Recent air and missile conflicts, from Ukraine to West Asia to India’s own Operation Sindoor, have exposed an uncomfortable truth: advanced platforms win battles only if factories can keep them supplied. India is now racing to turn that lesson into industrial capacity.
The lesson of four days
Operation Sindoor, conducted from 7 to 10 May 2025 in response to the Pahalgam terror attack in which 26 civilians were killed, was brief but intense. It involved precision-guided munitions, loitering munitions, drones and cruise missiles such as BrahMos, alongside air-defence engagements on a large scale.
In its aftermath, Indian officials have been unusually candid about what it revealed. Operational analyses found that ammunition consumption exceeded projections, particularly in artillery and infantry support roles. Defence Secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh has outlined plans to surge small-arms ammunition production and to double war wastage reserves, the stockpiles maintained for sustained combat, with greater private-sector participation. He has also said that inventories have since been replenished and, in several categories, strengthened beyond pre-operation levels.
A global pattern
India’s experience mirrors lessons elsewhere. The war in Ukraine has consumed artillery shells and air-defence interceptors at rates that Western industries, sized for peacetime, struggled to match. Missile exchanges in West Asia in 2024 and 2025 showed how quickly interceptor stocks can be depleted when an adversary launches large salvos of cheaper drones and missiles.
The strategic shift is clear. Air superiority and high-end platforms remain essential, but modern conflict rewards mass and endurance: the ability to replace losses, absorb attrition and keep firing over weeks or months. That depends on industrial depth, from raw materials and propellants to precision electronics and skilled labour.
Building ammunition at scale
India has made measurable progress. According to Lieutenant General Amardeep Singh Aujla of the Indian Army, 154 of the 175 ammunition variants in the Army’s inventory were indigenous by mid-2025, with full indigenisation targeted. Defence officials have also acknowledged gaps between stated capacity and actual output, particularly in critical inputs.
Public-sector producers, Munitions India Limited and other successors of the Ordnance Factory Board, remain the backbone of supply, and defence-news reports cite a 2,000-crore-rupee modernisation fund for their plants. The private sector is growing quickly. On 19 January 2026, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh inaugurated a fully automated 30-millimetre medium-calibre ammunition plant at Solar Defence and Aerospace in Nagpur, noting that the company’s Nagastra loitering munitions had been used during Operation Sindoor. The BrahMos facility in Lucknow, anchoring the Uttar Pradesh Defence Industrial Corridor, was built in about three and a half years from land allotment.
Overall, India’s domestic defence production has risen from about 46,425 crore rupees in 2014 to around 1.5 lakh crore rupees, according to the government, with the private sector contributing more than 33,000 crore rupees.
The rotary-wing gap
Helicopters illustrate a different kind of industrial challenge: fleet renewal. India’s armed forces still rely heavily on Cheetah and Chetak light helicopters derived from designs dating back to the 1960s, vital for high-altitude logistics and casualty evacuation in places such as Siachen. Their replacement by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited’s Light Utility Helicopter has been slow. The indigenous Advanced Light Helicopter fleet, the workhorse of all three services, faced a grounding after a 2025 accident, underscoring how a single technical issue can sideline a large share of a fleet.
Rotary overhaul is therefore not only about buying new aircraft. It requires maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) capacity, spare-parts supply chains and the engineering depth to diagnose and fix problems quickly.
Drones, electronics and the new arithmetic of attrition
Recent conflicts have also changed the economics of attrition. Inexpensive drones and loitering munitions can force defenders to expend interceptors costing many times more. Countering them requires layered air defence, electronic warfare and cheaper kinetic options, including guns firing programmable ammunition, all of which must be produced in volume.
That shifts attention to the electronics supply chain. Seekers, radios, navigation modules, batteries and semiconductors are often imported, and a long conflict could expose those dependencies quickly. Building domestic capability in these components, or at least securing diversified suppliers and adequate stockpiles, is as important as building more shells.
What industrial capacity really means
Sustained capacity depends on factors that rarely make headlines. Energetics such as propellants and explosives require specialised chemical plants and long-lead raw materials. Testing and certification, including proof ranges and quality laboratories, can become bottlenecks. Predictable multi-year orders matter more to private manufacturers than one-off contracts, because they justify investment in production lines. And a skilled workforce in metallurgy, precision machining, electronics and chemistry takes years to build.
Dual-use industrial strength matters as well. Countries with large civilian bases in chemicals, steel, automobiles and electronics can convert capacity to defence production faster in a crisis. India’s broader manufacturing push, from semiconductors to speciality chemicals, therefore has a security dimension that is easy to overlook.
Exports can help. Defence exports allow manufacturers to keep lines running and maintain economies of scale in peacetime, so that capacity exists when it is needed. India’s growing export orders, from artillery to missiles, serve that strategic purpose as well as a commercial one.
The long view
India’s defence planners now speak of readiness for wars that may be short and intense or long and grinding. Platforms will always attract attention, but the decisive advantage may belong to the side that can manufacture, repair and resupply faster. Operation Sindoor lasted four days. The industrial effort it triggered will take a decade.
