Opinion Indian Air Force’s revised doctrine adopts a holistic approach to the country’s security imperatives

A pithy articulation of the Service objectives — evolved out of combat experience, invaluable assessments of international conflicts and its experience gained in international exercises — underpins the doctrine. A novel air strategy covers the entire spectrum of future aerospace applications: Apart from peace and war, this also includes the unique no-war-no-peace condition confronting the country. State-sponsored terrorism, increasing border stand-offs and internal security challenges make peace in India uneasy. Aerospace power helps shape security operations and external and internal security. Sovereignty protection, deterrence, air diplomacy and nation-building remain peace-time imperatives.

The doctrine has the potential to accommodate major changes in wartime strategy that allow for the use of future precepts in the employment of aerospace power in the Indian security context. The doctrine’s focus on the criticality of controlling the skies — its absence in the Russia-Ukraine war has been conspicuous — is a justified imperative for India’s future joint military strategies as adversarial air powers will make all battle spaces highly contested. The IAF’s robust joint credentials, demonstrated in every conflict, remain a dominant flavour in its wartime air strategy, which flows out of the joint military strategy, and is laterally connected with the land and maritime strategies. Offensive air operations and air defence, the two indispensable pillars of air power, create the conditions for the holistic application of combat power, comprising the IAF’s coordinated operations along with army and naval operations. All of IAF’s enabling, enhancing and sustaining operations, underpinned by air mobility operations, directly and indirectly, contribute to the combined application of combat power.

IAF’s only conduct of strategic air operations was in the 1971 war when critical high-value targets of West Pakistan’s vital energy system comprising its oil tanks, refinery, gas plants, and communication systems — including road, rail and bridge networks — were targeted with devastating effects and strategic outcomes. While the resulting acute shortage in fuel stocks forced the enemy to resort to imports, IAF’s sustained attack on the Pakistan army’s communication networks significantly dented the latter’s ability to fight, contributing to the failure of its much-vaunted offensive plans. This vital aspect of IAF’s offensive capability, which seeks to strike the enemy’s strategic and high-value counter-force and counter-value target systems deep inside the adversarial heartland. The impacts on the enemy’s politico-military will and ability to wage war have been given significant doctrinal salience. With the expansion of battlespaces beyond the traditional air, land, and sea domains, and the necessity of a multi-domain approach in India’s future joint military strategy, battle space transparency, combat networks, cyber and electronic warfare, information warfare and the vital techno-logistics constitute the foundation of IAF’s future air strategy. Since doctrinal reviews are undertaken regularly to keep pace with the rapid technology-driven changes in air power tactics and concepts of operations, human resources, training, and operational testing and evaluation remain priority doctrinal precepts.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Shangri La speech of 2018, where he talked of working “with others to keep our seas, space, and airways free and open” and “equal access under international law to the use of common spaces on the sea and in the air,” doctrinally underpins IAF’s commitment to the larger political objectives of the nation. By exploiting its rapid force projection capability, enormous soft power, and international outreach in assisting statecraft and diplomacy, the document underscores the IAF’s inevitable and increasing role in the strategy for security and growth for all in the region (SAGAR), as well as in the larger Indo-Pacific construct.

Though the domain of future aerospace power lies primarily with the IAF, the doctrine acknowledges that other services — civil aviation and space agencies — also contribute to this strength. Despite the air and space continuum, IAF’s multitude of space-based dependencies and applications, and the future necessity of aerospace defence of India’s space assets and ground-based infrastructure, the document refrains from asserting ownership of the arena. It maturely acknowledges that future aerospace and defence capabilities, related R&D, and associated civil-military industrial capabilities are national force multipliers. Since national security is every citizen’s concern and given the efforts underway to evolve national defence and security strategies, the doctrine credibly conveys what aerospace power has, can and will do for the nation, and the need for greater awareness of it.

The writer is a retired Air Marshal who was part of the team that drafted the new IAF doctrine