• Member
• December 25, 2025

Srijan Sanchar articulates a new strategic approach to drone warfare for Indian Defence

Srijan Sanchar articulates a fundamentally new strategic approach to drone warfare for Indian Defence—one that moves away from platform-centric thinking toward system-level dominance under uncertainty. At its core, this doctrine asserts that future superiority will not be achieved by preserving individual assets, but by mastering probabilistic advantage, where loss is not only acceptable but instrumental to faster learning, greater resilience, and sustained adaptability.

The doctrine begins from the premise that India’s future battlefields—spanning conventional war, internal security, and persistent grey-zone conflict—will be shaped by scale, ambiguity, and rapid technological churn. In such environments, a small number of exquisite platforms cannot deliver decisive advantage. Instead, victory will accrue to forces capable of deploying large numbers of adaptive, expendable, and networked systems that continuously learn from engagement. The central insight is clear: success belongs to those who learn faster than they lose assets.

This represents a decisive strategic shift from legacy military paradigms. Traditional doctrines emphasize platform preservation, centralized control, and exhaustive validation before deployment. Srijan Sanchar replaces this with a field-first, learning-centric approach that accepts losses by design, distributes autonomy across systems, and prioritizes rapid deployment and iteration. In probabilistic warfare, survivability no longer resides in the individual drone, but in the resilience and adaptability of the overall system.

Operationally, the doctrine reframes attrition as a feature rather than a failure. Drone loss thresholds are to be pre-authorized, and mission success is evaluated by the information and decision advantage gained rather than by assets preserved. Swarm-level effectiveness supersedes unit-level survival, and deliberate sacrifice of assets is recognized as a legitimate and often winning strategy when it accelerates learning and adaptation.

Closely linked to this is the principle that quantity creates quality. The doctrine calls for mass deployment of low-cost, mission-specific drones with heterogeneous performance profiles. Rather than optimizing for endurance or perfection, the system is optimized for rapid replaceability and continuous improvement. Localized failures become inputs for global success, enabling the force as a whole to evolve faster than any adversary.

Strategic resilience is further reinforced through distributed manufacturing. Instead of centralized production facilities vulnerable to disruption, the doctrine envisions district-level drone manufacturing enabled by MSMEs, defence corridors, ITIs, and private innovators. This decentralization eliminates single points of failure and aligns industrial capacity with operational tempo, ensuring sustained availability even under prolonged conflict.

A defining pillar of Srijan Sanchar is the rejection of laboratory-centric development in favor of field-first validation. Drones and counter-drone systems are to be tested, deployed, and refined in real operational environments—along borders, in deserts, maritime zones, and dense urban clutter. This continuous feedback loop between doctrine and technology actively counters survivorship bias and ensures that learning is grounded in real-world conditions rather than controlled simulations.

The doctrine also prioritizes autonomy over remote control. Emphasis shifts toward swarm intelligence, mission-level autonomy, and loss-tolerant coordination. Human operators transition from direct pilots to mission architects, defining objectives, constraints, and learning priorities while autonomous systems execute and adapt in contested environments. This shift is essential to operating at the scale and speed required for probabilistic dominance.

In the realm of counter-drone and grey-zone conflict, the doctrine assumes persistent saturation attacks, civil–military blending, and adversary strategies based on cheap attrition. Accordingly, counter-drone systems must be cheaper than the threats they defeat, software-upgradable, layered, and themselves disposable. A core economic principle underpins this approach: never defend a low-cost threat with a disproportionately expensive interceptor.

To support this operational philosophy, Srijan Sanchar introduces new regulatory and command constructs. Probabilistic Rules of Engagement (P-ROE) enable mission-based autonomy with time-bounded permissions and pre-approved loss envelopes. Command evaluation metrics are recalibrated away from asset preservation and sortie success toward learning velocity and decision advantage gained. Leadership effectiveness is measured by how quickly the system adapts, not by how few drones are lost.

The doctrine explicitly rejects imitation of foreign drone strategies. Instead, it leverages India’s unique asymmetric advantages—scale, cost engineering, deep software talent, operational diversity, and a strong culture of improvisation. Srijan Sanchar mandates that these strengths be amplified rather than suppressed by rigid, imported doctrines.

By 2035, the envisioned end state is transformative. Indian Defence will operate millions of interoperable, expendable autonomous systems linked through continuous battlefield learning loops and supported by a distributed industrial base. This capability will not only secure national defence but also form the basis of an exportable doctrine for attrition-based, learning-driven warfare.

Ultimately, Srijan Sanchar positions India as a net security provider not by owning the most advanced individual drones, but by mastering the mathematics of uncertainty. Dominance is achieved through probabilistic superiority—where loss accelerates learning, scale ensures resilience, and adaptability consistently outpaces advances in technology.