The drone wars are here: Can India keep up with China’s war machine?

Ukraine’s war has become more than a contest of trenches, shells, and drones. It is now a preview of the next era of warfare: one in which cheap autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, and relentless electronic warfare can alter not only the front line but the economic foundations of a state.

For India, this is not a distant lesson. It is a warning about the kind of war it may face against a far more digitally integrated and industrially prepared China.

The battlefield in Ukraine has been transformed by drones in a way few military planners fully anticipated. At first, drones served as eyes in the sky, extending artillery range and improving targeting. Then they became strike weapons, able to hunt tanks, vehicles, and supply columns with unsettling precision. Now, according to recent reporting, they are becoming increasingly autonomous, AI-assisted, and resistant to jamming, even as both sides intensify electronic warfare.

More from Opinion

What makes this shift so consequential is that drones have changed the logic of combat. The old battlefield rewarded armour, air superiority, and massed firepower. The new one rewards speed of adaptation, software upgrades, distributed production, and the ability to operate in a saturated electronic environment. A small, cheap, and intelligent drone can now cost an enemy more in lost equipment, manpower, and time than a far more expensive platform once could.

Ukraine’s recent drone campaign has also widened the scope of what unmanned systems can do. A Fortune report on the latest developments notes that new Ukrainian drones are helping Kyiv gain battlefield advantage while also striking Russia’s oil infrastructure and disrupting an industry that remains central to Moscow’s war economy. That matters because it shows drones are no longer only tactical tools; they are instruments of strategic pressure, capable of degrading military logistics and revenue streams at the same time.

This is perhaps the most underappreciated change in modern warfare. Drones can now attack the economic spine of a war effort, not just the soldiers at the front. In Ukraine’s case, long-range strikes have targeted refineries, export terminals, and energy infrastructure, forcing Russia to absorb not only battlefield losses but also material damage to industrial capacity and export earnings.

That shift has profound implications. In the past, military campaigns often sought to win territory first and worry about industrial effects later. In the new model, the battlefield and the economy are collapsing into one another. A drone strike on a refinery is not just a tactical raid; it is a blow against fuel availability, logistics, state revenue, and the adversary’s ability to sustain war over time.

This is why the war in Ukraine matters far beyond Eastern Europe. It shows that future conflict will likely be multi-layered: battlefield attrition, electronic contestation, industrial sabotage, and economic disruption will occur simultaneously. The side that can move fastest across all four domains will have the advantage.

India has clearly recognised the danger, and it has begun to respond. After the May 2025 conflict with Pakistan, India introduced a $234 million incentive scheme to reduce reliance on imported drone components and strengthen domestic manufacturing. The Indian Army has also conducted major drone exercises and is moving towards dedicated drone units and broader training in unmanned systems.

That is a meaningful start, but it is still a start. The new drone era demands more than procurement. It requires indigenous sensors, secure data links, resilient command networks, mass production, software iteration, and a doctrine that assumes heavy attrition from the first day of war. If drones are the new infantry of the air, then chips, batteries, optics, and communications hardware are the ammunition. Any country that cannot secure these inputs in a crisis will find itself strategically constrained before the fighting even begins.

China is better placed than India for this new style of war. Chinese military planners are actively exploring AI-enabled drone swarms, robotic dogs, autonomous target recognition, and the integration of civilian AI advances into military systems. The significance of this is not simply technological. It reflects a broader industrial and institutional advantage: China has a larger manufacturing base, deeper electronics supply chains, and a state system more capable of fusing commercial innovation with military demand.

That gives China a powerful edge in a drone-centric conflict. It can experiment at scale, absorb losses more easily, and iterate hardware and software faster. India, by contrast, is still building the underlying architecture of this kind of warfare. Its progress is real, but it is uneven and reactive.

India needs to think like a state preparing for a long technological war, not a short border crisis. First, it must scale domestic drone manufacturing and component production so that wartime supply is not hostage to foreign vendors. Second, it must make counter-drone systems as central to air defence as fighters and missiles, because drone warfare is as much about denial as it is about offence.

Third, India should build a doctrine for mass and attrition. The Ukraine war has shown that expensive precision alone is not enough; the power lies in cheap systems produced in quantity, integrated with real-time intelligence, and continuously improved through battlefield feedback. Fourth, India must protect critical infrastructure — oil refineries, ports, communications hubs, and logistics nodes — because the next war may target economic capacity as directly as military formations.

Finally, India should treat AI in defence not as a futuristic add-on but as a core strategic capability. The winner of future wars will not necessarily be the side with the most exquisite platform. It will be the side that can sense first, adapt fastest, and keep operating when the electromagnetic spectrum becomes hostile and the skies become crowded with machines.

Ukraine has demonstrated that drones can change the battlefield. The newest reports show they can also shape the war economy. That is the decisive lesson for India. Modern warfare is no longer just about defeating enemy forces at the front. It is about weakening the opponent’s entire war machine, including its energy system, industrial base, and command networks.

On that measure, India has begun to prepare, but China remains ahead. If India wants to avoid being strategically surprised in the next major conflict, it must treat the drone age as a comprehensive national security challenge. In the wars of the future, the side that dominates the air may not do so with jet fighters alone, but with swarms of intelligent machines that can find, freeze and fracture both armies and economies.

(Hindol Sengupta is professor and executive dean of the School of International Affairs, and director of the India Centre at O. P. Jindal Global University. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)