What if the most important advantage in the next war is not a new missile, aircraft or tank, but the ability to change faster than the enemy?

For generations, military advantage was built around superior platforms, firepower, training and numbers. These remain important. But recent conflicts point to another source of combat power: the ability to appreciate a changing battlefield, understand what it means, alter the response and put that response into action before the adversary does the same.

The Russia-Ukraine war has provided the clearest evidence. The wars in West Asia have demonstrated another dimension, with drones, ballistic and cruise missiles, air defence, electronic warfare and precision strike operating together. Operation Sindoor brought many of these challenges directly into India's strategic environment.

The important lesson is therefore larger than the rise of drones. The military that learns faster, responds faster and converts experience into capability faster can increasingly gain the advantage.

A Battlefield with Few Secrets

The first major change is visibility. Satellites, unmanned systems, radars and other sensors are making it increasingly difficult for forces to remain hidden for long. Once a target is detected, digital communications can connect sensors, commanders and shooters much faster than in earlier wars.

This is altering the logic of manoeuvre. Concentration of forces, once essential for generating combat power, can now make a formation easier to detect and target. Survivability increasingly depends on dispersion, deception, mobility and electromagnetic discipline. A formation that remains in one place for too long risks becoming a target before it can generate its intended effect.

Ukraine has demonstrated this vividly. Small drones are used for reconnaissance, target acquisition, direction of artillery fire and attack. At the same time, both sides have developed increasingly sophisticated methods to conceal themselves, disrupt enemy sensors and defeat unmanned systems. The result is a battlefield in which visibility and vulnerability are closely linked.

This does not make conventional platforms irrelevant. Tanks, artillery guns, aircraft and missiles remain indispensable. What has changed is the environment in which they operate. Their effectiveness increasingly depends on the sensors, communications, electronic warfare and vectors connected to them. The platform remains important. The system around the platform is becoming increasingly decisive.

The New Economics of Mass

The second change is economic. A relatively inexpensive unmanned system can threaten a combat vehicle costing millions of rupees. The exact cost comparison varies with the weapon and circumstances, but the underlying problem is clear: repeatedly exchanging expensive systems against inexpensive threats is difficult to sustain. The answer is not to replace sophisticated platforms with cheap ones. It is to create the right mix.

Ukraine provides a striking illustration. Its Ministry of Defence reported that its armed forces received about three million FPV drones during 2025. The significance lies not simply in the number, but in the ability to produce large quantities of relatively inexpensive systems and employ them across a range of missions.

This points towards a different understanding of mass. Large numbers of affordable and replaceable systems can complement a smaller number of highly capable platforms. The latter provide capabilities that inexpensive drones cannot, but the former can impose persistent pressure, jeopardise enemy operations and absorb attrition.

The question for procurement therefore changes. It is no longer enough to ask which system is the most capable. We must also ask how quickly it can be modified, how rapidly it can be replaced and what it costs the adversary to neutralise it. Numbers still matter but increasingly, the ability to change those numbers and their capabilities during a conflict matters as well.

When the Answer Keeps Changing

This is where the experience of Ukraine becomes particularly important. The modern battlefield has become a continuous contest of action and reaction. A new drone tactic produces a countermeasure. Electronic warfare disrupts a communications link; operators change frequencies or adopt another means of control. Navigation is denied; alternative methods are evolved. A new countermeasure appears, and the process begins again.

This is not entirely new. Warfare has always involved action, reaction and counteraction. What has changed is the speed. Recent analysis of the Ukraine war shows how rapidly both Russia and Ukraine have modified drones, electronic-warfare systems, force structures and tactics in response to battlefield experience.

The consequence is significant. Technological superiority at the onset of a conflict does not guarantee superiority throughout it. A system that works extremely well on the first day may face a very different environment a few weeks later.

Lieutenant General Simon Stuart, then Chief of the Australian Army, put it simply: “Any war is a contest between who can adapt the fastest.”

Former Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief General Valerii Zaluzhnyi made a similar point in 2025, arguing that victory in a high-technology war will depend on the ability to keep pace with changing technological conditions on the battlefield.

The implication is important. Military innovation is no longer confined to laboratories and defence exhibitions. Increasingly, it takes place during operations, when soldiers discover what works, what fails and what needs to change.

From Ukraine to West Asia—and India

The wars in West Asia add another dimension to this picture. The June 2025 Israel-Iran conflict demonstrated the scale of modern missile and drone warfare, while also exposing the demands placed on air and missile defence. Iran launched hundreds of ballistic missiles and around a thousand drones during the 12-day conflict, while Israel and its partners employed a range of defensive systems. 

The large expenditure of interceptors highlighted an issue that goes beyond technology: even advanced defence systems have finite magazines and finite industrial capacity.

The lesson is not that air defence has become ineffective. It is that no single layer can deal economically with every threat. Expensive interceptors may be essential against ballistic missiles, while lower-cost guns, electronic warfare and other counter-UAS can provide additional layers against cheaper threats.

West Asia has also demonstrated the importance of integrating intelligence, electronic warfare, cyber effects, precision strike and air operations rather than employing them as separate activities. An analysis of the 2025 Israeli campaign against Iran has highlighted precisely this integration of different capabilities into a single operational design.

Operation Sindoor provided India with its own experience of this changing battlespace. On the night of 7–8 May 2025, Pakistan attempted to engage multiple military targets in northern and western India with drones and missiles. India's Ministry of Defence stated that these were neutralised by the Integrated Counter-UAS Grid and air-defence systems, including systems such as Akashteer alongside other layers of air defence.

The significance of Sindoor goes beyond the individual systems employed. It demonstrated the importance of rapid threat assessment, integration and the ability to bring different capabilities together under operational pressure.

Three conflicts, all very different in character, point towards one broad change: the advantage increasingly lies in how quickly a force can bring together information, weapons, soldiers and technology when circumstances change.

The Human and Electromagnetic Battlespace

As weapons and sensors become more connected, another battlefield becomes increasingly important—the electromagnetic spectrum. Communications, navigation, drones, sensors and precision weapons all depend, to varying degrees, on an electromagnetic environment that an adversary can contest. A system need not always be physically destroyed if its communications or navigation can be disrupted.

Ukraine has shown how rapidly this contest can evolve. Both sides have repeatedly modified frequencies, jamming techniques, navigation methods and countermeasures. Electronic warfare has consequently moved from being a specialist supporting activity to an integral part of combat.

The human dimension is equally important. Future commanders will need to understand technology without becoming technologists. 

Operators will have to work with unmanned systems, data and increasingly automated processes while retaining judgement when information is incomplete or misleading.

Former CDS General Anil Chauhan described this requirement in terms of the “hybrid warrior”—a combination of scholar, technology and information skills capable of dealing with conventional combat as well as cyber, unmanned and information challenges.

The challenge is therefore cultural as much as technical. A military that expects innovation to come only from specialised organisations may struggle when the need for change emerges at the frontline.

Can the Institution Keep Pace?

This may ultimately be the most difficult question. Military doctrine, training, acquisition and force structures are designed for stability. That remains necessary for major capabilities expected to remain in service for decades. But not every battlefield problem requires a ten-year solution.

A soldier who identifies a new threat should be able to communicate it to the organisation capable of developing a response. That response should be tested quickly, returned to the field and modified again on the basis of experience. The same principle applies to doctrine and training. Lessons should not wait until the end of a conflict before they are absorbed. Units need the freedom to experiment, report what works and discard what does not.

This does not mean abandoning standards or bypassing proper testing. It means recognising that different technologies move at different speeds. 

A new aircraft may take years to develop; a software update or a low-cost unmanned system may need to evolve within months. The institutional objective should therefore be simple:

Identify the problem → develop the response → test it with soldiers → modify it → field it.

India has already begun creating stronger links between the armed forces, academia and industry. The next challenge is to make those links work at operational speed.

The Way Ahead

The future battlefield will undoubtedly require soldiers, tanks, artillery, aircraft, ships and missiles. Technology has not removed the fundamentals of war. It has, however, increased the speed at which those fundamentals interact.

India should therefore judge military preparedness by more than the number or sophistication of platforms it possesses. It must also ask how quickly it can detect a new threat, understand it, respond to it, learn from the result and change course.

This calls for resilient networks, strong electronic-warfare capabilities, technologically confident personnel, adaptable formations and agile acquisition processes that can operate at different speeds for different categories of capability. Most importantly, it requires an institutional willingness to learn while the conflict is still unfolding.

The first engagement may be decided by the weapons brought to the battlefield. The engagements that follow may be decided by who learned more from the first one. 

The decisive advantage of the next war may therefore not belong to the force that begins with the better answer. It may belong to the force that reaches the next answer faster.

Lt Gen Tarun Chawla

Former Director General Artillery, DG Financial Planning of Indian Army