India’s New Commando And Drone Units Are Working, Its Defence Minister Tells MPs

The formations the Indian Army built itself around last year, including light commando battalions and artillery regiments equipped with drones and counter-drone systems, are proving effective in the field, the defence minister told a cross-party panel of members of Parliament on Tuesday. It is the first ministerial assessment of the restructuring since it was announced fifteen months ago

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Rajnath Singh was chairing the defence ministry’s consultative committee, a body drawing members from both houses of Parliament, which met not in the capital but at Jaisalmer, a garrison town in the Thar desert of Rajasthan close to India’s western frontier.

The units he named were unveiled by the army chief, General Upendra Dwivedi, on 26 July 2025. Bhairav are light commando battalions of roughly 250 soldiers each, thirty of them being raised, held clear of routine infantry duties and intended as rapid-response troops along the borders. Shaktibaan are artillery regiments built around unmanned aircraft, counter-drone systems and loitering munitions, part of a decision to place tactical drone operations under the artillery at corps level and below. Singh also named a third formation, Asani, which has not previously been publicly described. All three, he said, were addressing contemporary operational requirements and adapting to a changing battlefield.

He told the committee the defence budget for the current financial year had been raised to a record 7.85 trillion rupees, about 15 per cent above the previous year’s estimate, of which 2.19 trillion rupees is capital outlay earmarked for modernisation and procurement.

On domestic industry, Singh gave a longer baseline than the figures the ministry has been citing this week. Defence production has risen from 464 billion rupees in the financial year ending March 2015 to 1.78 trillion rupees in the year ending March 2026, close to a fourfold increase over eleven years. Exports, under 20 billion rupees in 2014, now stand at about 400 billion. He repeated the targets of 3 trillion rupees of production and 500 billion rupees of exports by 2029.

The meeting’s stated priorities ranged wider than equipment. They included tri-service integration and joint operational planning, artificial intelligence, autonomous and unmanned systems, cyber, space and electronic warfare, and closer work between the armed forces, the state Defence Research and Development Organisation, public-sector firms, private industry and universities to move inventions into service faster. The committee also pressed for measurable milestones, on the argument that modernisation plans have to translate into operational results.

Singh said a military’s strength was not determined by technology and money alone but by the capability of its people, and that all three services had been continuously revising their structures to match how war is now fought. Modernisation, he said, was a continuous process rather than a programme of purchases, and the objective was a force able to handle conventional, sub-conventional and multi-domain threats.

The junior defence minister, Sanjay Seth, the defence secretary, Rajesh Kumar Singh, and the secretaries for defence production, ex-servicemen’s welfare and defence finance attended, along with senior military officers.