India must draw strategic lessons from the Iran war

Indians have a right to be angry. US President Donald Trump’s decision to launch a war on Iran. New Delhi long warned against military action and prides itself on adherence to the diplomatic consensus on international law. Trump’s expectation that Iranians would rise and oust their oppressors was naïve. Today, India bears the consequences for decisions in which they had no input.

While the retail price of petrol and diesel remains steady, commercial fuel increases of up to 25 per cent will strike a blow to Indian industry and aviation. Diplomatically. Trump’s embrace of Pakistani mediation and his embrace of Field Marshal Asim Munir undercuts both the war against terror and unravels a quarter century of bilateral Indian and U.S. efforts to build tighter ties.

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Those who once lobbied for a New Delhi-Washington may feel betrayed, while old-guard diplomats and politicians for whom anti-Americanism is a comfortable staple want to drive home their supposed wisdom on talk shows and to their political opponents.

In both cases, however, the discussion misses the point. Indian greatness depends not on questioning the past, but on preparing for the future. Historians and pundits can argue whether the US and Israeli war on Iran was necessary or just. Indian procurers, Research and Analysis Wing employees and generals should instead be studying what the United States and Israel accomplished to ask two questions: Can they undertake the same operations, and, if not, what will it take to reach such capabilities?

On the first morning of conflict, the United States decapitated Iran’s leadership. Both Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps assumed falsely that the US military would never strike during the day. While New Delhi proved its targeting during Operation Sindoor, Indian analysts should ask two questions: Can they stage a daylight raid, and do they have the intelligence to know where Pakistan's Army Chief Asim Munir, Inter-Services Intelligence chief Lt Gen Asim Malik, Air Chief Marshal Zaheer Ahmad Babar Sidhu, Defence Secretary Lt Gen Muhammad Ali, and Jamaat-e-Islami ameer Hafiz Naeem ur Rehman might be in real time should India ever need to target them in response to a terror atrocity? Elected politicians will make the decision whether to do so, but it is the job of both the military and intelligence communities to ensure that their leaders have all options at their disposal.

Likewise, on April 3, 2026, Iran shot down an American F-15 with two crew members onboard. Over subsequent hours and days, US forces located their missing men and rescued them. Indian Air Force officers should ask: If an Indian pilot is shot down over Pakistan or China or the territories either country occupies, do they have the training to survive? Alternatively, if a Pakistani pilot crashes inside India, can Indian forces do better than their Iranian counterparts to locate and capture the pilot before he can escape?

The same holds true for the Navy. The United States hobbled the Iranian navy in the first hours of the war, sinking one frigate off the coast of Sri Lanka. Given the threats that both the Pakistani and Chinese People’s Liberation Army–Navy ships pose to India, does New Delhi have the real-time capability to always have each enemy ship essentially within its torpedo sights?

Alternatively, if the US Navy were struck by a submarine, does the Indian military have the sonar buoys and underwater tripwires in place to ensure that no enemy submarine can enter the Indian Ocean basin without the Indian Navy at least being aware? This should not be a new capability: During the Cold War, the United States would strive to monitor the so-called GIUK gap, the waters between Greenland and Iceland and Iceland and the United Kingdom, to trace any Soviet submarine that sought to move into the Atlantic Ocean. Can India detect any crossings of the Australia-Singapore or Oman-Gujarat gap?

Finally, Trump may not have succeeded in uprooting the Islamic Republic’s leadership, but his war does also provide lessons about fuel and food security as well as air defence systems. If another war breaks out, perhaps, for example, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, that is as capable of disrupting global energy flows, is India prepared? How many weeks or months of sparse capacity does it have to keep Indian factories running? While India is self-sufficient in agriculture, it lags behind in edible oils. What plans are in place to plug this gap?

More importantly, the war shows the importance of defences against drones and missiles. India maintains a hodgepodge of systems to avoid vulnerability to any single supplier. India fields the S-400 Triumf, its own ballistic missile defence interceptors, and the Barak-8 system it developed jointly with Israel. Even if these systems could suffice against ballistic missiles and drone swarms, however, does India have enough? After all, India has 75 cities with more than one million people, in addition to which it will need to defend its airfields, industrial sites, and ports. Put another way, India needs a defence system for 2030, not 1990.

Certainly, Indian politicians excel at anger and second-guessing. Fair enough: Trump must take responsibility for his own mistakes. When it comes to ensuring India has military capabilities to match the country’s stature, however, the Indian political debate falls far short. Indians can say, for example, the US war with Iran is one of choice, but Indians may not have a choice when they next find themselves embroiled in war.

(Michael Rubin is director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)