India strengthens its air defence architecture with some serious investments 

Junaid Suhais

Every era of warfare crowns a weapon that all the others must answer. For much of the 20th century it was the bomber and the fighter that hunted it. In the 2020s, the crown has passed to the interceptor. Ukraine has spent four years defending its cities against cruise missiles and Shahed swarms, and the Gulf has watched American and Israeli batteries fire through stockpiles that took decades to build. South Asia received its own lesson in May 2025, when the four days of Operation Sindoor turned India’s layered air defence grid from a procurement plan into a combat record. The headline of that record belongs to a Russian system India first made operational in Punjab in December 2021, whose longest engagement reached about 300 km across the border and changed how the adversary could use its own airspace.

From Battery to Network

An air defence missile system once meant a battery: a radar, a launcher and a crew defending a patch of sky. That definition has dissolved. The modern system is a network that fuses sensors across a theatre, assigns each incoming threat to the cheapest interceptor able to kill it, and engages in layers, from long-range missiles that reach beyond the border to guns and lasers that guard the final kilometre. 

Three technical shifts drive the change. Radars have moved to Active Electronically Scanned Arrays (AESA), increasingly built on gallium nitride, which track hundreds of targets at once and hold up better against jamming. Interceptors have adopted dual-pulse motors and active seekers that conserve energy for the terminal manoeuvre; India’s Akash-NG pairs a dual-pulse motor with an AESA seeker over a reported 70 to 80 km envelope. And the threat itself has fragmented because a modern salvo mixes ballistic missiles, terrain-hugging cruise missiles, loitering munitions and decoy drones, each demanding a different answer.

The fourth shift is economic, and it is the one now reshaping procurement everywhere. The United States (US) war with Iran consumed an estimated 65 percent of the American Patriot inventory, leaving fewer than 1,000 interceptors, and THAAD stocks fell from 452 to between 234 and 278, with CSIS estimating that rebuilding both could run to mid-2029. American commanders have described the munitions stockpile as dangerously low. Because every interceptor fired is a year of factory output, militaries are hunting for cheaper kills, which explains the rush towards directed energy: Lockheed Martin won a contract for a containerised 500 kW laser two weeks after a successful Golden Dome test.