Inside India's post-Sindoor defence overhaul: Bigger budgets, new formations and record exports

Every major military power has, at some point, had to find out in real time whether decades of doctrine and equipment actually hold up in combat. The United States tested precision strike and networked battlefield systems in Iraq and Afghanistan.

China has used exercises around Taiwan and in the South China Sea to stress-test its navy, air force and missile systems. For India, the last such test before 2025 was Kargil in 1999. Operation Sindoor, the four-day military confrontation with Pakistan in May 2025, became the next one.

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More than a year on, government data and official statements sketch out what has changed since. Defence experts who spoke to ET Online offered their own reading of what worked, what didn't, and what still needs fixing.

The government's account

India's account of the operation has stayed consistent since day one. On May 7, 2025, the government said the Armed Forces had struck terrorist infrastructure at nine sites in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The action was focused, measured and non-escalatory, it said, with no Pakistani military facility targeted.

That framing mattered as Islamabad pushed a different version of events. Pakistan claimed India's S-400 and BrahMos installations had been destroyed. Wing Commander Vyomika Singh appeared at a special briefing on May 10 to confirm both remained intact, laying out instead the damage India's strikes had done to Pakistani airbases at Skardu, Sargodha, Jacobabad and Bholari.

Lt Gen Rajiv Ghai, India's Director General of Military Operations, followed up two days later with the operational picture. He briefed reporters on how the country's mix of legacy and modern air defence, counter-drone systems and electronic warfare assets had performed.

An ORF Special Report from June 2025, edited by Harsh V Pant, Vice President at the Observer Research Foundation, and Sameer Patil, Director of its Centre for Security, Strategy and Technology, calls Sindoor India's deepest military campaign since 1971, noting that the strikes hit targets untouched for decades, the Lashkar-e-Taiba headquarters in Muridke, Jaish-e-Mohammad's base in Bahawalpur, Hizbul Mujahideen's in Muzaffarabad.

India has kept up pressure since through non-military means too, chiefly the Indus Waters Treaty suspension and a push to get Pakistan back on the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey list.

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A separate Electronic Journal of Social and Strategic Studies (EJSSS) paper notes India sent all-party delegations of 59 MPs to 32 countries and the EU headquarters in the weeks after, to make its case directly.

Pakistan's retaliation had been expected from across the border, since India's own strikes had stayed clear of the Line of Control.

The tech push

If the briefings explained what had happened, the months after were about building for what comes next. The clearest signal came in August 2025, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi used his Independence Day address to announce Mission Sudarshan Chakra, a home-built system he said would not just stop incoming attacks but "hit back at the enemy many times more," expanding to cover strategic and civilian sites nationwide by 2035.

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh gave the mission its first concrete milestone weeks later, announcing that the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) had test-fired an indigenous air defence weapon system capable of hitting three targets at once.

Lt Gen Deependra Singh Hooda (Retd.) told ET Online that Sudarshan Chakra is, in his view, the single most significant move India has made since the operation.

He pointed to newer Army formations built around drones and rapid-strike capability: Rudra Brigades, Bhairav commando units, Shaurya drone squadrons. He also flagged imports already in motion, including more Rafale jets, P-8I aircraft, and five additional S-400 regiments.

Dinakar Peri, fellow at the Security Studies Programme, Carnegie India, pointed to a longer list still. He named Integrated Battle Groups, Bhairav battalions and Divyastra drone batteries, a longer-range BrahMos with a hypersonic variant in development, and major upgrades to the Pinaka rocket system.

A new long-range air defence missile under Project Kusha recently had its first successful test, he said, and a Joint Operations Centre is being set up to bring the pieces together.

A less-noticed part of this build-out is cyber. A peer-reviewed paper in the EJSSS, by Sunaina S, Dr T.K. Singh and Dr Kishor Jose of the Central University of Gujarat, argues that stitching the indigenous Akashteer system together with the S-400, Barak-8, Pechora and Akash platforms pushed India's air defence doctrine from reactive toward proactive.

The paper also cites a Maharashtra Cyber Department assessment that India faced roughly 1.5 million cyberattacks during the operation, alongside a coordinated Pakistani misinformation push built on AI-generated content and repurposed old footage.

New units, old questions

The Union Budget reflects the same shift. This year's allocation of Rs 7.85 lakh crore marks a 15.19 per cent jump, which the government explicitly linked to costs from the emergency procurement it ordered right after the operation. Capital expenditure alone rose to Rs 2.19 lakh crore, up from Rs 1.80 lakh crore the year before.

Hooda and Lt Gen Kamal Jit Singh (Retd.), former GOC-in-C of Western Command, both cautioned that emergency procurement cannot substitute for long-term capability planning, and that India's military still lacks the assured multi-year budgets that would let it plan that way.

C Uday Bhaskar, a retired Commodore and Director of the Society for Policy Studies, offered a different reading of the same Budget. He pointed to a longer trend running the other way: defence spending as a share of GDP has declined from 2.5 per cent in 2014 to 1.9 per cent in 2025, numbers he said reveal the structural reasons emergency procurement keeps recurring.

Rajnath Singh has repeatedly pointed to the Ordnance Factory Board's 2021 conversion into seven defence public sector undertakings as proof the model works, saying the factories have "transformed from loss-making entities into profit-making units."

Major General Sanjeev Khanna (Retd.) told ET Online that six of the seven turned profitable within their first six months, with three earning Miniratna Category-I status. He also pointed to the Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA) fighter prototype Request for Proposal (RFP) issued in May 2026 to three private-sector-led consortia, calling it a significant widening of competition in an area the public sector has long dominated.

The export story

The defence export story predates Sindoor, but the operation appears to have sharpened it. ET Online reported in June that India's defence exports had already hit an all-time high of Rs 38,424 crore in FY26, a 56-fold rise from a decade earlier, driven by deals like the BrahMos sale to Vietnam and talks underway with Indonesia and the UAE. Khanna's own numbers put the pace at roughly 32 per cent a year since FY 2021-22, which, if it moderates but holds, could see India become a net defence exporter sometime between 2033 and 2040.

This year's official accounting adds a detail: the gain wasn't concentrated in one sector. Private industry brought in Rs 17,353 crore and public sector undertakings Rs 21,071 crore, both up sharply from the year before. Overall defence production touched Rs 1.78 lakh crore, with the private sector's share climbing to 24 per cent from 22 per cent.

The China question

Officially, this is the thinnest part of the record. None of the government's releases on the operation make specific claims about Chinese intelligence or data-link support to Pakistan. Published research goes further: the ORF report's editors write that the operation "demonstrated the enduring Chinese role in enabling Pakistani maleficence," without spelling out how.

Experts read the implications differently. Khanna said India must prepare for a Pakistan front "enabled by Chinese intelligence, surveillance, communications, electronic warfare, cyber capabilities and military hardware." Lt Gen Kamal Jit Singh called it a "fused front," with China likely to treat Pakistan as a testbed for its own frontier technologies. Hooda's take was more measured: what's needed is a clear-eyed assessment that neither over- nor under-estimates what Chinese-origin systems can do.

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Rahul Rawat, Research Assistant at ORF's Strategic Studies Programme, described the China-Pakistan relationship in similar terms: China's growing military cooperation with Pakistan, he said, is aimed at giving Islamabad "eyes to observe and teeth to bite" against India. At the same time, he noted that Pakistan's continued reliance on non-state actors, despite that backing, suggests India's conventional deterrence "has done fairly well." His advice going forward was to keep strengthening India's Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) architecture, firepower and mobility.

More confident, not comfortable

Experts broadly agreed that the year since Sindoor has seen real institutional change. Khanna said the operation "should leave India more confident, but not comfortable." A four-day conflict, he said, cannot test the harder things: sustainment, attrition replacement, industrial surge capacity. The real test, he added, was never what happened right after Sindoor, but whether the urgency lasts.

Hooda agreed there is real confidence now, but said it comes with an acknowledgment that doctrinal and organisational reform still has to happen, and how fast that happens will decide whether India ends up with incremental fixes or genuine structural change.