DAC clears ₹52K cr proposals for the armed forces with focus on air defence

What Is the DAC and What Does "AoN" Actually Mean?

The Defence Acquisition Council is chaired by the Defence Minister and includes the three Service Chiefs, the Chief of Defence Staff, and senior bureaucratic and scientific heads. It sits at the apex of India's defence procurement pipeline and takes the in-principle decisions that authorise the formal acquisition process to begin. "Acceptance of Necessity" is the first and arguably most important gate in that process. An AoN essentially says: yes, this capability gap is real, yes, the armed forces genuinely need this system, and yes, the government agrees to initiate the process of acquiring it. Without an AoN, no tender can be floated, no Request for Proposals issued, no vendor selected. The AoN is emphatically not a purchase order. Actual contracts, delivery schedules, and money changing hands come much later, typically years later, after vendors are evaluated, trials conducted, price negotiations completed, and the Defence Acquisition Council gives its final go-ahead at the contract stage. The ₹52,000 crore figure is an estimated value of these systems, not money already committed. But the AoN matters enormously for two reasons. First, it commits the government's intent: these acquisitions are now in the official pipeline and have ministerial sanction. Second, it starts the clock on a procurement process that, in India's defence sector, can take anywhere from three to ten years to conclude.

Why Now? The Shadow of Operation Sindoor

To understand why this particular package looks the way it does, so heavily weighted toward air defence, counter-drone systems, and electronic warfare, you need to understand what happened in May 2025. Operation Sindoor, launched in May 2025, saw India and Pakistan fight their first non-contact war, with large-scale tri-service deployment of drones and missiles for precision strikes deep inside Pakistan rather than large formations being massed on the borders and troops firing directly at each other. The Indian Air Force struck nine high-value targets in Pakistan and Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir in a window of roughly 25 minutes. Pakistan responded with waves of aerial counterattacks. What followed was a textbook demonstration of layered defence: Rafales, Sukhoi-30MKIs and Mirages patrolled the skies, while the IAF's S-400 batteries and MRSAM systems provided long- and mid-range cover. Pakistan's forces employed multiple waves of drones along the western border, from Leh to Sir Creek, over a period of nearly four days, many of them relatively simple platforms designed largely to exhaust Indian air defence systems by drawing fire away from more sophisticated ones. The conflict validated India's layered air defence concept and the performance of indigenous systems like Akash. But it also exposed specific gaps: insufficient counter-drone coverage at the formation level, the need for smarter electronic warfare rather than purely kinetic interception, the demand for persistent surveillance that doesn't rely on satellites with fixed orbital paths, and the necessity of having enough interceptor stockpile to absorb a sustained multi-day drone barrage without running short. India also concluded it needs more space-based and near-space collection assets with higher revisit rates for persistent detection. The July 2026 DAC package reads, almost line by line, as a direct response to those lessons.

The Army Package: A Layered Response to a New Battlefield

Akash Tarang: The Soft-Kill Anti-Drone Shield

The most conceptually interesting approval in the Army list is the Akash Tarang, an indigenous anti-drone electronic warfare system developed by DRDO with production support from Bharat Electronics Limited and private defence MSMEs. Despite sharing a name with the Akash surface-to-air missile family, the Akash Tarang is a distinct electronic warfare platform designed to detect, track, and neutralise hostile unmanned aerial vehicles through signal disruption and jamming rather than kinetic intercept. The distinction matters enormously. A kinetic counter-drone system, one that physically destroys incoming drones, is expensive on a per-shot basis and can be overwhelmed by swarm attacks. A soft-kill system like Akash Tarang works differently. It is an electronic warfare platform designed to neutralise drones by jamming their communication frequencies. By severing the link between the drone and its operator, it renders the drone ineffective without physically destroying it. Akash Tarang employs a three-tier detection approach: radio frequency sniffers identify drone communication signals, GPS/GNSS jamming disrupts navigation, and its anti-swarm capability enables simultaneous tracking and neutralisation of multiple threats. Its modular architecture allows deployment in vehicle-mounted, fixed-site, and man-portable configurations, enabling rapid mobility and adaptability across diverse operational environments. Crucially, this ensures full intellectual property ownership under the Make in India and Aatmanirbhar Bharat frameworks, reducing dependence on imported technologies. After years of fielding foreign counter-drone systems, India now has an indigenous electronic warfare solution it fully controls.

MPATGM: The Infantryman's Anti-Tank Weapon

The Man Portable Anti-Tank Guided Missile system is a DRDO-developed indigenous replacement for anti-tank capabilities currently dependent on older foreign platforms. The approval includes 100 launchers, 2,300 missiles and five simulators, enhancing the infantry's capacity to neutralise adversary armour. The context here is primarily the northern frontier. India's standoff with China along the Line of Actual Control has persisted in various forms since 2020, and China's People's Liberation Army has invested heavily in mechanised forces for high-altitude operations. An infantryman-portable anti-tank missile that can engage enemy tanks and armoured vehicles in rugged mountain terrain, where crew-served heavy weapons are hard to position, fills a genuine operational gap. The man-portable requirement is key: these missiles are carried and fired by individual soldiers or small teams, making them viable in the kind of terrain that makes wheeled or tracked platforms impractical. Their effectiveness in urban and high-altitude settings has been demonstrated repeatedly in conflicts from Ukraine to the Middle East.

MRSAM: The Middle Layer of Air Defence

The Medium Range Surface-to-Air Missile system is the backbone of India's mid-tier air defence architecture. India already operates the Indo-Israeli jointly developed MRSAM system, produced through the DRDO and Israel Aerospace Industries partnership, across all three services, and this AoN reflects the decision to procure additional batteries to expand coverage. The MRSAM system provides medium-range air defence against a variety of stand-off aerial threats. That phrase "stand-off aerial threats" covers a broad category: not just aircraft and helicopters, but also cruise missiles, anti-radiation missiles, and precision-guided glide bombs that modern adversaries launch from outside the reach of shorter-range defences. The MRSAM provides the critical middle layer between the long-range S-400 batteries (which handle high-altitude, long-range threats) and the shorter-range systems below it.

V-SHORADS: Closing the Low-Altitude Gap

Very Short Range Air Defence Systems are the innermost layer of India's air defence network, the last line of protection for specific vital areas and installations. India currently employs Igla missiles, L-70 guns and ZU-23 mm guns in this role, while DRDO is developing an indigenous V-SHORADS to replace and augment these legacy systems. V-SHORADS with multispectral sensing will enhance the countermeasure resilience and effectiveness of the Army, and are man-portable systems meant for neutralising low-altitude aerial threats at short ranges. The "multispectral sensing" detail matters. Modern drones and low-flying missiles can be designed to defeat single-mode detection, they might be hard to spot on radar, or hard to track optically, but rarely both simultaneously. Multispectral sensing combines radar, infrared, and electro-optical channels so that a target invisible to one mode is still caught by another. This significantly raises the system's reliability against sophisticated small targets.

Active Protection Systems for Tanks: Fighting Back Against Guided Munitions

Active Protection Systems represent one of the most significant doctrinal shifts in armoured vehicle design in decades. Traditionally, tanks were protected by passive armour, layers of steel, composite materials, and reactive explosive tiles that absorbed or deflected incoming rounds. APS adds a new dimension: the tank detects an incoming anti-tank guided missile or rocket-propelled grenade and actively intercepts it before it hits. The active protection system will be capable of improving the defence mechanism of tanks and enhancing their survivability. Given the proliferation of precision anti-tank guided missiles, systems like Javelin, Kornet, and their various derivatives, which can be fired by dismounted infantry and precisely guided onto a tank's weakest points, APS is increasingly seen as essential for any armoured vehicle operating on a modern battlefield. The conflict in Ukraine, where tanks without APS were devastatingly vulnerable to guided missiles fired by individual soldiers, reinforced this lesson globally.

Jet-Based Kamikaze Drones: Precision Strike at Scale

Kamikaze drones, also called loitering munitions, are single-use unmanned systems that fly to a target area, loiter waiting for the right target, and then dive into it, combining the persistence of a reconnaissance drone with the lethality of a precision munition. The jet-based kamikaze drones provide better electronic warfare capability with greater lethality and survivability while also being cost-effective. The "jet-based" specification is notable. Most current loitering munitions, including the Israeli Harop system India already operates, are propeller-driven. Jet propulsion means higher speed, making the drone harder to intercept and reducing the warning time for the target. It also means longer range in some configurations. India's experience in Operation Sindoor with loitering munitions, and the global lessons from Azerbaijan's use of Harop drones in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, have comprehensively demonstrated that kamikaze drones can neutralise high-value targets, radar systems, artillery pieces, armoured vehicles, command posts, at a fraction of the cost of conventional missiles.

The Navy Package: Mines, Drones, and Testing Infrastructure

Multi-Influence Ground Mines: Controlling the Seas Without Firing a Shot

Multi-Influence Ground Mines are sophisticated naval mines that rest on the seabed and are triggered by a combination of inputs, the magnetic signature, acoustic profile, and pressure wave generated by a passing vessel. Requiring all three to be present before detonating makes them much harder to sweep than older single-influence mines. The Multi Influence Ground Mines will help deny freedom of manoeuvre to adversary naval vessels. This is fundamentally about sea denial — the ability to make certain maritime zones too dangerous for an adversary to operate in. In the context of India's maritime security, which encompasses both the western Indian Ocean and the increasingly contested Bay of Bengal, the ability to rapidly mine choke points or approaches to key ports and naval bases is a significant operational capability.

Naval Shipborne Unmanned Aerial Systems: Eyes Above Every Ship

Naval Shipborne Unmanned Aerial Systems will provide ships with organic surveillance capability. The logic here is straightforward: a surface vessel's own sensor horizon is limited by the curvature of the Earth. A drone launched from the ship's deck extends that horizon dramatically, providing over-the-horizon reconnaissance, targeting data for long-range missiles, and early warning of threats approaching from beyond visual range. As naval warfare increasingly involves anti-ship missiles with ranges of hundreds of kilometres, the ability to detect, identify, and track a threat before it reaches firing range becomes critical. Ship-launched drones provide that forward sensing capability without requiring a dedicated aircraft carrier or air support.

Land-Based Testing Facility: Reducing Dependence on Foreign Infrastructure

The approval for a Land-Based Testing Facility for electric propulsion systems is more infrastructure-focused but strategically significant. The LBTF replicates a ship's onboard power, propulsion, or combat systems, and will support the development and testing of electric propulsion systems for future naval platforms, reducing dependence on foreign testing infrastructure while supporting indigenous warship programmes. India's warship construction programme is ambitious, it currently has multiple frigates, destroyers, and submarines under construction. Testing the propulsion, power generation, and combat management systems of these vessels requires either testing at sea (expensive and limited) or a shore-based facility that can replicate the onboard environment. Having such a facility domestically means India can test, iterate, and troubleshoot these systems without needing to send engineers abroad.

The Air Force Package: Eyes in the Stratosphere

Fixed-Wing High Altitude Pseudo Satellite: Bridging the Gap Between Drones and Space

The most conceptually ambitious approval in the entire ₹52,000 crore package is the FW-HAPS, the Fixed-Wing High Altitude Pseudo Satellite, for the Indian Air Force. This is also the one that will take the longest to materialise, but its strategic implications are significant. A HAPS is essentially a high-endurance unmanned surveillance aircraft designed to operate in the stratosphere, typically at altitudes above 65,000 feet, allowing it to remain over a designated area for weeks or even months. Unlike conventional fuel-powered drones, a fixed-wing HAPS uses solar panels to generate electricity during the day and rechargeable batteries to sustain flight at night. The full-scale platform is expected to begin flight testing in 2027, with operational capability targeted around 2030. Designed to operate at altitudes of up to 23,000 metres for at least 90 days, the aircraft will have a maximum takeoff weight of about 450 kilograms and a wingspan of 24 to 25 metres, carrying a 35-kilogram payload for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, SIGINT, communications relay, and border and maritime surveillance while remaining above commercial air traffic, most weather systems, and the engagement envelope of many air defence systems. Unlike satellites confined to fixed orbital paths, HAPS can be deployed flexibly and repositioned as needed. Operating at around 20 km, they fly close enough to deliver high-resolution imagery and real-time intelligence. Their endurance, weeks or even months, allows continuous coverage over an area without the revisit delays of satellites. They can also be recovered, upgraded, and redeployed, offering modularity satellites cannot. The operational relevance is direct. India concluded after Operation Sindoor that it needed more collection assets with higher revisit rates for persistent detection, satellites pass overhead on fixed schedules that adversaries can predict and work around. A HAPS that loiters over a border region for 90 days, repositionable on demand, solves that problem in a way that no satellite can.

What Ties This All Together

Step back from the individual systems and a coherent strategic logic emerges. Every item in this ₹52,000 crore package addresses either a lesson from Operation Sindoor or a structural gap that modern warfare has exposed globally. The overwhelming emphasis on layered air defence, MRSAM for the middle layer, V-SHORADS for the inner layer, Akash Tarang for soft-kill drone suppression, reflects the reality that aerial threats now come in far more forms than they did even a decade ago. Aircraft remain a concern, but rockets, cruise missiles, guided glide bombs, kamikaze drones, and cheap commercial-grade surveillance UAVs have multiplied the threat spectrum enormously. The approval of India's own jet-propelled kamikaze drones simultaneously addresses the offensive dimension: if adversaries can use loitering munitions to pick off high-value targets, India must be able to do the same. The Active Protection Systems for tanks acknowledge a shift in the land battle: in an era when a single infantryman can carry a missile capable of precisely striking a tank's weakest point from two kilometres away, passive armour alone is no longer sufficient. And the FW-HAPS approval addresses the intelligence and surveillance gap that persistent high-altitude platforms can uniquely fill. The latest approvals highlight the government's push to modernise the armed forces through indigenous capability development and reflect the armed forces' emphasis on counter-drone, electronic warfare, and layered air defence capabilities following last year's conflict with Pakistan, which saw increasing use of drones. India's defence production reached ₹1.78 trillion in FY2025-26, a significant milestone. The DAC's rhythm of large approvals, sustained across multiple sittings per year, is the procurement engine that keeps that production figure growing. The ₹52,000 crore cleared on July 3 is not an isolated decision. It is one instalment in a multi-year modernisation effort that is, slowly and deliberately, reshaping what the Indian military can do.