News and Politics • India’s Wake-Up Call: Why US Defense Reform Must Match the Speed of Modern War

by John Spencer, by Vincent Viola,

The United States is in urgent need of fundamental defense reform. Not just adjustments. Not just marginal gains. A full-scale overhaul. The wars of today—and the even more brutal ones looming on the horizon—will not be won by the slow, the bloated, or the bureaucratically constrained. They will be won by those who can think faster, build faster, and fight smarter—and above all, by those who master the physics of lethality required on the modern battlefield. Right now, that’s not us.

The goal of modern war is no longer to prepare for indefinite, grinding campaigns. The objective is clear: wars must be won quickly and decisively with superior military capabilities. That demands a defense ecosystem built not just for speed—but for scale. The United States has fallen into the trap of believing that one magic platform, one exquisite system, can win future wars. It can’t. Winning will require modularity, volume, redundancy, and continuous adaptation—built into a system that is ultimately faster, leaner, and more efficient. That means rapidly identifying battlefield requirements, acquisition, research, iterative development and manufacturing, and deployment across an industrial base designed to surge—not stall. India just proved what that looks like.

America’s Acquisition Pipeline Is Too Slow for Modern War
The war in Ukraine laid bare a staggering truth: America’s research, development, and deployment cycle is operating on a timeline the battlefield no longer respects. Ukraine’s defense since 2022 has leaned heavily on western systems like Javelins anti-armor system, High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), and air defense Stinger missiles—but even this modest proxy war pushed U.S. defense production to the brink. The Pentagon had to scramble to restart dormant Stinger lines. Javelin production was capped at peacetime capacity. HIMARS launchers, though effective, were too few, too expensive, and too slow to replenish.

Perhaps most telling was the U.S. military’s inability to produce enough artillery shells to keep pace with battlefield consumption. In a high-intensity war, the need for hundreds of thousands of shells per month has outstripped America’s industrial capacity. Instead of ramping up quickly, the Pentagon found itself reliant on stretched supply chains, outdated manufacturing infrastructure, and timelines measured in years—not weeks.

Since 9/11, many of the most effective frontline battlefield solutions—the real “tip of the spear” technologies—haven’t come through the formal acquisition pipeline at all. They’ve come from outside it. Programs like the Rapid Equipping Force, Joint Urgent Operational Needs Statements (JUONS), and commander discretionary funds were built as temporary workarounds to bypass a system too slow and too rigid to meet battlefield urgency. These stopgap authorities allowed private firms and battlefield commanders to field lifesaving tools—from counter-IED gear to surveillance drones—without waiting for years for approval. But these were improvisations, not reforms. The result is a two-track system: an official pipeline too bureaucratic to fight a modern war, and an unofficial one too fragile to scale. Instead of codifying the agility created in wartime, the US let it dissolve in peacetime. The US has been surviving on battlefield duct tape—when what we need is a complete redesign.

These are not exceptions—they are symptoms. The US acquisition model, built around Cold War cycles and peacetime audits, is too brittle to support the demands of wartime replenishment, rapid adaptation, or scalable production under fire.

Cost Structures Are Unsustainable
The US is not just too slow. It is also too expensive. American weapons are among the most advanced in the world—but that edge is being priced out of viability. A single Tomahawk missile costs up to $2 million. A single HIMARS launcher costs over $5 million. Meanwhile, adversaries and allies alike are building systems with similar or superior battlefield impact for a fraction of the cost. Iran’s loitering munitions, for instance, cost a fraction of their US counterparts.

Drones are the new artillery shells of the modern battlefield. Armies don’t need dozens—they need thousands. Cheap, expendable, and ubiquitous, drones must come in variety and volume to swarm, surveil, strike, and survive. But the US defense industry has not embraced this truth. Instead, it continues to push costly, exquisite platforms built for yesterday’s wars.

Even US President Donald Trump recently criticized America’s drone cost structures, pointing to the disparity between Iranian drones that cost just $40,000 and a US defense contractor’s $41 million quote. “You look at these drones they’re sending in,” Trump said. “They’re good, they’re fast, and they’re deadly.” But we don’t need to copy Tehran. Better models already exist in allies like Israel and India.

America’s Defense Industrial Base Is Captured and Uncompetitive
The core of the problem is industrial. America’s defense manufacturing process is dominated by a small cartel of primes that, while capable, have little incentive to drive innovation, reduce cost, or adapt quickly. There is no real market competition. This is not competition—it’s cartelized domination. And the consequences are on display.

US defense giants produce exquisite systems, but often at boutique pace and boutique prices. There is no agile, scalable, layered, fast-response production network. No real surge capacity. The primes effectively control the process from design to deployment, and they are not optimized for the speed or scale of modern war.

Contrast that with what Ukraine has done.

Since 2014, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have been experimenting with a hybrid defense model—a national military seasoned with western ideas, supported by a scrappy, innovation-driven defense industry. The result? In less than a decade, Ukraine has transformed into a global pioneer in drone warfare and real-time target acquisition—out-innovating larger militaries by adapting commercial technologies into lethal, battlefield-ready systems. Their adaptation of commercial drones into loitering munitions and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms came not from billion-dollar defense firms, but from battlefield ingenuity and necessity. It emerged from necessity, competition, and survival in war.

An example: by 2023, Ukraine had developed and deployed autonomous unmanned systems, capable of AI-assisted target recognition and strike coordination—leveraging edge computing to execute missions without constant human input. These drones can identify enemy vehicles, transmit coordinates in real-time, and engage targets under human-supervised autonomy—blurring the lines between ISR and direct action. This isn’t theoretical: Ukrainian operators are already integrating AI-driven systems into daily battlefield use, often outpacing the doctrinal and technical experimentation of far larger Western militaries.

Critics may argue that Ukraine’s transformation was driven by wartime necessity—that the U.S., not facing an immediate existential conflict, lacks the same urgency to overhaul its defense model. That’s precisely the problem. Waiting for catastrophe to force adaptation is not a strategy; it’s a gamble. The U.S. has the unparalleled advantage of learning from others’ wartime experience without suffering the same losses. Ukraine’s improvisations were born of desperation—but their effectiveness has now been validated. For the United States, mimicking that innovation should not require a crisis. The smarter path is proactive reform, not reactive scramble. In war, time is the one resource you can’t buy back.

India’s Operation Sindoor: A Blueprint for What Comes Next
India, too, offers a compelling model. In 2014, after its own moment of strategic introspection, New Delhi launched the “Make in India” initiative—reforming its defense sector around domestic production, self-reliance, and strategic speed. A decade later, that investment paid off in Operation Sindoor.

Operation Sindoor was more than a swift and precise military response to another cross-border terrorist attack. It marked a strategic inflection point. In just four days, India used domestically developed systems to strike hardened targets across the border with precision, speed, and overwhelming effect. No US systems. No foreign supply lines. Just BrahMos missiles, Akashteer air defense units, and loitering munitions designed or assembled at home.

India’s overwhelming success demonstrated something more enduring than airpower. It validated a national defense doctrine built around efficient domestic industrial strength. And most significantly, it delivered a clear message to its strategic rival. Pakistan—a Chinese proxy by armament, alignment, doctrine—was completely outmatched. Its Chinese-made air defense systems could not stop, detect, or deter India’s precision strikes. In Sindoor, India didn’t just win. It demonstrated overwhelming military superiority against a Chinese-backed adversary.

The BrahMos missile—a supersonic cruise missile co-developed with Russia but now largely manufactured in India—costs approximately $4.85 million per unit. While more expensive than the older U.S. Tomahawk ($1 to $2.5 million, depending on the variant), BrahMos delivers unmatched speed and kinetic impact at nearly Mach 3—a distinct performance advantage. Meanwhile, India’s Akashteer system—an AI-integrated air defense control and reporting network—is being fielded at a fraction of the cost of U.S. systems like NASAMS or Patriot. With a contract value of just $240 million for a full suite of integrated capabilities, Akashteer exemplifies India’s ability to deploy high-performance, scalable systems without the financial burdens typical of Western platforms. Together, these investments reflect a strategic model built on capability, speed, and cost-efficiency—one the United States would do well to study.

India’s drone usage during Sindoor reinforced the point. The SkyStriker—an Israeli-developed loitering munition assembled domestically—and the Harop, a long-range autonomous loitering munition, proved critical to India’s ability to identify and strike key terrorist targets with precision.

This wasn’t theory. It was execution. These systems were not boutique prototypes—they were deployed, tested, and validated in a real war.

Meanwhile, Pakistani defenses—built largely around older Chinese systems like the LY-80, HQ-9/P, and FM-90—were powerless to detect, deter, or respond to the strikes. In the skies over Pakistan, India didn’t just dominate. It redefined regional deterrence.

India has already moved from 30% to 65% domestic sourcing in defense capital procurement, with a goal of 90% by the decade’s end. It increased capital outlays for domestic production from $6 billion in 2019-2020 to nearly $20 billion in 2023-24. It allowed up to 74% FDI in defense, bringing in foreign partners while building indigenous capacity. India didn’t just talk about reform. It executed it. And it won.

India has become a master of the physics of lethality. The United States can learn from their success and model some of their changes for its own needs.

The Strategic Choice Before America
India’s success—and Ukraine’s innovation—should be a wake-up call. They are building the warfighting models of the future. The US is still operating with Cold War machinery and Gulf War assumptions.

If the United States wants to remain a global military power—let alone deter China—it must reform:

Rebuild the acquisition process around speed, iteration, and field feedback, not static 10-year programs.
Break up defense industrial monopolies or at least introduce real competition and alternative suppliers.
Shift focus from perfection to effectiveness from gold-plated systems to scalable, rugged, modular platforms.
Treat allies like India and Israel as co-equal production partners not just buyers or tech recipients.
The next war won’t give the US five years to prepare. It may not give the US five months. The lesson of Operation Sindoor is not just that India is rising—it’s that the United States can fall behind.

We cannot deter a war we are not prepared to fight. And the US cannot win a war it can’t afford, can’t scale, and can’t keep up with. The time for US defense reform is not coming. It’s already late.

The power of the United States in World War II didn’t just come from the bravery and quality of its soldiers or its decentralized battlefield leadership—though those were essential. It also came from something we’ve since allowed to atrophy: an industrial base that was flexible, innovative, and shockingly fast. America’s military industrial complex could adapt, surge, and produce at a scale no enemy could match. The US has lost that edge.

To meet the speed of modern war, reform cannot be confined to factories and procurement cycles. It must extend to how we learn. The United States should establish permanent, deployable learning teams—designed not to sift lessons from media reports, but to gather them directly from the ground. These teams must operate forward, embedded where history is unfolding: in urban combat zones, in drone labs, in dispersed logistics hubs. From Ukraine to India, battlefield truths are being written in real time. The US must capture them not passively, but through deliberate collection, analysis, and integration into our own systems—with one goal in mind: making the US defense ecosystem the most efficient, adaptable, and dominant in the world.

To deter war with China—the world’s largest military by active personnel, with approximately two million soldiers, and a population over four times the size of the US—it won’t be raw numbers that determine the outcome. It will be a holistic defense capability: a system that can innovate, produce, scale, and fight at speed. That is the true challenge. That is the reform we need. To lead again, America must not only revive its defense industrial power—it must master the physics of lethality at scale, speed, and sustainability. And the clock is ticking.

Tags: defense industrial base, Defense Reform, India-Pakistan Conflict, Russia-Ukraine War

Statistics: Posted by Spice Runner — 2025-05-24 03:59pm