India's focus on fighter aircrafts could be a mistake. Here's why

India just signed a deal worth ₹62,370 Crore for 97 Tejas Mk-1A aircraft, the largest indigenous defence order in history. And then, we’re also going for a 5th Gen fighter project, with ₹15,000 Cr budgeted only for the prototype.

Nobel intentions. But there’s an issue no one’s talking about. It’s that ‘fighter jets are an obsolete technology’.

Yes. That sounds like a provocative statement. But for people who’re actually reading this closely, it’s not even controversial.

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

Wars of today aren’t dominated by fighter jets. They’re decided by drones.

If you read about what happened in Armenia-Azerbaijan (2020), or what’s happening in Russia-Ukraine today, or even the conflict between US and Houthis, it’s basically an “all drone war”. Today, drones are everything. They’re so significant that countries don’t even need to fight wars anymore, they could just count the number of drones and declare the winner. And that judgement will most likely be right.

Think about it. A drone could be big, it could be small. It could be expensive, it could be cheap. It could be a large scale destroyer, or just be the size of a Bee. 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 Nuclear Bomb, you don’t need to make another which is, let’s say, 2x better. There’s a limit to what you can do with that technology. But there’s no limit to how far you can go with Drone Tech. It can keep improving, and in all directions.

Did you know that Houthis in the Red Sea are currently fiddling with drones worth ~$10,000, making the U.S. Navy launch interceptors worth Millions just to keep supply lines open? It’s crazy, whatever’s happening. And in the midst of this, we’re looking at spending lakhs of crores on Fighter Jets? That doesn’t sound like the best use of our precious time, money and focus.

India could literally have a “smartphone moment” in defense tech right now. Just like in 2011, only 9.5% of Indian households had a computer (urban 18.7%, rural 5.1%). We never really entered the PC age. But it didn’t matter, because we just skipped it and directly entered what was the future of computing - smartphones. 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. No matter how much we throw at them, it’ll be too little too late. But drones? That’s still an open field. For the money we are about to commit to a 5th Gen jet (when China has already built a 6th Gen), we could build an entire ecosystem of AI led drones, counter-drones, and so on.

It could be a revolution. We just need to look ahead.

Wars of today aren’t dominated by fighter jets. They’re decided by drones.

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