India finally going heavy on Drones: Ghatak, MALE and more

About a year ago, I had written that "Fighter jets will soon be an obsolete technology". And that rather than investing billions of dollars on Fighter planes, India would greatly benefit by focusing on drones instead.

Naturally, I was scoffed at. People said, "Defense strategy is not anyones domain to comment". And that, "Indian Government and Army is not so foolish to approve huge funds". Some even said that I didn't know about "the nuances of war".

It was the usual authority bias led BS that comes as a response to any contrarian thought. Nothing special.

But then passed some time and came March 27, 2026.

On that day, the Indian Government announced an order of ₹39,000 Cr for Ghatak Drones. For the very first time, the Def Ministry said, "Drones are the future of warfare", with Mr. Rajnath Singh saying, "India will need to be self reliant on drone manufacturing by 2030". This, by the way, is in addition to the ₹30,000 Cr we are slated to spend on MALE drones.

Once again, we are vindicated. The announcement came a bit late, but it came nevertheless.

But how did we see this coming? Just by observing things closely, and by reading history as a "process", and not a collection of museum pieces.

Fighter jets used to be important, sure. They defined who won wars in the 20th century. From the WWII Spitfires, to the Mirages that flew over Kargil, control of the skies meant everything (The Bomber Mafia by Mr. Malcolm Gladwell is a great book on this, highly recommend it). But that's not true anymore.

Wars of today are all about drones.

Read about Armenia-Azerbaijan (2020), or what's happening in Russia-Ukraine, or even the conflict between US and Houthis (and now Iran), it's basically an "all drone war". Today, drones are so significant that, as per Mr. Musk, countries could just count the number of drones and declare the winner. And that judgement will most likely be right.

Someone recently said, "Drones are like Nuclear Bombs, but without a limiting factor". And that's absolutely right.

What it means is that once you've created a N-Bomb, you don't need to make another which is, let's say, 2x better. There's a limiting factor in that technology. But there's no limit to how far you can go with Drone Tech. It can keep improving, and in all directions. As it's happening right in front of our eyes.

Which is why, as soon as I read about India looking at spending lakhs of crores on Fighter Jets, I thought of it as strategic myopia. I wrote:

"India could literally have a "smartphone moment" in defense tech right now. In 2011, only 9.5% of Indian households had a computer. We never really entered the PC age. But it didn't matter, because we just skipped it and directly entered the smartphones paradigm. Now, in 2025, over 85% percent of households have atleast one smartphone. We won.

The same leap is possible in defence. Fighter jets are passé. But drones are still an open field."

Interesting to see India moving in this direction. More power to us!

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