Strategic Premises for the Future of India’s Air Power

DIPTENDU CHOUDHURY

Introduction

The exploitation of the aerial domain and the leveraging of air power—with its capacity to rapidly adapt technology tailored to conflict dynamics—is a sine qua non of modern warfare. This is reflected in recent conflicts, whether in Russia’s extensive employment of air power in the standoff against Ukraine, Israel’s aerial attacks in Gaza and Lebanon, Myanmar’s military air strikes against anti-junta resistance, the Houthi rebels’ disruption of Red Sea traffic with drone and missile attacks, the Turkish air strikes against Kurdish militants in Syria and Iraq, or the recent Pakistani air strikes against Afghanistan. Adding to such instances of direct deployment of air power is its use for coercion and political signalling in all critical and potential conflict zones. China’s aggressive and escalating use of large combat aircraft formations to transgress Taiwan’s airspace, which has effectively erased the sanctity of the median line in the strait separating the two nations, is a key example.^[1] Thus, control of the aerial domain, both over land and sea, has emerged as a military security imperative—one that is no longer an air-force-only requirement but a crucial joint warfighting necessity.

Key Takeaways for India

Contemporary conflicts present a number of strategic air-power takeaways for India’s security context, particularly considering the threat from China and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed adversaries with formidable air forces. In India, too, all future conflicts will involve highly contested air spaces, where any degree of airspace control will have to be fought for, whether over tactical battlespaces, penetration corridors, or hostile airspaces. Unless a certain degree of control exists, offensive action by enemy air forces will have a detrimental impact on India’s surface operations.^[2]

To consider that India’s future wars can be fought and won without the aggressive use of offensive air power, whether over land or sea, would be a fallacy.  However, India’s current offensive advantage due to fighter force ratios, better weapons payload capacity, higher mission rates, larger number of airfields, dispersed launch and recovery capabilities at lower altitudes,^[3] swift turnaround between missions, and A-A refuelling and AWACS/AEWC integration^[a] is rapidly diminishing.

A nation’s offensive military capabilities are fundamentally tied to effective deterrence. Thus, the fusion of air defence (AD) with offensive air operations is an operational reality of all professional air forces worldwide. The Indian Air Force (IAF) is no exception, with its integrated AD (IAD) capability that synergises AD operations with all offensive air operations. This is bolstered by an extended IAD (EIAD) system with a multi-tiered array of AD sensors and surface-air weapon systems that allow engagement of the enemy deep inside adversarial airspaces, well before they enter friendly airspace, to carry out aggressive depth offensive missions.

It is this offensive capability to take the war to the enemy by penetrating the adversary’s heartland that is currently the IAF’s only asymmetric advantage against China. This sole military advantage needs to be bolstered with future-generation combat platforms, combat enablers, and advanced A-A and air-ground weapons.^[4] The conceptual and doctrinal fusion of the IAF’s future EIAD operations with the IAF’s future offensive capabilities is an imperative for India’s joint military strategy as it will create the tactical conditions necessary to penetrate Chinese anti-access/area denial defence systems in Tibet and defeat Pakistan’s robust AD network.

Modern battlespaces are intensely busy, with a dense area of airspace that needs close surveillance and control to ensure every air threat can be detected, identified, and engaged with. Moreover, during hostilities, the entire volume of airspace, including the tactical battle areas of the Indian Army, needs to be closely managed to enable the free operation of all friendly air and surface missions. The detection of enemy air threats and their engagement at the farthest possible ranges, the deconfliction and maximum exploitation of airspace and fratricide, and the prevention of all future air operations are only possible through the automated and networked visibility of the entire volume of air space. This is currently possible due to the IAF’s Integrated Air Command and Control System (IACCS), which creates networks and data links between all surface and airborne radars and AD weapon systems.^[5] During India’s airstrike on Jabba Top and its follow-on air operations in 2019, the IACCS proved its capability in ensuring dynamic situational awareness in combat and the shortest possible sensor-shooter kill chain.

Future measures to upgrade the IACCS must focus on integrating the Indian Army’s surveillance radars with the IAF’s EIAD coverage as it would enable a more comprehensive and cost-effective AD for all surface operations, whether defensive or offensive.^[6] The IACCS will also need to be upgraded to an aerospace command-and-control system to incorporate the safety of aerial platforms that include space while allowing complete freedom to engage with all types of adversarial aerial and space threats.^[7]

For over a decade, the IAF’s IACCS has ensured extensive air domain awareness (ADA). Though the move towards greater ADA is welcome, it is not enough for the future. Globally, space has become a contested domain that is increasingly being weaponised. Airspace management and control is no longer sufficient, given that near space, at the very least, will be extensively used for military applications in the future. Hypersonic weapons, such as space glide vehicles and fractional orbital bombardment systems, Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS), and Anti-Satellite Weapon (ASAT)  capabilities—including co-orbital systems, directed energy weapons, high-powered lasers, space-enabled electronic jamming, and spoofing—pose a serious threat. Moreover, apart from a military perspective, controlling space is equally important from a civilian angle, given the immense growth potential of India’s civil aviation sector and civil leveraging of space as a national enterprise.

Thus, India must move towards a greater awareness of near space and space. The concept of ADA must be extended to an integrated aerospace domain awareness (IADA), which includes situational awareness of the air, near space, and outer space. Two areas crucial for India’s future security in this context are the development of an IADA capability and the transition from an integrated air defence capability to an integrated aerospace defence capability (IADC). India must accelerate its research and development (R&D) to create a comprehensive IADC architecture that builds on a futuristic IADA architecture. This will need a larger national commitment, with work towards building a proactive synergy between the IAF and India’s civil space and aviation industries.

In terms of expanding India’s sensor coverage, building aerial surveillance sensors over island territories is also an imperative, given the strategic importance of the Indian Ocean region to India’s economy, national security, and vital interests.^[8] This would make India’s peacetime AD more robust and resilient. In addition, active control over India’s six Air Defence Identification Zones (ADIZ), which are designated sovereign airspaces over its mainland and island territories, must be ensured to detect, identify, track, and control all aerial traffic and factored into India’s future aerospace security awareness and control architecture.^[9]

A Comprehensive Approach to Civil and Military Aviation

Civil aviation is a key element of a nation’s comprehensive air power, and India must realise the potential of collaboration in the defence and civil aviation industry. There are large areas of overlap between civil and military aviation in national security due to the interoperability of capabilities and capacity redundancies. The aviation sector also has the potential to contribute to economic growth, foreign policy support, diplomacy, political support and signalling, and humanitarian assistance. India needs to develop a comprehensive and visionary aerospace technology development and production (ATDP) strategy that embraces public-private partnerships and invest heavily to make the aviation industry a profitable economic venture. India’s aviation industry expects investments of INR 350 billion (US$4.99 billion) over the next four years, with the government planning to invest US$1.83 billion for the development of airport infrastructure and aviation navigation services and build 220 new airports by 2025.^[10]

The country is already known for cost-competitive space research, development, and production. Expanding this model to an integrated military-civil aviation industry will be a truly strategic investment for the future, given the immense regional demand for affordable combat platforms, critical enablers, AD radars, weapon systems, aerial weapons, fixed and rotary-wing civilian passenger and transport aircraft, and unmanned platforms. This will not only fill inventory gaps but also expand regional influence by creating technology dependencies through generating extensive low-cost competitive exports.

Another critical concern is the ever-widening gap between the IAF and the Pakistan Air Force and the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF), both in terms of platform capabilities and combat inventory. India’s already delayed fifth-generation Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA) project is still a decade from being deployed, by which time China would have altered the air power balance and infrastructure in Tibet in its favour. This means that, by the time the AMCA arrives, China’s sixth-generation platform would already have been deployed, not only in Tibet but also in Pakistan, leaving India lagging in technology and military capability. Of equal concern is that, in this period, the IAF’s mainstay fourth-generation fleet will also be a decade older, despite its upgraded capabilities. This does not bode well as Beijing increasingly leverages its air power capabilities as an instrument of its coercive foreign policy over Taiwan and the East and South China Seas, signalling its future use against India.^[11] There is already a visible increase in PLAAF’s air activity across disputed borders, with Beijing building extensive infrastructure across disputed regions, including the creation of border villages. An increase in aerial violations and coercive air activity to bolster Beijing’s narrative building and support its territorial ambitions in Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh can be expected to become the future normal.

The long hiatus since India’s only unfettered use of offensive air power in the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971 has led to a strategic air blindness in the national security approach. The salience of air power in the land and sea domains has led to increasing aspirations of service-specific air power capabilities instead of work to coalesce and strengthen the military’s joint capabilities in a nation with a limited defence budget. The vertical domain is the IAF’s area of core competence and it is the IAF’s capabilities that must be strengthened to holistically address the future security needs of the nation and the joint warfighting needs of the other services.

The extensive use of air power in current conflicts underscores its continued relevance and expanding methods of use, such as in manned and unmanned platforms, diverse long-range precision weapons, hypersonic and advanced aerial missiles, sophisticated air defence systems, and surface and space-launched weapons that operate across the aerospace continuum. Air power is the essential, integrating thread in future multi-domain operations, connecting land, sea, and space. With China remaining resolute in its pursuit of becoming a world-class military power by 2047 and asserting its role as the central global state, or Zhōngguó, it has strategically focused on advancing its air and space power capabilities, with its sixth-generation fighters already surpassing those of the US.^[13]

Conclusion

India’s growing economic and great-power status places it in strategic competition with China across all domains. With two strong adversarial air forces, control of the vertical domain will be highly contested and will impact all future surface operations; therefore, they must be part of future joint military strategies. The fusion of India’s future EIAD system with its depth offensive capabilities will be a strategic warfighting imperative. Given the increasing fusion of the air and space domains and its importance to future national security and sovereignty, aerospace domain awareness and aerospace defence need to be urgently integrated, invested in, developed, and expanded.  A holistic ATDP strategy, which addresses India’s vast civil aviation potential and future military air power needs, would help the country’s aviation industry become robust and productive. Till we achieve true Atmanirbharta in future generation fighter production, critical inventory gaps must be filled with foreign purchases while leveraging other areas of proven production in the indeginous aviation industry. Air power will remain a vital instrument of national power, and New Delhi must do all it can to maintain the nation’s current asymmetric advantage over Beijing by prioritising India’s comprehensive air power requirements.

Endnotes

^[a] Air-to-Air (A-A) refuelling or aerial tanking, Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS), and Airborne Early Warning and Control (AWEC) are critical combat enablers necessary for contemporary and future air operations in both war and peace.

^[1] Ben Lewis, “2022 ADIZ Violations: China Dials Up Pressure on Taiwan,” CSIS, March 23, 2023.

^[2] Air Mshl (Dr) Diptendu Choudhury, “The IAF’s Transformation into the Indian Air and Space Force,” Chanakya Forum, January 25, 2024.

^[3] Choudhury, “The IAF’s Transformation into the Indian Air and Space Force”

^[4] Air Marshal Diptendu Choudhury, “Breaching the Dragon’s A2AD: Strategic Targeting the Key,” in USI Strategic Year Book 2023 (New Delhi: Vij Books, 2023), pp. 176-185.

^[5] Doctrine of the Indian Air Force, IAP2000-22, pp.44-45.

^[6] Air Mshl Diptendu Choudhury, “Air Defence is Everywhere,” Vivekananda International Foundation, July 24, 2020.

^[7] Choudhury, “Air Defence is Everywhere”

^[8] Air Mshl (Dr) Diptendu Choudhury (Retd), “Rising Chinese Air Power in the Maritime Domain- Is it Time to Reset Maritime Strategy?,” Chanakya Forum,

^[9] Air Marshal (Dr) Diptendu Choudhury (Retd), Future Employment of Air Power: Strategic Inferences for India, USI Monograph 05-2024, December 2024

^[10] “Indian Aviation Industry,” India Brand Equity Foundation.

^[11] Air Mshl Diptendu Choudhury, “Convergence of the Indo- Pacific with the Indian Ocean—Is a Maritime- Centric Approach Enough? An Indian Perspective,” Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs (May-June 2024).

^[12] Choudhury, Future Employment of Air Power: Strategic Inferences for India

^[13] Yu Zeyan, “Has China Unveiled its Sixth Generation Fighter?,” Think China, December 30 2024.