Author: Dr Manish Ranjan
In February this year, Germany’s parliament approved its first large order of AI-guided strike drones: about €536 million for several thousand loitering munitions from two young firms. A decade ago, Berlin would not even have debated such weapons. Today it buys them by the thousand. War has quietly moved to machine speed, while most of us were still asking AI to write our emails.
The numbers tell the story. World military spending reached $2.89 trillion in 2025, the eleventh straight year of increase, according to SIPRI. India, at $92 billion, is the fifth-largest spender. In the war in Ukraine, an estimated 70 to 80 per cent of daily combat losses on both sides are now caused by drones, and Ukraine’s forces alone received about three million small attack drones in 2025. A machine costing a few hundred dollars can now destroy armour worth millions. Mass is losing to math. Counting tanks and squadrons tells us less and less about who is really strong.
I write as a civilian administrator, not a soldier. But as district collector of Latehar in 2006, and later in Hazaribag in 2011 when Left Wing Extremism scarred that region, I learnt that security is an information contest long before it is a firefight. The side that knows first, where the movement is, which bridge is watched, which village is wavering, usually wins without firing a shot. Machines now play that game of knowing a million times faster than any human network. A nation that rents its machines rents its safety.
India has already seen this on its own frontier. During Operation Sindoor in May 2025, waves of drones and missiles were met and blunted. One quiet hero was Akashteer, the Army’s automated air defence control system, built at home by Bharat Electronics, which joins radars and weapons into one live picture of the sky. It worked. The forces have drawn the lesson quickly: every infantry battalion is to get an “Ashni” drone platoon with about ten types of drones, and new Bhairav battalions have been raised for fast strikes. This year’s defence budget of Rs 7.85 lakh crore raised capital spending by nearly 22 per cent. Defence production touched a record Rs 1.78 lakh crore in 2025-26, and exports rose 62 per cent to Rs 38,424 crore, reaching more than 80 countries.
The next argument is about dependence, and it is best said plainly. An imported algorithm is a loyalty you cannot inspect. Software has owners, updates have gatekeepers, and in a crisis the switch may sit in someone else’s hand. Recent export controls on advanced chips have shown how quickly technology can be withheld. No country sells its sharpest edge. What cannot be bought must be built.
India’s route will be its own, built on its strengths: a vast pool of engineers, a lively startup scene and working channels into the forces. iDEX has signed about 650 innovation contracts with startups and small firms. Its ADITI window offers up to Rs 25 crore per startup across about 30 critical technologies. The Defence Ministry showcased 75 AI products as early as 2022 and declared 2025 its Year of Reforms. The pieces exist. What the moment needs is scale and speed: treating algorithms like ammunition, stocked, tested, war-gamed and refreshed, rather than software bought once and left alone.
Four priorities would turn these pieces into deterrence. First, a sovereign military AI stack: models trained on our terrain, our languages and our sensor data, running on Indian computers, so that no foreign update can blind us on a bad night. Second, testing ranges for autonomy, where swarms, counter-swarms and jamming are practised as routinely as artillery firing. An algorithm that has never been jammed in training will fail when it is jammed in war. Third, a defence AI cadre, in uniform and outside it, with fast lanes that carry a young engineer’s breakthrough to a forward unit in months. Fourth, a counter-drone shield for borders, cities, refineries and airports. By late November 2025, the BSF had seized 272 drones along the Punjab border alone. The cheap drone has made every installation a possible front line.
One principle must run through all of this, and here India can lead. Even at machine speed, the decision to take a human life must remain a human decision. The US defence department’s own rules require “appropriate levels of human judgment” over the use of force, and the UN Secretary-General and the Red Cross have asked nations to agree on binding rules for autonomous weapons by 2026. India can build autonomy right up to that line and champion the line itself: the machine may watch, warn, track and intercept, but a named officer owns the final decision. Our civilisation has debated the rules of war since Kurukshetra. Restraint built into the weapon is not weakness. It is the mark of a power confident enough to stay human.
There is an economic prize as well. The nations that mastered aerospace sold the world its airliners; the nations that master defence AI will sell the world its shields. Every rupee spent on military autonomy also builds civilian strength in logistics, mapping and disaster response. Done well, security spending is industrial policy in uniform.
I once watched jawans sweep a forest road at dawn, in Saranda Forest of West Singhbhum district, metre by metre, for mines, young men reading the ground with sticks and nerve. I think of them whenever I read about algorithms at war. Technology has always decided how much courage costs. Done right, machines will take the first risk so that our soldiers take fewer. Deterrence in this decade will belong to those who own their algorithms. India has the engineers, the battlefield lessons and a tradition of restraint the world needs. What remains is to move at the speed the machines have set.
The author is an IAS officer and the author of eight books on Artificial Intelligence. An alumnus of the University of Oxford and UC Berkeley, and a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Award and the National e-Governance Award, he was recognised as one of India’s ‘Top 25 Changemakers of 2025’. Views are personal; Views presented are personal.