Context

• Artificial intelligence, automation, swarms of drones, and inexpensive precision weapons have radically lowered the cost of force while accelerating decision cycles and amplifying operational risk.
• For India, facing potential confrontations along two fronts and in multiple domains, the consequence is stark: technological purchases alone will not suffice.
• India must remake the architecture of power: doctrine, command, force design, professional military education (PME), and the defence industrial base must be integrated into a single, adaptive system.

The problem: fissures between technology and organisation

• The Indian Armed Forces have taken essential steps, new doctrines (Joint Doctrine, 2017; Army Land Warfare Doctrine, 2018), tri-service agencies for cyber and space, and capability buys such as MQ-9B drones and Rafale-M fighters.
• Yet capabilities without coherent command structures and cultural alignment risk being stove-piped.
• Despite political emphasis on jointness for over a decade, joint PME and true operational integration are only now being implemented; the pace of organisational change has lagged operational needs.
• The underlying problem is not a single deficiency but a mismatch: a technological tempo that demands rapid, multi-domain responses and an institutional tempo that favours slow, service-centred decision cycles.

Proposed Solutions

• From coordination to command: Theatre Commands and Legal Reforms
  • Moving from mere coordination to unified command is the central organisational prescription.
  • Empowering theatre commanders with administrative and disciplinary authority (as reflected in recent rules) aligns authority with responsibility, a prerequisite for fast, coherent action.
  • But authority must be paired with accountability, legal clarity, and safeguards. Phased activation of theatre commands, with clear metrics and sunset reviews, will help manage inter-service resistance while proving operational utility.
  • The alternative, half-measures that give commanders fragments of authority, will only preserve the worst of both worlds: confusion in crisis and inertia in peace.
• Doctrine and multi-domain evolution
  • Future conflicts will be multi-domain from the opening salvo: choices made in cyberspace, space, and the information environment will shape kinetic outcomes.
  • Doctrine must therefore be anticipatory. India’s Ran Samvad emphasis on hybrid warriors, officers versed in scholarship, technology and narrative shaping, is a necessary conceptual shift.
  • Doctrine must move beyond stove-piped playbooks to multi-domain campaigns that synchronise ISR, cyber effects, electronic warfare, maritime denial, and precision fires.
  • The Joint Doctrine and land warfare publications supply a baseline, but doctrines must be living documents updated continuously through experimentation, red-teaming, and integrating lessons from exercises into PME.
• Force design: modularity, speed, and logistics
  • The emergence of Integrated Battle Groups (Rudra) and modular units (Bhairav) is a practical response to the need for speed and tailored lethality.
  • These mission-specific brigades promise 12–48-hour deployments with integrated armour, artillery, engineers, drones and loitering munitions.
  • But rapid entry forces demand rapid logistics, resilient C2, and joint sustainment: absence of logistic parity will render fast brigades brittle.
  • Equally, maritime reforms, carrier-centred posture bolstered by Rafale-M, strengthen blue-water options, yet need an unmanned and subsurface roadmap to deter across the spectrum of conflict.
• PME and the technologist-commander
  • Reforming PME to produce technologist-commanders is vital.
  • Officers must be fluent in code, data-centred decision-making, and information operations; they must also be comfortable failing fast in controlled settings and iterating.
  • Embedding rapid prototyping into exercises, creating joint courses with industry and universities, and rotating technologists through command postings will break the knowledge-silo barrier.
  • Education without institutional pathways for technologists to rise into command echelons will, however, blunt the initiative.

Risks and mitigation

• Inter-service rivalry: Mitigate via phased authority transfer, joint career pathways, and pooled incentives (budgets tied to joint readiness milestones).
• Overcentralisation: Avoid giving theatre commanders unchecked power; embed legal oversight and parliamentary reporting.
• Cyber and AI vulnerabilities: Invest in resilient architectures, adversarial testing, and human-in-the-loop safeguards for AI decisions.
• Industrial bottlenecks: Reform procurement, finance, and testing frameworks to enable the rapid prototyping loop.

Conclusion

• The technologies that compress time and expand domains of conflict also demand that the nation knit its forces, doctrine and industry into an adaptive organism capable of rapid learning and decisive action.
• The textual prescription, theatre commands, modular forces, tri-service technologies, joint PME and civil-military fusion, is sound in orientation.
• The decisive factor will be execution: clear metrics, phased command activation with accountability, relentless joint testing, and an industrial loop that rewards iteration.