Conflict call

their inventory. 

The US Navy torpedoed an Iranian frigate in the Indian Ocean, in India’s backyard. And in a complex operation, the US rescued an airman who had gone missing for two days after Iran shot down an F-15E fighter jet. Amid a tenuous ceasefire since April 8, with sporadic stabs at talks, both Iran and the US have blockaded the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway for 20 per cent of the world’s oil trade. 

The conflict is being closely followed in India, which can draw several lessons, including doctrinal and tactical, according to current and former officers of the Indian armed forces. 

The major lessons: Prepare for protracted wars (multidomain and possibly multifront); align political and military goals; maintain stockpiles of both high-end and low-cost weapons; develop advanced intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capability; build a reliable supply chain; and invest in defence research even at the risk of failure. 

The war has been dominated by US-Israeli air power, with the US Navy on standby. Drones and air defence systems, even when operated from the ground, did not lead to the deployment of troops, unlike in the US-led operation against Iraq in 1991. That lasted for 100 hours. 

The US, according to the Pentagon, hit 13,000 targets in Iran in March alone. The Pakistan-mediated talks to end a war on which the US has spent an estimated $25 billion (excluding repairs of its bases) in 38 days had not produced a peace deal by the end of April, leading to a no-war no-peace situation.  

“The assumption that modern wars would be short and swift needs a review,” Air Marshal S P Dharkar (retired), a former vice-chief of the Indian Air Force (IAF), said. 

India should enhance its military capability across domains, and be ready for different national security scenarios — “have one common fighting front” — from protecting civilian infrastructure to disaster management and cyber security, Dharkar said, adding that the country ought to build this through self-reliance, because depending on other countries for supplies during crises would be unpragmatic, both in terms of money and time. 

Objectives

Despite the doctrinal shift in diplomacy over the years, from a non-aligned position to many alignments, based on national security considerations, India remains focused on its borders, according to analysts who described this position as largely inward-looking, in spite of two previous interventions in South Asia. To be sure, the country continues to face strategic challenges in its neighbourhood from Pakistan and China. 

The Australia-based think tank Lowy Institute’s 2025 Asia power index (of 26 countries) puts India in third place after the US and China. But the survey says India exerts less influence in the region than expected, especially given its available resources. India’s negative power gap score expanded slightly to its widest ever.

Admiral Karambir Singh, former Indian Navy chief, said: “It’s time to rethink this reticent approach.” 

Urging the government to get more involved in geopolitics, Singh added, “Hard power can be demonstrated by upholding principles such as keeping the seas free and open for commerce.”

He said India needs a robust defence-industrial base to independently sustain a long war, with both scale and industrial sophistication, and “the strategic use of geography”.   

The Strait of Hormuz, located at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, may offer an important lesson for India. It is a rare occasion in recent times when an economic channel is sought to be leveraged for combat. 

US President Donald Trump said the US Navy’s blockade of Iranian ships and ports will continue until Iran agrees to a deal. Iran claimed to have laid sea mines there and said its fighters were hiding in sea caves to target ships that didn’t pay toll. Two Indian-flagged tankers near the strait came under gunfire on April 18. The Indian government then summoned the Iranian Ambassador to India Mohammad Fathali to protest.

Closer to home, the Iranian warship IRIS Dena was sunk by a US submarine some 20 nautical miles off Galle, Sri Lanka, on March 4. It was in Indian waters earlier for the International Fleet Review that India hosted from February 15-26. The attack did not seem to surprise military officials in India because of the nature of naval operations that tend to be spread over large geographic areas. 

If anything, it reaffirmed the Indian Navy’s requirement for SSNs. An SSN (submersible ship nuclear) is a nuclear-powered attack submarine designed for stealth, speed and long-endurance operations. India aims to build six SSNs, expected to be commissioned by 2036-37. 

“It is a known fact that SSNs can go anywhere underwater,” one of the sources said. 

Before the war started, the US and Israeli military commanders met to decide on the division of responsibility for targets in Iran, according to The Washington Post. And, it was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who convinced Trump to attack Iran, The New York Times said. 

On February 28, Israel struck a compound in Tehran where Khamenei and other leaders had gathered, in a shocking breach of personal safety, and killed everyone. Israel assassinated Iran’s top security official Ali Larijani in another airstrike on March 17. Israel said it killed Alireza Tangsiri, the naval commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the powerful military unit formed after the Iranian Revolution in 1979 to safeguard the theocratic state, on March 26. An airstrike killed Hossein Salami, the head of the IRGC, during an Israel-US campaign last year. 

An observation by some of the war’s critics in the US is that Trump entered it without a clear exit plan. Whether regime change was the main objective also remains unclear.

“There should not be any mismatch between strategic or political and military aims,” Singh said.

A lesson for India is to clearly define objectives beforehand, so that the adversary or other parties do not attempt to mitigate them midway. Plus, the conflict-termination criteria should be in place, one of the sources said.

India’s last major conflict took place in the summer of 2025. While different in scale and scope from Operation Epic Fury, some interviewees gave the example of Operation Sindoor as a military campaign where political and military goals aligned. 

Iran’s underdog image has helped it to deny the US a clear victory in spite of the US-Israeli military prowess on display, because Iran has been preparing for war with the US or Israel or both for years. Recently, Iran deployed cognitive warfare tools — Lego memes of Trump.

But narratives don’t win wars, kinetic action does. Even so, gathering intelligence to stay ahead in the mind-space battle is important in the era of social media, two interviewees said.

The government should do scenario-building, not just planning but ranking them, too, Rear Admiral Raja Menon (retired) said of an approach to national security in a volatile world. 

Weapons 

The perception advantage for Iran seemed to have continued in the actual battlespace but didn’t hold up on 

closer scrutiny.

On March 20, Iran reportedly aimed two ballistic missiles towards the Diego Garcia airbase. One failed in flight and the other was intercepted by an Aegis missile from a US warship. It is unclear if Iran’s long-range strike capability 

(self-imposed) has gone beyond 2,000 kilometres (km). Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri) expert Markus Schiller said on the think-tank’s website it might have been a Khorramshahr missile, from which the warhead separates in flight, giving the impression that two were approaching the island (which is 1 km at its 

widest point). 

“These are not advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles with complex post-boost vehicles,” he said, adding that while a direct hit from the light warhead that the Khorramshahr would carry could damage a distant building, it would not have much effect if it hit an airfield. 

The idea that Iran can send a missile 4,000 km away is symbolic, a message that it could target European capitals. But efforts are in place to prepare for such a strike, reflected, for instance, in Germany’s purchase of the Israeli 

Arrow-3 missile-defence system. 

In West Asia, the warring sides have extensively used missiles and drones and, as a result, stockpiles have fallen. The US missile inventory in particular is expensive, many costing upwards of $1 million apiece. 

The New York Times said the US stockpile was meant for a war with China if it came to that. 

India’s lesson here is also its dilemma: On the one hand, expensive precision-guided weapons have a serious impact, as seen during Operation Sindoor. On the other hand, given delays in defence manufacturing and the smaller industrial capacity in India (when compared with advanced countries and China), it may make sense to produce cheaper items such as attack drones in large numbers. 

Iran used its signature Shahed drone in the war, while the US successfully debuted a low-cost unmanned combat system, based on its reverse-engineering of the Shahed. 

Russia, Venezuela and Hezbollah (the Lebanon-based armed group), among other state and non-state actors, have bought the Shahed drone, which is considered a compact weapon but limited in its effects. A standard Shahed-136 kamikaze drone carries a high-explosive warhead of 30-50 kilograms.

“Drones might win battles, they will not win wars,” Menon said.

Drones became a hot combat commodity after Ukraine showed their usefulness against the Russian military in the ongoing war that started in February 2022. 

One big takeaway from West Asia is that drones will not deliver a strategic outcome by themselves, Air Marshal Diptendu Choudhury (retired), an ex-commander, IAF fighter squadrons, said. 

Israel has always used air power as strategically as the US, he said, referring to the Gulf and the Gaza wars. “Strategically used offensive air power has a big role to play in conflicts. India induced costs for the Pakistan Air Force last year.”

But the IAF’s falling squadron strength is worrisome. China is making fifth-generation fighter jets that it will also sell to Pakistan. Meanwhile, India’s indigenous multirole fighter aircraft is at least a decade away from mass production. 

“We will soon have two air forces to deal with,” Choudhury said.

India should bolster its arsenal (different weapons, including precision and swarm) and build a robust air defence system for long fights, such as “a Chinese onslaught”, one of the sources said. 

Two interviewees said no air defence, including Israel’s Golden Dome system, can guarantee 100 per cent safety, as this conflict has proved again. India’s terrain and size present additional challenges. But the effort has to be made, they said.

Israel is expected to take 32 months to replenish its inventory of interceptors. Even the US’ high-value Thaad missile defence radars were targeted by Iran.  

James Jeffrey, the Philip Solondz distinguished fellow at The Washington Institute, wrote on the think-tank’s website in March that many see a key lesson in the ability of cheap but numerous air attack systems such as drones and rockets to overcome sophisticated but far more expensive and numerically limited defensive systems. 

But those have been learned for over a decade by Israel, and by Ukraine and Russia since 2022. The US, with the world’s most innovative high-technology research base, didn’t respond effectively, he added. 

“It’s not that the US military ignored those lessons, it’s that its formula for adapting to them — ponderous study, peacetime procurement rules, myriad legal hurdles and challenges, and refusal to accept ‘perfect is the enemy of the good’ — has not worked.”

Technology

A “noncontact war” is not an option for India, owing to the criticality of territory, Choudhury said. 

Operation Desert Storm in 1991 represented a paradigm shift in military affairs. The air campaign designed to degrade Iraqi command and control, destroy its air defence and Soviet-origin Scud missile batteries before US-led coalition troops arrived reflected an understanding that air power existed to enable ground operations. 

Wing Commander Vikas Kalyani, senior fellow, Centre for Aerospace Power and Strategic Studies, wrote on the New Delhi-based think tank’s website that this should be reassessed in the context of West Asia. “The assumption that air power alone cannot achieve strategic objectives is increasingly a statement about outdated doctrine rather than inherent limitations of the medium.”

Critics conflate the limitations of historical air power with those of air power as such — a “category error” that obscures transformative developments in reconnaissance, precision strike, and persistent surveillance that have fundamentally altered the equation, he added.

ISR systems such as satellite constellations, high-altitude platforms, networked sensor grids, and artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced data fusion have created capacity for awareness of adversary activities across geographic expanses, significantly reducing sensor-to-shooter timelines.

“Persistent presence over the battlespace, maintained not by rotating crews through exhausting sorties but by platforms that can loiter for days or weeks, fundamentally alters the regeneration calculus.”

Last year, India had prior intelligence on Pakistan’s airborne warning and control systems and air force hangars, one of the sources said. India used loitering munitions and “a package formation” (for different targets) with such items as the Israeli-made Heron drones (India and Israel had a deal in the mid-2000s, following the Kargil War in 1999) and “penetrator weapons”. 

That predictive AI can influence outcomes in combat has been proved in the Israeli-US targeting of strike locations in Iran. 

This war has revealed a dramatic swivel towards algorithmic warfare (predictive AI, composite air picture and extensive use of software), Lieutenant General Raj Shukla (retired) said, adding that the US is projecting power in space surveillance and technology-infused warfare by using Delta, Maven and Claude. These are AI-enabled defence software and coding tools.

At the same time, Iran, a smaller adversary, has the Shahed. Iran challenged the US, which has more than 200 military bases around the world and 11 aircraft carriers, by targeting all 13 US bases in West Asia.

“India needs to project power,” Shukla said. “Signing AONs (‘acceptance of necessity’, a government term in defence buying) in Delhi is not enough.” 

He said India’s foreign policy pivot — “strategic autonomy” — should be augmented with military capacities. 

“National security is not an L1 game, it is an H1 game with combat commands,” he said, referring to video game parlance (the first is low level and the second is more complex, high level).

Research and industry 

The former IAF vice chief, Dharkar, said the government must spend much more on defence research and not be afraid of projects failing, because that’s the way innovation works. 

“There should also be some policy space to monetise. We can’t be selling to (just) one client: The Indian armed forces.”

The Defence Research and Development Organisation designs exquisite weapons, among other defence goods, but it is the only agency doing so. India’s military research funding is below 8 per cent of its total defence budget of ₹7.85 trillion ($92.1 billion). 

India ranked the world’s fifth-largest military spender in 2025, with defence spending rising 8.9 per cent year-on-year after the clashes with Pakistan, according to the Sipri data. Globally, military spending hit a record $2,887 billion in 2025, marking a 2.9 per cent rise over 2024. 

India, Pakistan, Japan and Australia were among the 10 largest arms importers in Asia and Oceania over 

2021-25. The main supplier to the region was the US, which accounted for 35 per cent of regional arms imports. Russia accounted for 17 per cent and China 14 per cent. 

India, the world’s second-largest arms importer after Ukraine, saw imports fall marginally (-4.0 per cent) between 2016-20 and 2021-25. India’s largest arms exporter was Russia (40 per cent). But India is increasingly turning to Western suppliers. 

Arms imports by Pakistan grew by 66 per cent, with China supplying 80 per cent over 2021-25. China itself dropped out of the top 10 arms importers for the first time since 1991-95, because of domestic production.

India needs a reliable supply chain and a solid defence-industrial base, Colonel Rajneesh Singh (retired), research fellow, Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, said. “Our industrial capacity must be factored in in the military plan.” 

The war in West Asia has highlighted a sharp cost asymmetry: Iran’s reliance on cheaper drones and missiles forced the US to expend far more expensive interceptors, accelerating depletion rates, Singh wrote in a brief for the think tank, adding that a defence ecosystem optimised only for high-end platforms risks constraints in prolonged war scenarios.

“Equally important (for India) is maintaining depth in ammunition stocks, surge production capability, and resilient supply chains that can be rapidly mobilised in wartime.”

Lieutenant General Thomas Trask (retired), a former officer of the US Air Force, said that among the lessons for the US military are understanding how fourth- and fifth-generation platforms coordinated during the war. This was the first large-scale use of F-35 fighter jets. 

“It will be focused on the new platforms that don’t have the years of combat experience that our generation-4 platforms have, where we’ve learned all the lessons of what can go wrong.”

The US military has sought a budget of $1.5 trillion for the fiscal year 2027, a 44 per cent jump since last year. Some 52 per cent of the budget would be spent on buying munitions, planes, tanks 

and ships. 

The budget allocates more than $750 billion to capability development and getting weapons systems, Jules W Hurst, a US defence official, told the media on April 21.

“Large defence firms are critical to our national security, but they rely on tens of thousands of small- and medium-sized businesses to provide the parts, components and materials to larger firms,” Hurst said, adding that the F-35 programme alone has over 2,100 suppliers, and more than half of them are small businesses.

Captain Bradley Martin (retired), formerly with the US Navy, and now senior policy researcher, Rand Corp, said the US Navy needs small attack boats like Iran has, because not everything can be done with warships — for instance, patrolling the Strait of Hormuz (the chokepoint is some 33 km wide).  

For the joint forces, Martin cautioned against overlearning the lessons from Venezuela (where the 

US captured the country’s former president Nicolás Maduro in January), Iran and Ukraine. 

“Integrated air defences weren’t a particular problem for those cases,” he said. “That would not necessarily be the case if we were dealing with, say, China.” 

India does not have a production model similar to either the US or China. India could lose the lessons from West Asia without a stronger defence industry. 

Martand Mishra contributed to this story