Recasting India’s Air Defence Architecture: Countering the Drone and Swarm Threat

This report argues that India’s traditional air defence (AD) architecture—reliant on expensive, centralized missile systems—is becoming obsolete against the proliferating threat of low-cost, autonomous drone swarms. The May 2025 “Operation Sindoor” crisis exposed a critical “cost asymmetry”: expending million-dollar interceptors against disposable $2,000 FPV drones is economically unsustainable, allowing adversaries to easily exhaust India’s magazine depth.