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New Delhi: At a training facility in Likabali, in the forested foothills of Arunachal Pradesh, infantrymen who enlisted to carry rifles are learning to fly. A decade ago, the scene would have seemed odd. Today it reflects the defining military lesson of the 2020s, written largely over the plains of eastern Ukraine.
There, the war has become a contest of sensors and small aircraft. Drones now inflict most of the losses on both sides. Armoured columns, once the measure of a ground army, have all but vanished from the front. Soldiers creep forward in twos and threes, knowing that anything moving in the open will be spotted, and probably struck, within minutes.
A sky of their own
The biggest change lies not in how many drones exist but in who controls them. Air reconnaissance used to sit with higher headquarters and reached the front late, filtered and rationed. In Ukraine it now belongs to the section commander. One soldier sends a small quadcopter beyond the treeline; another launches a first-person-view drone, flown through video goggles, to finish what the first one found. Sighting and strike now happen inside the platoon.
India has chosen to build that capability into the infantry rather than bolt it on. Its approach, branded ‘Eagle in the Arm’, treats a drone as part of a soldier’s personal kit, much like his weapon. Every infantry battalion now has an Ashni platoon of roughly two dozen drone specialists, and the Army wants every infantryman to be a competent operator by 2027. Artillery regiments, meanwhile, are receiving loitering munitions and counter-drone equipment of their own.
Cheap and many, or costly and few?
The second lesson concerns money. A first-person-view drone costs a few hundred dollars; the armoured vehicle it disables may cost millions. Ukraine, which now turns out around four million drones a year, nearly all at home, has made this imbalance a doctrine. It buys drones the way armies once bought shells, expects to lose most of them, and changes designs whenever the enemy’s jammers catch up.
Defence faces the same arithmetic in reverse. Spending a surface-to-air missile on a cheap drone is a losing exchange, which is why Ukraine increasingly hunts attack drones with low-cost interceptor drones. India met its own version of this problem in May 2025, when waves of Pakistani drones crossed the western border over successive nights and were countered with guns and jammers as much as with missiles.
Yet the drone age has not retired precision. In the same operation, Indian armed drones struck air-defence sites inside Pakistan, and one destroyed a radar. The answer is a blend, not a choice: plentiful, disposable drones to watch and harass, backed by a smaller stock of accurate, jam-resistant loitering munitions for targets that matter.
Thin air, hot sand
Ukraine’s lessons were learned over flat, low farmland. India’s northern frontier sits far higher. At around 5,000 metres, the air is roughly 40 per cent less dense, so rotors generate less lift and motors labour for every minute aloft. Winter nights in Ladakh drop well below minus 20 degrees Celsius, sapping batteries just when endurance matters most. Mountain walls block radio links, and gusts funnelling through valleys can toss a light quadcopter off course.
The western front tests machines differently. During Operation Sindoor, hostile drones were sighted from Baramulla in the north to Bhuj in the south, including over the Thar near Jaisalmer and Barmer. There, summer heat above 45 degrees Celsius strains electronics, fine dust grinds into motors, and long empty distances reward range over agility. On both fronts, crews must assume satellite navigation will be jammed.
Systems meant for India must therefore prove themselves in Indian conditions. Loitering munitions already in Army service have been through flight trials in Ladakh, and the Army expects such systems to work across plains, desert and high-altitude terrain alike. Manufacturing firms in India are constantly testing new technologies that will be able to deliver high levels of precision and accuracy in such areas. Indian industry is already delivering at scale: Solar Defence and Aerospace Limited (SDAL) has handed over 450 Nagastra-1R loitering munitions to the Army in a single supply batch, which the company describes as the largest such supply to the Army so far.
The Ministry of Defence, for its part, signed contracts in New Delhi on August 14, 2026, in the presence of Defence Secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh, with TATA Advanced Systems Limited and NIBE Private Limited to procure loitering munition systems, along with munitions and other accessories, for the Army at an approximate cost of Rs 1,577 crore. WB India, a member of the WB Group, which manufactures loitering munitions in the country, is among the firms able to tune designs for these extremes and keep them serviced close to the troops. Warmate is no longer a prototype.
WB Group’s loitering munitions are in the Army’s inventory and have been in Ladakh’s high-altitude trials. Add the FlyEye reconnaissance drone as the spotter and the system’s reach stretches to roughly 100 km, which is the sensor-to-shooter loop Shaktibaan units are designed to close.
The common thread is speed. In Ukraine, a drone design can be obsolete within months, and the side that adapts faster sets the terms of the fight. India’s task is to build that rhythm into its own forces: train every soldier to fly, buy small tactical drones in bulk, hold a precise tier in reserve, and test everything where it will actually be used. The next war on the subcontinent may be decided as much in the few hundred metres above the ground as on it.