Jodhpur: Future military power will depend less on the number of platforms a country possesses and more on how quickly it can sense, understand, decide and act, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said on Saturday, stressing the importance of self-reliance and international cooperation amid the changing nature of warfare.
He highlighted the growing role of drones, unmanned systems, artificial intelligence, electronic warfare and long-range precision weapons in military operations. “Different nations. Different aircraft. Different experiences. But one sky. Singh urged the IAF to incorporate lessons from the exercise into its training, tactics, technology, doctrine and future capability development.
Addressing participants of the second edition of Exercise Tarang Shakti 2026 at Air Force Station Jodhpur, Singh said modern warfare was expanding beyond land, sea and air into space, cyberspace, the electromagnetic spectrum and the information domain.
That is the message of Tarang Shakti,” he said. Referring to Operation Sindoor, he said it had demonstrated the IAF’s ability to conduct precise, calibrated and effective operations in pursuit of national security objectives.
He cited indigenous programmes such as the Tejas fighter aircraft, Dhruv, Rudra and Prachand helicopters, the Akash air defence system and the Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA).
Singh said “India had adopted self-reliance in defence as a national policy, recognising the need to produce its own weapons and critical technologies to withstand prolonged conflicts and periods of uncertainty. Self-reliance, he said, meant developing domestic capacity to design, manufacture, maintain and upgrade critical defence technologies, without retreating into isolation. India, he said, was keen to cooperate with like-minded countries in research, joint development, production, maintenance, training and innovation. “The defence relationships of the future will be about technology and trust, not just about platforms,” Singh said. Multinational exercises, he said, allowed air forces to exchange operational knowledge, test procedures and learn from different approaches to training and mission planning.
