A ministerial directive for cyber, space and electronic doctrines arrived on the same day that Hindustan Aeronautics reported a quarter without a single new Tejas handover to the Air Force.
On 12 November 2026, Raksha Mantri Rajnath Singh told the Air Force Commanders’ Conference in New Delhi that “victory in future conflicts would depend not merely on the number of aircraft, but also on technological sophistication, speed of response and precision of preparations.” He asked the Air Force to develop dedicated doctrines and architectures for electronic, cyber and space warfare, and launched a suite of artificial intelligence applications built in-house by the service’s own AI centre.
That same day, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited had reported its September quarter, the board having approved the audited results on the morning of 12 November. Consolidated revenue rose 14.9% to ₹7,613.25 crore, consolidated net profit 16% to ₹1,935.64 crore, and the operating margin slipped to 22.8%. Not one Tejas Mk1A — the aircraft the Air Force has ordered 180 of — had been handed over.
The Air Force is at 29 fighter squadrons against an authorised 42, the figure successive parliamentary defence committees have used — most recently in December 2024, when the panel recorded 31 against 42. IAF leadership has used 42.5, a broader count of combat squadrons that takes in bomber and electronic-warfare units as well as fighters, which is why the two figures are not interchangeable. By press accounts the current figure is the lowest in six decades. The minister’s argument is that this deficit can be answered with sensors, software and doctrine as much as with airframes. That argument is testable, and the test is not the speech. It is whether the doctrines, the institutions and the budget line exist to carry it.
Key takeaways
- Rajnath Singh directed the IAF on 12 November 2026 to write dedicated doctrines for electronic, cyber and space warfare, and said airframe numbers alone would not decide future conflicts.
- The Air Force holds 29 fighter squadrons against an authorised 42. Its outgoing Chief put the requirement at 36 to 40 new aircraft a year and the achievable rate at 30 to 35.
- The IAF’s AI programme dates to 2021, when UDAAN was set up; its Centre of Excellence opened at Rajokri in July 2022. The ministry disclosed neither the names nor the number of the applications launched this month.
- The last published IAF policy document is the 2022 Aerospace Doctrine. No space or cyber doctrine has been issued, and the Defence Space Agency remains a two-star coordinating body.
- The FY27 allocation for aircraft and aero engines, ₹63,733.94 crore, is 31% above the original FY26 budget but 12% below the FY26 revised estimate — a normalisation, not a step change.
IAF AI applications: what was launched, and what the ministry did not disclose
On 12 November 2026 the Defence Minister asked the Indian Air Force to write dedicated doctrines and architectures for electronic, cyber and space warfare, called the element of surprise a capability to be built in both its offensive and defensive forms, and launched in-house AI applications for operations, administration and aerospace safety. The release named no applications, no contract values and no timelines.
The substance sits in three sentences of the ministry’s release. First, that the Defence Forces must develop methods that leave an adversary “no time to react or recover,” while never being caught off guard themselves, with the caveat that surprise “can manifest in various forms, both conventional and electronic.” Second, that contemporary conflicts are extending beyond traditional battlefields into non-contact domains, with the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas conflicts cited for the proposition that drones and air defence systems have become critical. Third, that the Air Force should make kamikaze drones and counter-drone operations a core priority and fold them into “institutional thinking, planning and operational processes.”
He also commended the Air Force for its conduct during Operation Sindoor in May 2025, and said the lessons drawn from it were visible in the service’s evolving procedures, “particularly through the increased emphasis on drones and air defence systems.” That is the ministry’s own account of what the operation changed, and it is consistent with the Defence Ministry’s Annual Report for 2025-26, which credited the Integrated Air Command and Control System with holding the air-defence picture together through the conflict.
The gap between the directive and the disclosure is the story’s hinge. The ministry did not say which applications were launched, how many there were, what they do, or what they cost. It did not say when the doctrines would be written, who would write them, or whether they would be published. A directive of this kind is a starting gun, and the IAF has fired starting guns before.
The Air Force is at 29 squadrons, and the pipeline is thinner than the number suggests
The IAF holds 29 fighter squadrons against an authorised 42, its lowest strength in six decades by press accounts. Air Chief Marshal A P Singh said on 3 October 2026 that the force needs 36 to 40 new aircraft a year and could induct 30 to 35 if the Tejas, Rafale and Su-30 programmes all proceed. Three MiG-29 and six Jaguar squadrons are due for retirement by the end of the decade.
The arithmetic is unforgiving and the Air Force has stopped pretending otherwise. The retirement of the MiG-21 fleet on 26 September 2025 took the count from 31 to 29. Air Chief Marshal Singh, speaking at his final pre-Air Force Day briefing, said the delay “is going to hurt us” and offered the formulation that has since become the service’s shorthand: “technology delayed is technology denied.”
His successor, Air Chief Marshal Ashutosh Dixit, who took charge on 1 November as the 29th Chief of the Air Staff, told reporters a day later that restoring combat strength towards the sanctioned level would be his “foremost task.” The conference at which Rajnath Singh spoke was the first of his tenure.
Against that, the replacement pipeline reads as a set of conditional promises. Hindustan Aeronautics has 180 Tejas Mk1A aircraft on order — 83 contracted in February 2021 and 97 more in September 2025 for over ₹62,370 crore — and has delivered none. It has received 14 F404-IN20 engines from GE Aerospace against 99 contracted, the dependency that India’s propulsion gap turns on, and has built 27 airframes that await final testing and acceptance. The first handover has been reported as likely in January 2027, ahead of Aero India; that report rests on a single anonymous source, and the company declined to confirm it.
The 114-Rafale Multi-Role Fighter Aircraft programme, cleared by the Defence Acquisition Council in February 2026 at a reported cost of about ₹3.25 lakh crore, remains unsigned. The outgoing Chief said in October that he expected the contract within the current financial year. Until it is signed, the annual induction math depends on a delivery rate the supplier has not yet demonstrated.
There is a fair counter-argument, and the Air Force makes it itself. Air Chief Marshal Singh said in October that Pakistan’s reported pursuit of a Chinese fifth-generation fighter, one strand of a wider India-Pakistan capability competition, was “a cause for concern” but not a no-go situation, because platform effectiveness depends on integration with sensors, weapons and command systems — and that Pakistan had operated capable aircraft before without decisive result. That is the same logic the minister used at the conference. It is a coherent doctrine. The question is whether it is being used to explain a plan or to absorb a shortfall.
Four years of UDAAN have produced applications, not yet a doctrine
The IAF set up UDAAN — the Unit for Digitisation, Automation, Artificial Intelligence and Application Networking — in 2021, and opened its AI Centre of Excellence at Air Force Station Rajokri in July 2022 with GPU servers and a big-data analytics platform. The applications launched on 12 November 2026 run on the service’s secure network. The binding constraint is data: a fleet spanning aircraft more than 30 years old and aircraft still arriving.
This is not a new programme being unveiled. It is a four-year-old programme reaching the stage where its output can be shown to a minister. UDAAN was formed in 2021, the Centre of Excellence followed in 2022, and the applications now cover operations, administration and aerospace safety — the unglamorous middle of air-force work, where scheduling, spares, maintenance prediction and document handling consume manpower.
Business Standard reported in February 2026 that the Air Force’s air-gapped network and predictive analytics were used during Operation Sindoor, citing a single unnamed source; the service does not discuss operational AI, and that claim should be read as a source’s account, not a confirmed capability. The same reporting described the human-in-the-loop principle the service applies to operational decisions, and identified the real constraint: heterogeneous data across old and new platforms, which has to be standardised before machine learning can be trusted with it.
That constraint explains why the applications matter less than the doctrine. Software built in-house for administration and safety is a competence signal. Software fused into targeting, electronic order of battle and air-defence cueing is a warfighting capability, and it requires the doctrine the minister has now ordered — the document that says who decides, on what authority, with what human check, when a machine’s output becomes an order.
Timeline of Indian Air Force institutional steps. Sources: Ministry of Defence and Press Information Bureau releases; Business Standard reporting on UDAAN and the AI Centre of Excellence; Ministry of Defence Annual Report 2025-26; Defence Acquisition Council approvals as reported.
Three doctrines do not exist yet, and the institutions behind them are unfinished
The last major published IAF policy document is the Indian Air Force Aerospace Doctrine of 2022, which shifted the service’s self-description from air power to aerospace power. No published cyber or electronic warfare doctrine has followed. The Defence Space Agency, raised in 2019, is headed by a two-star officer without full operational autonomy, and the space and cyber commands proposed in the Defence Forces Vision 2047 remain proposals.
The directive is therefore not a refinement of existing documents. It is a request for three new ones, in domains where India’s institutional arrangements are still being argued over.
The Defence Forces Vision 2047, released in March 2026, sets out what the services themselves think is missing: dedicated space and cyber commands, a defence geospatial agency, a data force, a drone force and a cognitive warfare action force, with a transition phase running to 2030. Those are recommendations in a vision document. None has been implemented.
Space illustrates the pattern. The Defence Space Agency was created in 2019 to coordinate space capabilities across the three services, after an earlier proposal for an aerospace command ran into inter-service disagreement over ownership. Seven years on, it remains a coordinating body at two-star level, and the question of which service would lead a full command is unresolved.
A doctrine is not a press release. It allocates authority, sets thresholds for action, defines what counts as an attack in a domain where attribution is slow and ambiguous, and tells the industrial base what to build. Until the Air Force publishes one, the applications launched this month are tools looking for a rulebook.
The budget shows a pivot, but a smaller one than the headlines suggest
The FY27 defence budget is ₹7.85 lakh crore, with capital outlay at ₹2.19 lakh crore, up 21.84%. The aircraft and aero engines line is ₹63,733.94 crore — 31% above the original FY26 budget of ₹48,614.06 crore, but 12% below the FY26 revised estimate of ₹72,780.15 crore. Read against the revised estimate, the fighter and engine line falls; read against the original budget, it rises.
Both readings are arithmetically correct, and the choice between them decides the argument. The FY26 revised estimate ran about 50% above its own budget provision, and the ministry does not publish what drove that increase; a lumpy payment calendar is the usual explanation, and it has not been confirmed for this line. On that reading the FY27 figure is closer to a normalisation than to a new departure. Anyone claiming a decisive shift of money out of platforms and into software has to make that case on a different line item.
The candidate is the “Other Equipments” head, covering missiles, ammunition, drones and electronic systems, and the budget documents settle it. The Notes on Demands for Grants for 2026-27 put the head at ₹82,217.82 crore, against ₹50,760.27 crore in the revised estimate for 2025-26 and ₹63,099.03 crore in that year’s original budget. That is 62% above the revised estimate and 30% above the original budget, and it makes the Other Equipments line larger than the ₹63,733.94 crore aircraft and aero engines head.
The head does not show composition. Missiles, ammunition, drones and electronic systems share a single number, so no published series supports a claim about how much of the increase is unmanned systems and how much is replenishment of conventional stocks after a year of firing.
What is documented is the direction of approvals. The ministry told a parliamentary standing committee that the Air Force’s capital budget for 2026-27 is 37.03% higher than the 2025-26 budget estimate, with the funds earmarked for the Rafale programme, combat enablers including airborne early warning and control aircraft, the Tejas Mk1A, medium transport aircraft and high-altitude long-endurance remotely piloted aircraft. Since September 2026, the Defence Acquisition Council has also granted acceptances of necessity worth a reported ₹3.2 lakh crore, overwhelmingly earmarked for domestic industry. An acceptance of necessity is a permission to begin procuring. It is not a contract, and the gap between the two has historically run to years.
What the market has already priced, and what it has not
The electronics and enablement layer of Indian defence already trades at a premium to the platform builders — Bharat Electronics near 47 times earnings, Paras Defence above 110, Data Patterns and Astra Microwave near 90, against Hindustan Aeronautics in the mid-30s as of August 2026. The doctrine shift is in the price. What is not priced is execution.
That inversion is worth stating plainly, because the intuitive trade — buy the software layer before the doctrine arrives — was available two years ago and is no longer cheap. The companies that benefit from a shift toward sensors, electronic warfare and counter-drone systems are the ones the market has already marked up.
Hindustan Aeronautics reported its September quarter on 12 November: consolidated revenue ₹7,613.25 crore, up 14.9%; consolidated net profit ₹1,935.64 crore, up 16%; operating margin 22.8%, down from 23.5%; shares down as much as 4.15% intraday on the margin miss. Its order book stood at ₹2.54 lakh crore at the end of FY26, the last figure the company disclosed, with a near-term pipeline of about ₹90,000 crore over two years, much of it helicopters, Su-30 upgrades and trainers. Brokerages remain constructive, with target prices between ₹5,410 and ₹5,943, and the catalyst they all name is the same one: Tejas Mk1A deliveries.
Bharat Electronics reported revenue of ₹7,328 crore consolidated, up 26.5%, and net profit of ₹1,540 crore for the same quarter, with an order book of ₹68,717 crore at 1 October 2026 and a book-to-bill ratio of 2.3 times. Its next leg depends on the Quick Reaction Surface-to-Air Missile order, worth about ₹30,000 crore and awaiting clearance by the Cabinet Committee on Security, and on a consortium bid with Larsen & Toubro for the Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft programme.
The smaller names carry the doctrine’s promise and its risk. Data Patterns reported revenue down 56.7% on an exceptionally strong base, while first-half order inflows of ₹1,046 crore, nearly three times the year-earlier figure, took its order position to ₹2,697.83 crore: ₹1,742.07 crore in confirmed orders on hand and ₹955.76 crore in negotiated orders awaiting formal award. Astra Microwave holds a ₹2,205 crore contract from Hindustan Aeronautics for the antenna array units at the heart of the indigenous Uttam radar, and demonstrated a vehicle-mounted anti-drone system in July 2026.
The index has begun discounting execution. The Nifty India Defence closed at 9,139.75 on 12 November 2026, about 9% below its 52-week high, with a price-to-earnings multiple near 56 — up about 11% over twelve months and down about 7% over three. That pattern — a year of gains, a quarter of give-back — is what a sector looks like when orders are visible and deliveries are not.
The manpower half: what the Second Tour of Duty changes
The Union Cabinet approved a Second Tour of Duty on 4 November 2026. Twenty-five per cent of each Agniveer batch continues to be retained on merit after four years; the remaining 75% are offered two further years, after which they become eligible for enrolment as regular soldiers subject to willingness and selection criteria. Fixed pay for the extension is ₹43,500 in the first year and ₹47,500 in the second, as the Air Force’s own briefing on 5 November 2026 set out.
Rajnath Singh raised the decision at the conference, describing it as a response to feedback from the Services. The link to the technology argument is direct: the same conference heard that the Air Force should draw on the technical knowledge of young recruits, and an AI-heavy force needs technicians and software-literate operators at the bottom of the pyramid, not only officers at the top.
The first batches complete their initial tenure between 21 November and 31 December 2026, and roughly three lakh Agniveers are serving across the three services, a figure that includes those still in training. Those who join the regular cadre through the extension will rank below the 25% retained at the four-year mark, a seniority distinction the Services will have to manage for a decade.
The constraint is institutional, not technological
India’s air power problem is not a shortage of ambition or of engineering talent. It is that doctrine, institutions and funding move on different clocks: aircraft take a decade to contract and deliver, software takes a year to build and a doctrine takes a decision to publish. The Air Force has been asked for three of those decisions at once, in domains where no command yet exists to own them.
The honest caveat is that this may be exactly how reform looks from the outside. A service that has quietly built AI capacity since 2021 and used an integrated air-defence network to absorb a drone barrage in 2025 is not starting from zero, and a minister telling commanders to write doctrine is a normal mechanism for pushing a bureaucracy. The 2022 Aerospace Doctrine itself was a substantial document. Judging the November directive before the documents exist would be premature.
But the sequencing matters for the reader with money or a career in this space. The Air Force will not field a cyber doctrine before it has decided who commands in that domain, and it will not get a space command before the services settle the ownership question that has been open since 2012. Those are political and institutional decisions taken above the Air Force’s pay grade. Until they are taken, the technology layer will keep producing applications faster than the rules that govern their use.
What to watch
- The QRSAM signature. A ₹30,000 crore order awaiting Cabinet Committee on Security clearance is the single largest near-term swing factor in Indian defence electronics order books.
- The AMCA consortium decision. If the Bharat Electronics and Larsen & Toubro bid is selected, a component supplier becomes a platform integrator, which changes the industrial map more than any single contract value suggests.
- Publication of a cyber or space doctrine. A published document, not a conference reference, is the signal that the November directive has moved. Watch the Air Force’s own publications and the Ministry of Defence annual report for 2026-27.
- The first Tejas Mk1A handover, and the squadron at Nal. The reported January 2027 timeline is a single-source claim; the raising of a full squadron at Nal in Rajasthan is the harder, more meaningful marker.
- The Rafale contract. Signed within FY27 or not, the annual induction rate the Air Force has described depends on it, and so does the credibility of the 42-squadron target as a planning document.
Sources: Press Information Bureau release 2335351; Notes on Demands for Grants 2026-27, Demand No. 21 (Capital Outlay on Defence Services); Ministry of Defence Annual Report 2025-26; Standing Committee on Defence reports; the Defence Forces Vision 2047; company filings and results calls of Hindustan Aeronautics and Bharat Electronics; and reporting by ThePrint, The Hindu, Indian Express, Business Standard, The Week, Times of India, Moneycontrol, CNBC-TV18, Business Today and India Today. Market data as of 12 November 2026.
