Land Warfare

Speaking at the two-day (October 22-23, 2026) NDTV World Summit at New Delhi, General David Petraeus argued that what worked in past conflicts will fail in future operations, advocating for a complete operational overhaul based on lessons from modern battles like the war in Ukraine. He was speaking on the second day of the summit in the session titled “War in the Time of AI: How Technology Is Rewriting the Battlefield”,

He highlighted how technological integration is erasing traditional frontlines and shifting how armies must defend, attack, and sustain themselves:

Frontlines are no longer defined linear positions. A highly lethal kill zone extends deeply from any forward line since exposed positions/troop can be seen and immediately targeted.
Traditional defences like trenches are no longer secure since small aerial drones can fly directly into them.
Resupplying troops using human drivers or vulnerable vehicles is becoming obsolete. Logistics must rely heavily on remotely driven ground vehicles and remotely piloted aircraft.
Rapid escalation and deployment of fully autonomous systems completely free of human pilots.
New concepts must rapidly adapt to specific geographic theatres; managing ground front; dealing with high-altitude terrain; like India's 18,000-foot borders, facing a two-front

Petraeus related his "new concept of warfare" to India's security landscape, warning that India must adapt now or lose a war. He framed his thesis around India’s distinct geopolitical challenges, high-altitude terrain, and adversaries, relevance of which included:

China is heavily studying the Russia-Ukraine conflict and has the unmatched industrial capacity to mass-produce cheap drones at a scale few can rival.
China's use of bullet-less aggression along the LAC in Eastern Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh forces India to stretch its conventional resources, making it highly vulnerable if it fails to integrate digital and autonomous countermeasures quickly.
India's military concept must be tailored to the specific theatre, which for India includes rugged, mountainous, and high-altitude borders reaching 18,000 feet.
Defence planners face the unique technical challenge of managing low-altitude drone detection and neutralization within highly complex mountain terrain and cluttered border environments.
Anything exposed will be seen and struck in the new drone era. The infantry must transition to decentralized, subterranean positions, relying heavily on unmanned, remotely piloted ground and air vehicles for logistics and medical evacuations.
India does not have five years to sit back and modernize gradually. Instead of slow, multi-year procurement cycles for major defence hardware, India needs to fundamentally shift how it interacts with its defence industry. Modern conflict requires the capacity for weekly software updates and bi-weekly hardware tweaks to keep up with adversary's electronic countermeasures.

Former Army Chief, General VP Malik noted that while these global drone and AI trends are revolutionary, India cannot completely discard legacy systems overnight. Changing force structures, retraining large human personnel, and modifying defence planning must be done carefully to avoid creating vulnerabilities along active borders.

It may be recalled Elon Musk had publicly stated on X that "manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones" and that continuing to build them will "only get pilots killed." At an Air Force association symposium, he famously declared that "the fighter jet era has passed." But fighter jets will not stop operating, and so will tanks, mechanised Infantry and infantry.

In the above backdrop, the Indian Army's new Land Warfare Doctrine (LWD) 2026 was released on 23 October 2026 by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh. It was officially unveiled on October 30, 2026 on the final day of the Army Commanders’ Conference, where Chief of Army Staff General Dhiraj Seth met senior commanders to assess the evolving security environment and future military challenges. This marked the first major doctrinal update since December 2018.

The new doctrine shifts the Army's strategy toward high-tech integration, emphasizing artificial intelligence (AI), unmanned systems (UAVs), cyber warfare, precision strike capabilities, electronic warfare and multi-domain operations. This change incorporates modern operational lessons from global standoffs and Operation 'Sindoor'. The doctrine is also intended to serve as a long-term framework for preparing the Army for emerging forms of conflict over the next two to three decades, while ensuring readiness for immediate threats.

The strategic landscape has changed significantly after the 2020 Galwan crisis. The Army was compelled to redirect attention towards the Line of Actual Control (LAC), where warfare is shaped by extreme altitude, harsh weather and limited infrastructure rather than desert manoeuvres. Units originally trained for conventional operations in the western sector spent successive winters deployed at elevations of around 15,000 feet in eastern Ladakh. The Army, therefore, must determine how to shift formations between Himalayan and desert theatres despite the limited road and mountain pass networks available for rapid movement.

Ex-CIA Chief David Petraeus speaking at NDTV World Summit 2026 on 22 October 2026 in New Delhi

Operation Sindoor in 2025 further transformed military thinking. India conducted deep strikes inside Pakistan, targeted key airbases and successfully defended against large-scale drone and missile attacks without relying on traditional armoured thrusts. The experience highlighted how rapidly warfare is evolving and exposed limitations in assumptions underpinning earlier doctrinal thinking.

Moreover, Pakistan has established an Army Rocket Force Command equipped with Chinese-origin missile systems intended to strike Indian military infrastructure from deep within its territory. Simultaneously, China’s Western Theatre Command has significantly expanded missile deployments, airfields, logistics hubs and transportation networks across Tibet and Xinjiang since 2020. As a result, both adversaries increasingly possess the ability to target rear areas from the opening stages of any conflict.

Beyond battlefield tactics, the doctrine shapes procurement priorities, force structure, training requirements and professional military education; effectively determining how the Army prepares itself for future conflicts and which capabilities receive sustained investment. Its release coincides with progress towards Integrated Theatre Commands, which reportedly is approaching Cabinet approval.

Key Aspects

The key military strategies outlined in the 2026 update pivot the Army away from historical numbers-heavy attrition warfare toward an agile, high-tech framework designed for conflicts over the next two to three decades, as under:

Multi-Domain Operations (MDO). It combines land forces with air, maritime, cyber, space, and electronic warfare capabilities into synchronized operations.
Decisive Land Power. Reinforces the ongoing centrality of land-based forces to achieve final territorial and political outcomes.
Speed and Information. Moves from heavy troop mass to a doctrine anchored in information dominance and rapid execution.
Automated Battle Management. Integrates automated networks to deliver sensor-fed live threat updates directly to field commanders for immediate counter-strikes.
Drone Ubiquity. Establishes drone operations and counter-UAS (unmanned aircraft systems) as universal, mandatory military skills across all ranks.
Manned-Unmanned Teaming (MUM-T) Operations. Combines autonomous platforms and loitering munitions directly with human combat teams to maximize reach and limit frontline casualties.
Resilient Infrastructure. Mandates the hardening of secure communications and logistics networks to operate effectively even under severe electronic warfare or communication blackouts.
AI Training. Backs the deployment of advanced analytics with a formal three-level AI training curriculum for military officers.
Strategic Updates. Incorporates strategic updates using critical data from the 2020 eastern Ladakh stand-off and Operation 'Sindoor'.
Self-Reliance. Aligns with Atmanirbhar (indigenization) to prioritize homegrown hardware and software pipelines for future stand-offs.

Unaddressed problems

From a critical and strategic perspective, defence analysts, military planners, and security think tanks point out that while the LWD 2026 is visually and technologically progressive, it leaves several critical conceptual, structural, and execution-related gaps unaddressed; as under:

The Jointness Paradox. Modern warfare demands Theatre Commands and unified cross-branch command, but the LWD 2026 is fundamentally an Army-centric document that introduces a 5-year Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) roadmap but operating primarily within the Army's domain. Without a universally binding, civilian-mandated National Security Strategy (NSS) and ITCs, the doctrine risks creating an 'Army MDO' rather than a genuinely unified Tri-Service capability.
Tech-Obsession. The doctrine heavily emphasizes AI curricula, MUM-T, and drone ubiquity. Such over-indexing on high-tech solutions risks the cost of core boots-on-the-ground readiness. High-altitude, sub-zero mountain warfare, as along the LAC, severely degrades battery life, drone mechanics, and advanced sensors. The doctrine lacks a dual-track strategy explaining how the Army will fight if advanced electronics are completely jammed or incapacitated by the severe climatic environments.
Multi-Front Framework. The doctrine replaces the traditional "two-front" terminology with a broader "multi-front environment" involving an external collusive threat (China-Pakistan synergy) alongside hybrid proxy elements. LWD 2026 notes that the military will "identify, rehearse and equip for such contingencies," but fails to provide a concrete strategic framework on how resource allocation will be split if a high-tech conflict erupts simultaneously on multi-fronts.
Self-Reliance. The doctrine aligns heavily with the Aatmanirbhar Bharat initiative, pushing for local software and hardware pipelines. But there is a glaring mismatch between doctrinal aspirations and domestic manufacturing realities. India still lacks critical domestic supply chains for high-end microchips, sophisticated sensor arrays, and raw engine technologies. By enforcing negative import lists, the doctrine risks denying immediate, cutting-edge sub-systems to frontline soldiers while local alternatives are still under multi-year R&D.
Organizational Inertia. The doctrine outlines what the force should look like but omits how the bureaucratic defence apparatus will adapt. It lacks a detailed blueprint for reforming the Army's hierarchical command structure to allow for decentralized decision-making, which is an absolute necessity for fast-paced, sensor-driven MDO combat.

79 years after Independence, India still lacks a National Security Strategy. While the Army has unveiled its LWD 2026; However, the Indian Military per se will continue to be constrained in conducting high-tech, AI-enabled MDOs because of multiple factors, requiring immediate course correction. some examples are given in succeeding paragraphs.

Reliance Jio is launching advanced positioning, navigation or /satellite services in collaboration with Luxembourg's SES. Concerns persist regarding how dependent India remains on external digital and military infrastructure, meaning foreign entities can potentially hold disruptive leverage over local critical services (https://www.thestrategicperspective.org/isro-cacaphony/). As a major European space hub, Luxembourg does not operate in isolation. It has built its entire space ecosystem around cross-border collaboration, commercial data-sharing, and multilateral security frameworks. Luxembourg's sovereign high-resolution Earth-observation satellite, NAOS (National Advanced Optical System), is explicitly designed to share imagery and reconnaissance data with the EU, NATO and the United Nations. Luxembourg is part of the 19-member EU Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST) Partnership. There can be absolutely no shortcut to developing and operationalizing a wholly indigenous system.

Admittedly, the Jio-SES collaboration addresses some of the core disadvantages typically associated with relying on a foreign entity for critical satellite infrastructure, but not all. In high-stakes national security or geopolitical emergencies, collaborating with an overseas company creates distinct structural vulnerabilities, even as Jio has structured this venture to mitigate several of these risks. But despite these structural safeguards, the structural architecture relies on foreign-owned hardware, preserving baseline risks in critical situations, as under:

Hardware Off-Switch. The physical satellites (such as the SES-12 and O3b mPOWER constellations) belong to SES. If a geopolitical rift occurs, the foreign parent entity still retains the fundamental technological capability to cut off or throttle beam capacity from space.
Sanctions. If Luxembourg or its Western allies impose sweeping economic sanctions on an allied entity or target region, SES could be legally forced to cease its technological support or software updates, paralyzing the JV's technical evolution.

In 2024, Ukraine officially launched its Unmanned Systems Forces (USF), operating as a distinct branch of the Armed Forces of Ukraine alongside the Army, Navy, and Air Force. The US has announced the formation of its Autonomous Warfare Command. Under the 'Defence Forces Vision 2047' roadmap, India is transitioning toward a dedicated tri-service Drone Force agency overseen by HQ IDS (Integrated Defence Staff) to enforce a unified joint doctrine. A Joint Drone Force is an immediate requirement but the Indian Air Force is averse to a joint force of this nature. India faces a multi-front threat across completely divergent topographies; from the ultra-high-altitude ranges of Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh to the plains and maritime reaches of the Indo-Pacific. India's Autonomous Warfare Doctrine, therefore, must encompass a Multi-Front Autonomous Strategy. Also, as formalized by the recent Ministry of Defence (MoD) drone security frameworks, India must mandate full access to the source code, firmware, and flight controllers of every deployed drone. To prevent geopolitical adversaries from leveraging backdoors in imported sub-components, India must maintain an entirely Indian-controlled orchestration layer. AI decision-making models must be stress-tested in localized digital twin simulations before equipping frontline soldiers (https://www.thestrategicperspective.org/managing-autonomous-warfare/).

Global tech giants are injecting hundreds of billions into building India's foundational compute, cloud, and energy infrastructure to support advanced AI. But India lacks domestic advanced chip manufacturing fabs, silicon packaging facilities, and core electronic design automation (EDA) software. Resultantly, India's AI layer is sovereign, but the entire physical computing layer underneath is foreign rented, which poses serious risks for national security, including military operations and preparedness (https://www.sps-aviation.com/experts-speak/?id=1118&h=The-AI-Conundrum). Until India develops a totally indigenous computing layer to match its AI layer, it will remain vulnerable. Significantly. Britain's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has warned that AI-powered ransomware could hit critical infrastructure by 2028. The agency says hostile actors are highly likely to use AI to find vulnerabilities, spread malware, and increase attack speed and scale. Experts warn AI is accelerating automated cyberattacks against companies. Reports describe a surge of AI-assisted attacks that can compress campaigns that once took years into much shorter time frames.

The author is an Indian Army veteran. Views expressed are personal.

More on related topics:

Mission Sudarshan Chakra vs Golden Dome, Iron Dome & Steel Dome: https://www.thestrategicperspective.org/mission-sudarshan-chakra-vs-golden-dome-iron-dome-steel-dome/

Ubiquitous Data Centres: https://www.thestrategicperspective.org/ubiquitous-data-centres/

Golden Dome, Iron Dome, Steel Dome: Comparative Report: https://www.thestrategicperspective.org/golden-dome-iron-dome-steel-dome-comparative-report/

Managing Autonomous Warfare: https://www.thestrategicperspective.org/managing-autonomous-warfare/