Recent conflicts have triggered a palpable surge in drone production, particularly in countries including United States, China, Israel, Turkiye, Ukraine, and Iran. Mainly spearheaded by the private sector, with the exception of China, drone production is allowing states involved in active combat to meet their own operational battlefield requirements. For states not engaged in active conflict, indigenous drone production serves as a pathway to industrial development and increased export potential beyond military self-reliance.
New Delhi has jumped on the bandwagon. The Indian government has attempted to encourage the private sector to step up drone production. As it picks up pace, the Indian drone industry seems to be following a hybrid model whereby it seeks to combine the Israeli industry’s mature commercial-feedback loop with the Ukrainian drone industry’s wartime innovation and scalability.
India has long imported drone technology. During the 1999 Kargil conflict, India’s military deployed Israeli-origin IAI Heron and Searcher drones for the first time. While the ambitions for indigenous drone manufacturing remained latent, they were considerably constrained by New Delhi’s operational and tactical requirements. India’s ambitions to become a drone producer truly came to fore following its military confrontation with Pakistan in May 2025. The four-day conflict fundamentally altered the role of drones from intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) roles to strike roles. While the U.S.-brokered ceasefire brought a halt to kinetic hostilities, a security-driven technological arms race has taken off.
This is not to suggest that New Delhi’s transition from being a drone importer to becoming a drone producer began in 2025. Instead, this transition was already underway through a sequence of state-led structural-level policy interventions.
In 2021, the Indian government had imposed import restrictions on drones to create a protected market space for domestic manufacturers. Likewise, the 2021 Production Linked Incentive scheme, launched by the Indian government, catalyzed private investment in UAV manufacturing at component and system level. The Drone Shakti Mission of 2022 articulated an ecosystem-building vision that treated drones as dual-use infrastructure rather than niche defense equipment.
On the demand side, the Defense Acquisition Procedure (DAP) 2020 created structural demand for indigenously produced drones by reserving the “Buy IDDM” (Indigenously Designed, Developed, and Manufactured) procurement category exclusively for Indian vendors with less than 49 percent foreign direct investment, and mandating at least 65 percent local content.
Collectively, these structural interventions have translated into over 600 drone and drone-components manufacturing companies in India, among which over 100 companies particularly specialize in their defense applications.
Following the 2025 confrontation however, Indian demand for drones has escalated. For instance, Zuppa Geo Navigation Technologies reportedly experienced a 10-fold jump in its order pipelines during May 2025 alone. The firm has since announced plans to expand its geographic footprint to Africa and the Middle East region, positioning itself as an exporter of electronic warfare-resistant systems.
At the same time, private firms are also utilizing the emergency procurement mechanism, provided under DAP to accelerate drone production. In June 2025, immediately following the India-Pakistan confrontation, ideaForge Technology Limited secured an emergency order for military-grade mini unmanned aerial vehicles. The order was worth $16 million, and the drones were to be delivered within a year. Subsequently, India’s military placed another emergency order valued at around $11.3 million for Zolt tactical drones and Vertical Takeoff Long-Range (VTOL) SWITCH 2 drones. In addition to this, the Indian government is also preparing to place a military drone order worth over $2 billion with domestic manufacturers including major firms like Adani Group, Tata Advanced Systems, and Larsen & Toubro, and startups including ideaForge and Asteria Aerospace, marking this its largest-ever unmanned systems procurement.
The surge in drone production has also been accompanied by a surge in drone testing. In September 2025, Rajesh Kumar Singh, India’s defense secretary, said that while a select few drone systems had cleared government trials to secure contracts from the armed forces, numerous other drones developed by private companies had been undergoing rigorous testing since Operation Sindoor. He emphasized that post-operation evaluations focused on reliability in contested environments, integration with legacy systems, and resistance to electronic warfare.
India’s drone production seems to be following a hybrid model whereby it seeks to combine Israel’s mature commercial-feedback loop with Ukraine’s wartime innovation and scalability. Israel fields a considerably mature and well-established drone production infrastructure, characterized by deep integration between ecosystems. Israeli defense producers (both state-owned and private producers) such as the Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, Israel Aerospace Industry, and the Elbit Systems function simultaneously as defense contractors, commercial exporters, and live-laboratory users of their own combat systems. For instance, the Harop loitering munition that proved decisive for India during Operation Sindoor is of Israeli origin, and a product of this model.
India appears to be replicating the same playbook of generating a commercial-military feedback loop. During Operation Sindoor, New Delhi deployed drones produced by private companies, such as Skystrikers drones produced by startups. The battlefield itself was treated as a validation environment, which is philosophically an Israeli approach to procurement – i.e. real-world testing as the highest form of qualification. Pakistan’s retaliatory drone offensive provided a dynamic testing environment for Indian air defenses.
Ukraine’s drone industry, on the other hand, is comparatively nascent, having been born out of existential necessity rather than the outcome of a planned industrial policy like India’s. However, it fields greater war-time innovation. Ukrainian drone industry has been exceptionally responsive to battlefield requirements, with military units liaising directly with developers.
The Ukrainian drone industry is also designed for scalability. In 2024 alone, Ukrainian manufacturers produced over 2 million drones. Their defense ministry set an ambitious target of 4.5 million units for 2025. The number of Ukrainian drone companies rose from 41 in 2022 to 132 in 2023 and 183 in 2024. These were supported by both government funding and Western allies. As a result, over 96 percent of the drones currently being used by Ukrainian forces are domestically produced, which is a dramatic shift from the early days of war when Ukrainian forces heavily depended on imported drones. In terms of war-time innovation and scalability, this is the model that New Delhi is apparently seeking to apply.
In the larger picture, New Delhi appears to be pursuing a three-pronged approach. It is seeking to employ drones against its western neighbor Pakistan, reduce its dependence on foreign suppliers, and position itself as a credible alternative drone supplier for the Global South, a market that is largely dominated by China.
At the regional level, this is accelerating the drone arms race, as it necessitates Pakistan to view drone sufficiency as a core security imperative. This becomes all the more evident in light of the surge in Indian government funding and procurement following the May 2025 conflict, indicating that Pakistan is a central driver of India’s expanding drone ecosystem. Therefore, New Delhi’s sustained investment in innovative and scalable drone production also holds the potential to meaningfully alter air warfare between India and Pakistan.
Loitering munitions and drone swarms, in particular, can easily saturate and overwhelm air defense systems through their sheer quantitative strength, thereby complicating interception, both technically and in terms of cost-effectiveness. Employment of drones also lowers the threshold for the use of force, rendering conflict escalation more likely. This is particularly alarming given the fact that India and Pakistan are two nuclear-armed neighbors, and crises and conflicts between the two are becoming incrementally recurrent and episodic.
With regard to New Delhi becoming a supplier and potentially breaking into markets in the Global South, this could prove to be an uphill task. Structurally, global drone supply chains remain heavily dominated by China. Chinese dominance is not merely a function of exports of finished products. It runs deeper, as China also controls critical segments of drone component supply chains, including motors, electronics, and batteries, among others. DJI, China’s largest drone producer, alone is estimated to dominate 70 percent of global commercial drone market. Chinese firms also dominate rare earth processing, battery chemistry, and key electronics inputs. Ironically, the Indian drone production sector, too relies on Chinese-origin components through gray markets. Hence, for New Delhi to break into Chinese-dominated drone supply chains would not only require competitive finished products, but also the ability to match China’s cost structures, manufacturing scale, and years of accumulated industrial learning.
Amid India’s drone revolution, Pakistan needs to prioritize cost-effective, scalable counter-drone capabilities within its air defense architecture. It additionally needs to strengthen its indigenous drone production ecosystem and weigh on cost-effective foreign procurement options. However, unlike New Delhi, which fields a comparatively larger budget and defense-industrial base, Islamabad faces considerable budgetary and financial constraints. Pakistan needs to focus on affordability as much as on innovation.
New Delhi’s accelerating militarization of drone technologies not only risks deepening existing asymmetries, but will also fuel a regional drone arms race, with detrimental implications for stability in the region.