On the night of May 7, 2025, something changed permanently in India's relationship with autonomous warfare technology. Indian loitering munitions, surveillance drones, and EW-assisted strike systems executed a coordinated multi-domain operation against nine targets across Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir in twenty-three minutes. The Nagastra-1, the SkyStriker, and the JM-1 performed in combat conditions. Indigenous EW systems jammed and bypassed Pakistan's Chinese-supplied air defence architecture. Satellite imagery confirmed the precision. The operation did not merely succeed. It validated a transformation that had been quietly building for nearly a decade.

Operation Sindoor was the first serious public demonstration of what India's defence technology ecosystem, energised by the iDEX framework, had been constructing since 2018. A country that seven years earlier imported nearly every significant military platform it operated had built, in a comparatively short span, a combat-proven autonomous warfare capability that performed under the most demanding operational test available: a real conflict, against a real adversary, in conditions that no laboratory could replicate. That achievement deserves recognition on its own terms, not merely as a baseline against which gaps are measured.

The iDEX Transformation: Building a Defence Innovation Ecosystem

The story of India's drone warfare capability is, at its core, a policy success story. The iDEX framework, launched in 2018 under the Department of Defence Production, solved a structural problem that had constrained Indian defence technology for decades: the inability of small, innovative companies to access defence procurement pathways dominated by large public sector units and imported platforms. By posting specific operational problem statements and providing grant funding of up to Rs 25 crore for deep-tech solutions, iDEX created a direct channel between Indian engineering talent and military need.

The results have been extraordinary. Of the approximately 78 million dollars raised by Indian defence-tech startups over the last decade, 68 million dollars was raised in 2025 alone, the year of Operation Sindoor. As of 2026, over 400 contracts have been signed with startups and MSMEs under iDEX and its successor programmes, with procurement orders worth thousands of crores placed across all three services. The Army has inducted loitering munitions, kamikaze drones, and surveillance UAVs worth over Rs 5,000 crore from Indian firms. An additional Rs 20,000 crore fast-track drone procurement is expected in 2026. India, which was effectively absent from the global drone export market five years ago, now fields combat-proven systems and is actively supplying or in advanced discussions with more than fourteen countries following Operation Sindoor's demonstration of its products' operational effectiveness.

The feedback loop that iDEX has created is the most significant structural achievement of India's defence technology policy in the last decade. More problem statements solved, more contracts signed, more intellectual property owned domestically, more investment attracted into the sector, more companies competing to produce the next generation of solutions. The loop has been running for seven years and is now compounding at a pace that makes India's defence-tech ecosystem genuinely competitive rather than merely aspirational.

The Electronic Warfare Foundation India Has Built

India's Electronic Warfare infrastructure, accumulated over decades of sustained DRDO investment, provides the foundation on which the newer counter-drone and autonomous warfare capabilities rest. The Samyukta ground EW system, deployable across a 100 kilometre by 70 kilometre operational area, gives India strategic-level communication interception and jamming capability along both its major land frontiers. The Samudrika naval EW programme, having delivered seven modern systems including the Shakti suite already inducted on frontline naval vessels, ensures that India's fleet operates with sophisticated electromagnetic situational awareness in the Indian Ocean. The Swayam Raksha Kavach airborne EW suite for Tejas Mk1A, currently in flight-testing and targeted for end-2026 deployment, will complete the airborne EW picture for India's frontline indigenous fighter.

The Dharashakti EW system upgrade, representing an investment of Rs 5,150 crore, has demonstrated advanced UAV detection, analysis, and neutralisation at ranges up to 150 kilometres in joint Army-IAF exercises. This is not a laboratory capability. It is a field-demonstrated performance against real UAV targets in realistic operational conditions. The recently signed Rs 1,476 crore contract for mobile ground-based EW systems, designed specifically to move with combat formations in high-altitude LAC terrain, addresses the particular tactical challenges of India's northern theatre where mobility and altitude performance determine operational utility.

The private sector has added further layers of indigenous capability that would have been inconceivable a decade ago. The DRDO Jammer Anti-UAV system, the IG T-Shul Pulse handheld counter-drone jammer serving both the Army and the Navy, and Zen Technologies' AI-powered counter-UAS combining radar, radiofrequency analysis, multi-band jammers, and kinetic hard-kill options together constitute a layered counter-drone architecture that is genuinely competitive in global terms and entirely domestically developed.

PRAGYASHAKTI and the Architecture of Future Electromagnetic Dominance

The most significant doctrinal development in India's EW modernisation is not a hardware programme. It is Project PRAGYASHAKTI, launched in 2025 to create the tri-service, AI-driven EW backbone that India's increasingly sophisticated multi-service operations require. By integrating American, Russian, French, and Indian-origin EW equipment through standardised middleware with machine learning modules for waveform decoding, adaptive jamming management, and real-time inter-platform data fusion, PRAGYASHAKTI addresses the integration challenge that has historically limited the effectiveness of India's considerable individual EW capabilities.

The institutional structure to support PRAGYASHAKTI has been simultaneously built. The Indian Army's 2026 decision to raise dedicated Electronic Warfare Brigades along the Pakistan and China borders consolidates EW operations that were previously dispersed across Signals units into a coherent, doctrine-driven capability. These brigades represent a doctrinal commitment to electromagnetic operations as a first-tier warfighting domain requiring dedicated professional expertise and organic capability rather than ad hoc aggregation of general-purpose signals assets. India's recognition of the EW integration challenge and its systematic programmatic response to it distinguishes its current approach from the fragmented, platform-centric EW development that characterised the previous two decades. PRAGYASHAKTI, the EW brigades, and the continuing expansion of indigenous counter-drone capability represent a coherent architecture rather than a collection of isolated investments.

IIT Kanpur and the Next Generation

The Ministry of Defence's approval of a Rs 500 crore National Military Drone Technology Hub at IIT Kanpur is perhaps the clearest expression of India's long-term strategic ambition in autonomous warfare. By anchoring the hub at one of India's premier engineering institutions, the programme creates a direct pipeline from cutting-edge academic research in communications, signal processing, and autonomous systems into military capability development. The hub's specific mandate, developing encrypted, frequency-hopping, jam-resistant data links for contested electromagnetic environments, addresses precisely the capability gap that the October 2025 trials identified. India's response to that trial failure was not bureaucratic deflection or indefinite study. It was a Rs 500 crore institutional commitment to solving the problem at its root.

This is the pattern that characterises India's defence technology progress at its best: systematic identification of a gap, institutional investment to close it, and a procurement framework that translates research outputs into operational capability. It is the same pattern that produced the iDEX ecosystem, the BrahMos production ramp, and the combat-proven autonomous systems of Operation Sindoor. Applied to EW-resilient drone communications, it will produce a generation of Indian UAVs capable of operating effectively in the contested electromagnetic environment that defines modern high-intensity conflict.

India's Electromagnetic Future

The trajectory India is on in drone warfare and electronic warfare is one of systematic, accelerating progress from a standing start. In 2018, India had no iDEX ecosystem, no indigenous loitering munitions, no combat-proven autonomous systems, and no doctrinal commitment to EW as a primary warfighting domain. In 2026, it has all of these. The distance covered in eight years is extraordinary. The distance still to be covered is smaller than the distance already behind.

India's defence preparedness has historically been measured against its adversaries' current capabilities. The more instructive comparison is against India's own baseline eight years ago. By that measure, the transformation is remarkable and the direction is unambiguous. India is building, systematically and with growing speed, the electromagnetic warfare capability that the drone-saturated conflicts of the next decade will require. Operation Sindoor proved it can perform in combat. The iDEX ecosystem proved it can innovate at scale. PRAGYASHAKTI proves it can integrate. The IIT Kanpur hub proves it can sustain the learning required to stay ahead. The electromagnetic domain is where the next conflict's outcome will be substantially shaped. India is building the capability to shape it on its own terms.

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*Dr Sudhanshu Kumar is a Subject Matter Expert on AI, Cyberwarfare and Cybersecurity at CENJOWS (Centre for Joint Warfare Studies), HQ (IDS), Ministry of Defence, New Delhi. He holds a PhD on "AI and Security policy" from the School of International Studies in JNU. He is also a Visiting Research Fellow at MGIMO, Moscow.*