“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
Modern conflicts have changed shape; the wars fought today are the syllabus for the war India must be ready to fight. Their lessons are consistent: speed of decision, depth of stockpiles, dispersed command, machine-speed use of data and control of the information space now decide outcomes as surely as firepower. A posture built for slow-burn deterrence and long mobilisation timelines no longer fits that reality: India must be able to fight and terminate a war within days, against political and military objectives cleared in advance.
The common thread in these conflicts is that the adversary is rarely alone. One partner furnishes satellites, sensors, precision munitions and diplomatic cover, the other geography, tempo and manpower. India’s planning assumption must therefore be collusivity rather than a single opponent: a Pakistan armed, cued and shielded by China, with Bangladesh a plausible third axis. What that requires is a rehearsed, whole-of-government escalation ladder, one for each adversary singly, and one for all of them acting in concert.
Artificial intelligence is now a combat capability. Ukraine’s drone war compressed the sensor-to-shooter loop from hours to minutes; Epic Fury opened with AI-assisted targeting faster than Iran could disperse. China practises ‘intelligentised warfare’ which it will export to Pakistan; a force fighting at human speed vis-a-vis adversary’s machine speed loses the first 72 hours regardless of platform parity. India must invest in both halves: AI for surveillance triage, air-defence cueing and predictive logistics on sovereign data and trusted models; and defences against enemy AI, sensor deception, data-poisoning resilience and hardened human authority over lethal decisions.
Integrated air defence is existential, as Operation Sindoor showed when Pakistan fired waves of cheap drones to saturate Indian defences. Saturation attacks will only improve, so India must pair layered defence with cheap, mass-producible counter-drone systems. Precision long-range fires will decide outcomes, the air-launched BrahMos proved a gamechanger, better missiles are needed for the hardened, high-altitude and underground targets on the northern borders.
Information and narrative control matter as much as kinetic results. Iran and Israel fought a war of psychological operations alongside missiles; India’s delayed disclosure in Operation Sindoor let one-sided narratives take hold before the full picture of Indian air dominance emerged. India must be as fast with information operations as with military ones.
The Iran war showed that resilience is a design choice. When the United States and Israel launched Epic Fury, strategic paralysis was the reasonable expectation. Iran’s decentralised ‘mosaic defence’, with a ‘fourth successor’ protocol pre-designating three to seven replacements for every critical appointment, left no node whose loss collapsed the fight and survivability was assured through pre-designated, pre-distributed command, stocks and authority.
Recuperation, equally, must be resourced as a capability. What distinguished Iran was regeneration: buried and dispersed stocks, mobile launchers shuttled between pre-surveyed sites, duplicated command links, and a retaliatory repertoire that kept firing on Israel, US bases and Gulf states, and closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which converted military damage into global economic cost.
Iran also showed that target selection is as important as precision. Our restraint in Operation Sindoor, confining strikes to terrorist infrastructure, suited that objective; but on a collusive front the question is not which targets can be hit but which compels war termination. This demands peacetime adversary-modelling: where decision-making genuinely resides, which nodes are load bearing, and a target list validated against effect.
The planning implication is simple: India war-games the 72 hours after our strikes far more thoroughly than the 72 hours after we are struck. Hardened dispersed airbases, rapid runway repair, duplicated fuel and ammunition depots, survivable communications and navigation timing, redundant satellite and undersea-cable paths, and a war-sustaining industrial base separate absorbing a first blow from being defined by it.
A joint Pakistan–China front would confront India with the mirror image of what confronted Iran. Beijing would furnish the satellites, sensors, munitions and intelligence; Rawalpindi the proximity and a second axis; Dhaka, possibly, a third. India’s high-value nodes are fewer and far more concentrated: a handful of large airbases, a few naval concentrations, national command and space-ground infrastructure, refineries and energy terminals, a narrow set of undersea cable landings.
The counter is not to imitate Iran but to borrow its dispersion: duplicated alternate command posts, pre-surveyed dispersal airfields, distributed logistics and forward stocks, proliferated small satellites, resilient undersea links, and pre-scripted delegation of bounded conventional authority to theatre commanders who may have to fight through a blackout. Deterrence by punishment India has; the Iran war argues for adding deterrence by denial and demonstrated endurance.
None of this demands a revolution in Indian strategic thought, only follow-through: faster procurement, deeper stockpiles, dispersed and survivable command, a rehearsed escalation doctrine for simultaneous adversaries, and an information strategy as prepared as the missile plan. The next war will be short, technological and fought against a coalition, and it will not wait for India to be ready. It will test not only how hard India can hit, but how much India can take and still keep fighting. If you wish for peace, prepare for war and the preparation is what must happen now.
(Brigadier (Retd) Anil John Alfred Pereira is a veteran from Goa, who served the nation with distinction
for 32 years.)
