Airpower and Technology
Airpower operates at the leading edge of technology. Every major technological breakthrough has had a profound impact on airpower and, eventually, on its employment in combat. Until a few years ago, a major thrust was on the development of manned platforms and their sophistication through upgrades in avionics, weapons, and stealth features to improve combat effectiveness and survivability. Unmanned aerial weapons were also sporadically employed.
The history of unmanned aerial weapons goes back to the Second World War, notably the German V-1 flying bomb. Modern unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), however, evolved principally as reusable reconnaissance, surveillance, and later strike platforms. They have since been employed extensively in ISR and asymmetric warfare, notably by the United States and Israel. For many years, their capability-to-cost ratio did not favour their employment as a war-winning combat asset.
This changed dramatically with the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Having prevailed militarily in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, Armenia continued to rely heavily on legacy systems. Azerbaijan, in contrast, procured different kinds of combat drones and electronic warfare systems alongside conventional capabilities, having assessed that drones and electronic warfare could be game changers in the next conflict. It proved to be a sound assessment. Azerbaijan surprised Armenia with innovative employment of drones, loitering munitions, and electronic warfare.
The conflict focused unprecedented analytical attention on drones as a potentially transformative force in war. The War in Ukraine has since demonstrated the possibilities of mass employment of small reconnaissance and strike drones, FPV systems, and longer-range unmanned systems, while conflicts in West Asia have extended the experiment. At the same time, miniaturisation, computing, artificial intelligence (AI), space-based systems, abundant data, communications bandwidth, electronic and cyber warfare, stealth, and autonomous systems are transforming how wars are conducted and will be conducted in the future.
But the deeper transformation of airpower is not primarily about drones, AI, stealth, or space in isolation. It is about the rise of increasingly autonomous, disaggregated, intelligent, and interconnected systems of warfare.
The Enduring Purpose of War
Before delving deeper into the technical aspects of future warfare, it is worthwhile to consider its purpose. Clausewitz’s famous treatise On War, in its simplest expression, describes war as a continuation of policy by other means.
Thus, the purpose of war remains constant: to impose one’s will on the adversary while preventing the adversary from doing the same. This is an important lesson from history. Military success does not necessarily translate into strategic success. Vietnam and Afghanistan are powerful reminders that battlefield superiority cannot by itself produce a lasting political outcome.
India has a large and experienced military, a substantial air force with significant scale, a growing navy, an expanding industrial base, and increasingly capable space assets. However, it remains constrained relative to the major powers. The enduring Clausewitzian proposition therefore remains relevant: technological superiority is valuable, but technology must ultimately serve a political and strategic purpose.
From Platforms to Systems
For most of airpower’s history, the aircraft was the centre of gravity. Speed, altitude, range, payload, manoeuvrability, and, later, stealth determined effectiveness. Technology improved the platform, but the platform remained central.
That is changing. The modern combat aircraft is increasingly a node within a larger system. It receives information from multiple sensors, shares information across platforms, employs electronic warfare, launches weapons against targets it may not itself have detected, and works alongside unmanned systems.
A Conceptual Representation of a Networked Battlefield
Image Courtesy: ChatGPT
India’s Rafales, with their advanced sensors, electronic-warfare capabilities, and networked employment, already point in this direction; Su-30MKI upgrades and future Tejas variants and AMCA will reinforce it. The aircraft does not become less important, but its integration into the wider combat architecture becomes even more important.
The Drone Changed the Question
Nagorno-Karabakh offered an early glimpse of what was possible. Relatively inexpensive unmanned systems provided persistent surveillance, targeting, and strike capabilities, exposing the vulnerability of armour, artillery, and static air defences.
Ukraine took this transformation considerably further. Small reconnaissance drones, FPV drones, loitering munitions, and longer-range unmanned systems have blurred the traditional distinction between reconnaissance and attack. The decisive development, however, is not the drone itself but the compression of the kill chain: the time from detection to engagement. Detection, identification, transmission, decision, and engagement can increasingly occur within minutes or even seconds.
This has elevated time into a critical variable. The side that can sense first, understand the situation, decide faster, act effectively, and then assess and adapt repeatedly can gain a potentially decisive advantage. Airpower is becoming more persistent, distributed, and networked.
For India, operating across vast distances, high-altitude terrain, and potential two-front scenarios, this compression of decision cycles is both an opportunity and an imperative.
Conventional Airpower Is Not Disappearing
There is a temptation to conclude that drones and AI will render conventional airpower obsolete. The evidence does not support that view. Offensive and defensive airpower remain fundamental.
Every major technological breakthrough renews the offence-defence cycle: radar strengthened defence; precision weapons strengthened offence; surface-to-air missiles challenged aircraft; electronic warfare and stealth responded. The cycle continues and is accelerating.
Drones have strengthened the offence through mass, persistence, and relatively inexpensive precision. Defence is adapting through electronic warfare, short-range air defence, interceptor drones, directed-energy systems, and intelligent systems.
Control of the air remains fundamental, but it is increasingly a dynamic and localised condition rather than a permanent state. Giulio Douhet’s early concept of command of the air evolved in subsequent airpower thinking into concepts such as air superiority and, eventually, more nuanced assessments of the degree of control achieved in a particular place and time.
In contested airspace, a favourable physical air situation increasingly needs to be accompanied by a favourable electromagnetic spectrum, cyber, and information environment. Control of the air is therefore acquiring additional dimensions.
Stealth Still Matters — Selectively
If airpower is becoming disaggregated and the battlespace saturated with inexpensive unmanned systems, what is the relevance of expensive stealth aircraft? This question has only one answer: considerable relevance.
Disaggregation may increase their value. Mass and exquisite capability solve different problems. Cheap unmanned systems provide persistence, reconnaissance, deception, decoy operations, saturation, and attrition. Certain missions still require range, speed, sophisticated sensors, electronic warfare, survivability, and substantial weapons capacity.
A stealth or low-observable aircraft can serve as the survivable high-end node within a larger force. It need not see everything itself; it can receive information from satellites, other aircraft, airborne early-warning systems, UAVs, and ground-based systems, and then penetrate or operate near heavily defended areas with a lower probability of detection. Stealth is not invisibility. Its purpose is to make the adversary’s kill chain more uncertain, difficult, and time-consuming.
For India, this implies a balanced approach: continued investment in limited numbers of high-end platforms such as Rafale, future AMCA, upgraded Su-30s, and Tejas variants, while simultaneously developing larger inventories of attritable and collaborative unmanned systems.
The future is not a choice between the fighter and the drone. It is the fighter enabled by the drone, informed by space, protected by electronic warfare, and assisted by AI.
Airpower Embraces Space — Aerospace Power
Space-based systems already provide communications, navigation, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and missile warning. Their role is shifting from supporting infrastructure towards becoming an integral part of the operational decision network.
A future air operation may begin with a satellite detection, confirmation by another sensor, AI-enabled data fusion, local unmanned surveillance, a manned aircraft entering the engagement zone, and weapon release without the shooter necessarily holding an independent view of the target. Unmanned systems or low-Earth-orbit satellites may subsequently contribute to battle-damage assessment.
The traditional boundaries between air, space, land, and sea are becoming increasingly artificial. The architecture looks broadly like this: space provides sensing and connectivity; air provides sensing, penetration, and effects; land and sea provide additional sensors, weapons, and sustainment; and AI assists with fusion, correlation, and decision support.
The challenge is resilience. Greater dependence on networks and space makes those networks attractive targets through jamming, spoofing, cyberattacks, anti-satellite capabilities, and physical destruction.
India possesses genuine strengths through ISRO, a maturing military space capability, and a growing private space sector. The task is to move from individual national technical capabilities towards resilient, multi-source architectures that can fuse indigenous, allied, and commercial data; operate in degraded modes; and push processing towards the edge.
AI, Teaming and the Swarm
If drones are the visible face of the transformation, artificial intelligence is its most consequential enabler. AI can process and correlate volumes of information at speeds and scales beyond unaided human cognition. It can assist in pattern recognition, sensor correlation, threat prioritisation, electronic-warfare management, and mission planning.
The next step is human-machine teaming: a pilot or controller commanding several unmanned systems rather than simply flying one aircraft.
Autonomous or semi-autonomous platforms may perform reconnaissance, deception, electronic attack, or weapons delivery while the human retains responsibility for the broader purpose and employment of force.
A true swarm is not merely many drones in the air; it is a collection of systems capable of cooperating, adapting, and redistributing tasks. India is not yet there, but programmes such as HAL’s CATS Warrior, DRDO’s Ghatak, and related loyal-wingman concepts point in the right direction.
The fundamental shift is from one human controlling one platform towards one human commanding a system of machines.
The Economics of Airpower and the Return of Industrial Capacity
Ukraine has underscored a hard lesson: war consumes equipment at astonishingly high rates. A sophisticated interceptor costing millions of dollars employed against a drone costing a fraction of that amount cannot, by itself, provide a sustainable answer to mass.
Industrial capacity therefore returns to the centre of military power.
The future force requires both exquisite systems and mass. It needs the ability to manufacture, repair, replace, and upgrade systems rapidly and, more importantly, to modify software and tactics faster than the adversary can adapt.
The decisive advantage may belong not simply to the nation with the best technology, but to the one with the shortest technology-to-battlefield cycle.
For India, this is both a challenge and an opportunity. Atmanirbhar Bharat, greater private-sector participation, and the development of indigenous drones, munitions, and software-defined systems are essential. The goal should not be autarky in every high-end platform, but the capacity to generate and regenerate combat power at scale under pressure.
Resilience and the Contest of Wills
The ongoing conflicts in West Asia reinforce another dimension: resilience.
How much punishment can a state absorb? How rapidly can it regenerate military capability? Can its industrial base continue functioning under sustained attack? Can it maintain command and control? Ultimately, can its leadership and society sustain the political will to continue?
Technology cannot eliminate this variable. A technologically superior power can destroy enormous quantities of equipment and infrastructure, yet destruction does not automatically produce strategic success. The adversary may absorb punishment, regenerate, and continue.
Conflict therefore becomes, in part, a race against time: who can sustain the contest longer, and who first loses the will or the capacity to continue?
Industrial resilience and societal resilience consequently become components of airpower. For India, with its continental scale, demographic depth, and democratic legitimacy, these can be sources of strength, provided they are deliberately cultivated through dispersed basing, robust logistics, redundant command networks, and a defence-industrial base optimised for wartime surge.
India’s Aerospace Framework for Future War
Future airpower is likely to be a distributed combat ecosystem comprising stealthy or low-observable manned aircraft; autonomous and semi-autonomous unmanned systems; long-range and stand-off weapons; persistent ISR; electronic warfare; layered air and missile defence; space-based sensors and communications; resilient command-and-control networks; artificial intelligence; and, above all, human judgement.
None of these capabilities is sufficient by itself. In a networked battlefield, their value lies in integration. For India, a coherent path forward has several interlocking elements.
First, heterogeneous force design: limited numbers of high-end manned platforms as intelligent, survivable nodes, paired with much larger inventories of attritable and collaborative unmanned systems.
Second, multi-source ISR architectures: indigenous space capabilities, allied partnerships, and commercial constellations should be treated as complementary rather than mutually exclusive sources of information.
Third, industrial mass and software agility: platform excellence must be accompanied by the ability to manufacture, replenish, modify, and upgrade systems rapidly, ensuring that the technology-to-battlefield cycle remains short.
Fourth, resilience: dispersed operations, layered and cost-effective air defence, redundant command networks, and the ability to fight effectively in degraded network conditions must become integral to force design.
Fifth, doctrine and training: the armed forces must shift from platform-centric skills towards system-of-systems command, human-machine teaming, joint operations, and rapid tactical adaptation.
This also places a premium on jointness and interoperability. A common, secure digital data architecture, resilient communications, and compatible command-and-control systems are prerequisites for harnessing the combat capabilities of the three services and integrating the capabilities of other public and private organisations into a genuinely networked battlefield.
The fighter will not disappear because of the drone. The drone will not replace the fighter. AI will not replace the commander. Space will not replace airpower. Each will increasingly become part of a larger system in which information, decision, action, and adaptation occur at unprecedented speed and scale.
The future of airpower will not be defined by a single revolutionary platform. It will be defined by the ability to build a force that can see, understand, decide, act, survive, regenerate, and adapt faster than its adversary.
Technology will continue to change the character of war. But beneath the drones, algorithms, satellites, stealth aircraft, and intelligent weapons, the oldest element remains: the contest of wills.
Success will finally depend on how effectively technology, industrial capacity, jointness, and strategic culture are harnessed, in service of that enduring purpose.
Header Picture Credit: Representative Image Generated using AI
Author: Wg Cdr JP Joshi
Twitter: @AirPowerAsia
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