed where it belonged. What changed was that the picture, and the coordination built on top of it, became genuinely shared.¹⁵ That distinction, between owning a platform and controlling a campaign, is the one a drone doctrine needs to preserve.

A Tiered Framework for Ownership

Extending that precedent to drones argues for a framework built on three tiers rather than one blanket rule. Tactical drones used for reconnaissance, local protection or immediate precision effects can remain organic to the formation that owns them, so long as their effects stay local and their flight paths stay clear of wider air operations. Missions that cross formation boundaries, enter contested or shared airspace, or need electronic-warfare or suppression support should shift to coordinated employment, in which the owning service still tasks the mission. Still, the air component deconflicts it against everything else flying in that space. Missions whose purpose is air superiority, deep strike, or suppression of an integrated air-defence system belong under aerospace-led employment, where campaign authority, not merely airspace management, sits with the service equipped to orchestrate it.

This is not a hierarchy of prestige. It is a hierarchy of risk and dependency. A quadcopter watching the next ridge line creates almost no risk to anyone else’s operations. A strike package penetrating a defended air corridor creates a great deal, and needs the intelligence, jamming and suppression machinery that only a genuine air campaign can supply.

The Bespoke Exception

Every framework needs room for the operation that breaks its own rules. On June 01, 2025, Ukraine smuggled 117 small drones into Russia concealed inside truck-mounted containers, then launched them near airbases thousands of kilometres from the front line, destroying roughly a third of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet in a single coordinated strike.¹⁶ No formation owned that mission in any conventional sense. It was planned, rehearsed and executed as a single bespoke event, exploiting a route and a vulnerability that would not survive a second use.

That is precisely the exception a rigid ownership framework must accommodate, and precisely why it cannot become the template. Once exposed, the smuggling method, the control links and the target set are studied and defended against; Russia has since dispersed and sheltered aircraft that were previously left exposed on open aprons.¹⁷ Repeating the effect will require the intelligence, deception and suppression machinery of a sustained campaign, not another improvised route across a border. A tiered doctrine should therefore protect the bespoke raid as a rare instrument of surprise, available to whichever service finds the opportunity, while resisting the temptation to generalise a single success into a standing method of employment.

Escalation Control and Its Limits

Proponents of distributed drone ownership sometimes argue that smaller, cheaper platforms make escalation easier to manage: a lost drone costs less, politically and materially, than a lost pilot so that leaders can act and de-escalate at lower risk. There is real substance to this. Classic analysis of coercive air power identifies the ability to raise costs on an adversary while retaining the ability to pause, calibrate or stand down as central to why air power succeeds as an instrument of pressure rather than blunt destruction.¹⁸ A genuinely attritable platform extends that logic further down the escalation ladder than a manned strike aircraft ever could.

The same feature cuts the other way. A lower political cost of employment can also lower the threshold for employment, and an adversary facing swarms of ambiguous, hard-to-attribute drones may find a calibrated response harder, not easier, to judge correctly. Operation Spiderweb illustrates both sides of that coin at once: it demonstrated exceptional control over escalation, since Ukraine chose precisely which aircraft to strike and when, but it also demonstrated to Moscow that no airbase, however distant, could any longer be treated as sanctuary, a lesson that itself invites a harder-to-predict response.¹⁹ Nagorno-Karabakh and the Red Sea add further evidence of decisive tactical effect; none of the three cases shows that cheaper platforms make escalation management easier by default. What determines the outcome is still the doctrine governing when, and under whose authority, those platforms are used, not the platforms themselves.

Conclusion

Drones have not displaced air power. They have distributed it, stripped of some of its cost and scarcity while keeping its essential character: reach, precision, networked effect and the ability to concentrate force without staying concentrated. That is a genuine democratisation, and every service is right to want a share.

What determines whether that share becomes a strategic asset or an expensive liability is not who owns the airframe. It is whether the owning service has absorbed the air-mindedness that turns an isolated platform into part of a system: a shared picture, a coordinated airspace, and a doctrine that knows when to hold a drone close and when to hand its employment to the component built to orchestrate an entire campaign. India’s own experience during Operation Sindoor shows this is achievable without collapsing service identity into a single uniform. It has not yet been written into a standing tri-service doctrine for drones specifically, and that, more than any acquisition decision, is the gap that now matters most.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Centre for Aerospace Power and Strategic Studies [CAPSS])

Author Biography:

AVM GK Mohan AVSM (Retd) was commissioned into the fighter stream of IAF in June 1989. He is a Qualified Flying Instructor, and an alumnus of College of Defence Management and NDC Bangladesh. In a career spanning 37 years, he commanded two fighter airbases and one ADDC. His last assignment before hanging up the uniform was as the ADG Acq Tech (Air) in the Acquisition Wing, Ministry of Defence.

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