The public sees the visible end of air power: a fighter lifting off in afterburner, a transport aircraft descending with relief supplies, a helicopter hovering over difficult terrain, or a missile rising from its launcher. These images compress speed, technology and national purpose into a single moment. Yet the moment can be deceptive. It appears singular, but the mission carries the work of hundreds.
Behind every launch stands a chain of intelligence, planning, engineering, armament, fuel, communications, air-traffic control, radar control, meteorology, logistics, security and administration. Runways must be serviceable. Sensors must see and networks must communicate. Weapons have to be stored, prepared and matched to the mission. Aircrew must be current, technicians certified, spares available and decisions taken in time. After landing, the aircraft must be inspected, repaired, refuelled, rearmed and returned to the line. In war, this cycle must continue despite fatigue, uncertainty, enemy action and loss.
This is why an inventory of aircraft, however impressive, is not an air force. An aircraft is a platform; air power is the ability of an institution to employ many platforms as a coherent force. Many countries operate military aircraft. Far fewer possess the institutional depth to integrate and sustain the complete range of air operations – combat, air defence, air mobility, reconnaissance, command and control, search and rescue, and humanitarian assistance across a large territory and for as long as the nation requires.
The Indian Air Force’s distinctive strength lies in this largely invisible capacity. Built over nine decades, it is an ecosystem of people, doctrine, command arrangements, training, maintenance, logistics and administration. Its operational history matters not simply as a record of victories or valour, but because it shows an institution learning, adapting and repeatedly converting national resources into usable aerospace power.
From Aircraft to Air Power
Air power is unforgiving. A modern combat aircraft can cross hundreds of kilometres in minutes, but its speed does not shorten the years needed to train a pilot, build a technical workforce or develop a reliable command-and-control system. A precision weapon may strike within metres, but only if intelligence identifies the right target, planners select the right means, technicians prepare the weapon correctly, communications remain secure and commanders understand the political purpose. Technology magnifies institutional quality; it does not replace it.
The useful measure of an air force is therefore not how many aircraft it can display, but how much effective air power it can generate. ‘Sortie generation’ sounds like a technical phrase, yet it is where strategy meets institutional capacity. It means recovering, inspecting, repairing, refuelling, rearming and relaunching aircraft at the pace required by operations. The principle applies equally to transports, helicopters, unmanned systems and surface-based weapons.
This broader view is especially important in India. The IAF must operate across deserts, high mountains, maritime approaches, densely populated plains and remote islands. It prepares for intense conflict while remaining available every day for evacuation, disaster relief, strategic lift and support to civil authority. It must absorb aircraft and systems sourced from different countries and generations, connect them into a common operational design, and sustain them under demanding climatic and geographic conditions.
The Institutional Engine
The IAF’s familiar verticals of Operations, Maintenance and Administration provide a useful way to understand this engine.
Operations turn national direction into executable missions. It brings together intelligence, target development, air defence, offensive planning, airspace management, communications, meteorology and joint coordination. It decides what effect is needed, where and when, and matches that requirement to available forces. The most sophisticated aircraft is of little value if information arrives late, targets are poorly chosen or missions compete for the same airspace without coordination.
Maintenance converts holdings into available combat power. Aircraft serviceability is not created by a last-minute repair on the flight line. It rests on preventive maintenance, testing, overhaul, calibration, supply chains, technical publications, quality assurance and a culture that treats airworthiness as sacred. The same depth is required for radars, communications equipment, missile systems, vehicles, power supplies and specialist ground equipment. The maintainer’s achievement is often anonymous precisely because success looks uneventful: the system works when called upon.
Administration supplies the human and physical conditions in which operations and maintenance can endure. Personnel management, medical support, education, security, finance, accommodation, transport, legal systems and welfare may appear distant from the target. They are not. A force dispersed across many bases cannot sustain high-tempo operations unless people are fed, rested, protected, moved, treated and reinforced. Families must also be supported when personnel deploy at short notice. Administration is not the background to operational readiness; it is one of its foundations.
These verticals are not separate silos. They intersect on every mission. A fighter scramble, a missile engagement or a relief sortie is the product of decisions and actions distributed across the organisation. The true capability resides in the quality of those connections.
The Human System
Air forces are often described through machines because aircraft are visible and easy to count. Their decisive quality, however, is trained human judgment. Aircrew, engineers, controllers, radar operators, weapon technicians, logisticians, medical teams, administrators and security personnel must perform specialised tasks while understanding how their work contributes to the mission.
That combination of specialisation and common purpose takes decades to build. Training cannot end after initial qualification. Aircrew require realistic exercises, technicians need recurrent certification, and controllers and commanders must practise emergencies and multi-force situations. In combat, plans will meet imperfect intelligence, equipment faults, weather, surprise and enemy counter-action. A mature force depends upon initiative guided by command intent.
This human dimension also explains why institutional memory matters. Lessons must travel beyond the individuals who experienced them. They have to become doctrine, curricula, tactics, checklists, equipment priorities and organisational change. Otherwise, every generation is condemned to rediscover the same truth at operational cost.
Learning Through War
The first Kashmir operations of 1947–48 established a theme that would recur throughout IAF history: air mobility could alter events on the ground at strategic speed. The airlift of troops into Srinagar helped secure the airfield and enabled the defence of the Valley. Dakotas subsequently supplied forces operating across terrain where roads were few, vulnerable or absent. The aircraft were modest by today’s standards; the organisational lesson was not. Air transport was not merely a supporting convenience. Properly timed, it could preserve political and military options for the nation.
The 1965 war exposed both courage and institutional shortcomings. On 4 September, Flying Officer V S ‘Pat’ Pathania of No 23 Squadron, flying the small and agile Gnat, shot down an F-86 Sabre near Akhnur, the IAF’s first confirmed air-to-air victory after Independence. His unit flew intensively from Pathankot despite technical limitations, including unreliable radios and gun stoppages. Pathania’s success is rightly remembered as individual skill and resolve (Gupta 2025). Yet the larger value of 1965 lies in what the IAF did with the experience.
The war revealed the costs of inadequate warning, aircraft vulnerability on the ground, uneven command arrangements and dispersed effort. The response was structural. New bases and permanent runways improved reach and survivability. Radar coverage and surface-to-air defences expanded; hardened aircraft shelters were added; training was consolidated and modernised. Large numbers of MiG-21s, together with Su-7s and indigenous HF-24s, entered service. Dissimilar air combat training, low-level interception and radar-controlled tactics received greater attention. Most importantly, assumptions of a long mobilisation period gave way to preparation for a short-notice, intense conflict.
India’s post-1962 Air Defence Ground Environment System (ADGES) shows how such capability is built. An integrated air-defence system is a decision architecture that detects, identifies, prioritises and engages threats while preserving combat power, not merely a collection of radars, missiles and fighters. The IAF created the Radar and Communication Project Organisation (RCPO) and the Directorate of Plan ADGES at Air Headquarters. RCPO surveyed sites and installed radars and secure communications in remote terrain. After American assistance ended in 1965, IAF engineers and Bharat Electronics Limited continued the work; by the late 1970s, vital areas were connected through an independent tropo-scatter network. RCPO turned disparate equipment into an operational system linking sensors, controllers, fighters, surface-to-air missiles and commanders. This networked approach was an institutional precursor to today’s Air Force Network and Integrated Air Command and Control System (Bhatia 2010; Gupta 2022).
Joint arrangements also matured. Ground Liaison Officers, Tactical Air Centres, Forward Air Controllers and Joint Operations Centres created a chain through which Army and Navy requirements could be understood and translated into air tasks. These were not glamorous reforms, but they helped turn experience into readiness for 1971.
That institutional mechanism can be seen in the Advance Headquarters of Western Air Command during the 1971 war. Located alongside the Army’s Western Command, it stood between land-force requests and the air command controlling aircraft. Tactical Air Centres attached to corps headquarters converted battlefield demands into viable targets, filtered requests and set priorities (Gupta 2026). The system was imperfect and had to be refined under fire. Forward Air Controller Flight Lieutenant Lawrence Pereira was killed in action on 14 December and awarded the Vir Chakra posthumously. His service reminds us that the connective tissue of joint operations is made of people exposed to the same danger as those they guide.
Individual initiative remained vital. At Jamnagar, Wing Commander Don Conquest’s Operational Training Unit had no assigned mission on 4 December. He proposed a Hunter strike on the oil installations near Karachi, and led the attack (Gupta 2024). The episode should not be romanticised as frictionless joint action, the air and naval effects were largely parallel and coordination had limits. Its real value is different: a sound institution can improvise because its people, training and support systems provide a reliable base from which to do so.
Kargil in 1999 demonstrated the same process under very different conditions. The IAF had to attack small targets at extreme altitude while respecting the political direction not to cross the Line of Control. Rarefied air affected aircraft and weapon performance; terrain complicated target acquisition; portable air defences imposed risk. Tactics were adapted, night operations expanded, and the Mirage 2000’s sensors and precision weapons were integrated with intelligence and Army requirements. Precision was not merely a property of the weapon. It was the result of planning, identification, crew skill, technical preparation and political control aligned around a clear purpose.
Operation Sindoor in 2025 offered a contemporary reminder that air operations are increasingly a contest between integrated systems rather than individual platforms. Precision offensive action, air and missile defence, electronic warfare, surveillance, networks and joint decision-making had to function as a whole. Public discussion naturally focused on weapons and claimed performance. The enduring institutional lesson is that neither attack nor defence is delivered by a single aircraft, missile or radar. Effect comes from a connected force whose people have trained together and whose support system can keep it functioning through an intense cycle of action and response.
The IAF’s history contains celebrated examples of courage in the air, but also quieter examples of technical imagination. At the Base Signals and Radar Unit at Pune in the early 1960s, Air Commodore Harish Chandra and his team repaired scarce radio, radar and electronic equipment, recovered systems that might otherwise have been cannibalised, and developed replacements when supply was uncertain (Gupta 2026). Their maxim, ‘Nothing is Beyond Repair’, captured more than ingenuity. It expressed an operational ethic: national capability could not remain hostage to distance, scarcity or routine procedure. The people who restore a radar or radio to service may never see the engagement they enable, but they have participated in it nonetheless.
That repair culture was institutionalised early. Partition left India with little deep-repair capacity, prompting a network of specialist repair and storage units. At Kanpur, Chakeri, No 1 Aircraft Repair Depot and No 10 Air Stores Unit became No 1 Base Repair Depot in 1949. A Maintenance Group followed in 1950 and became Maintenance Command on 26 January 1955 under Harjinder Singh. By the mid-1960s, more than two dozen technical units supported aircraft, engines, electronics and weapons, giving the IAF an indigenous capacity to inspect, repair, modify and regenerate a mixed-origin fleet (Gupta 2026).
Across these conflicts, the pattern is more important than the catalogue. The IAF did not grow by acquiring platforms alone. It grew by converting operational experience into bases, command structures, training, protective infrastructure, maintenance capacity and doctrine.
Air Power in the Service of the Nation
An air force’s value is not confined to war. The same attributes that create military effects, speed, range, payload, communications, disciplined command and the ability to operate from austere locations create national reach in peace.
The IAF routinely carries people and material where time or terrain makes ordinary transport inadequate. It has moved election teams and voting equipment to remote areas, delivered medical supplies, supported civil authorities during internal emergencies and sustained isolated communities. During the COVID-19 crisis, transport aircraft moved oxygen containers, medical equipment and personnel. When a task is unusual, urgent and nationally important, the IAF is often called because it already possesses a secure command network, trained crews, loading expertise, protected bases and the ability to act at short notice. The cargo may be civilian; the strategic value lies in assured national capacity that can be activated immediately.
Disaster relief makes the connection especially clear. After the March 2025 earthquake in Myanmar, India launched Operation Brahma. IAF C-17 and C-130J aircraft carried relief material, rescue teams, medical personnel and equipment. Such missions may be called ‘soft power’, but they demand hard capacity: diplomatic clearance, loading plans, airfield assessment, maintenance, communications and crew endurance. Compassion reaches its destination because capacity was built beforehand.
Later that year, the IAF supported Operation Sagar Bandhu after Cyclone Ditwah caused floods and landslides in Sri Lanka. C-130J, Il-76 and C-17 aircraft moved relief supplies, rescue and medical teams, field hospitals and bridging equipment; Mi-17V5 helicopters sustained local relief and evacuation missions. Strategic airlift opened the air bridge, tactical helicopters reached isolated areas, and the same command, maintenance and logistics system sustained both.
The same institutional confidence is visible in international exercises. By hosting Tarang Shakti in 2024, the IAF moved from being only a participant in major multinational air exercises to being a convener. Complex exercises test interoperability, airspace control, logistics and command relationships on a scale that routine training cannot. They also expose personnel to different methods and create professional trust before a crisis. This is military preparedness, defence diplomacy and institutional learning in the same activity.
A Capability Built Over Generations
Modernisation debates inevitably gravitate towards numbers: sanctioned squadrons, aircraft on order, weapon ranges or procurement timelines. These questions are important. Quantitative shortfalls cannot be wished away; they impose real operational limitations. But numbers alone do not reveal whether a force can absorb new technology, integrate it with existing systems and sustain it in combat.
The IAF’s future strength will depend on protecting the institutional foundations while transforming them. Indigenous design and production must be accompanied by realistic testing, dependable supply chains, production capacity and long-term maintenance planning. Networks must connect sensors, shooters and commanders without becoming brittle or vulnerable. Space, cyber and unmanned systems must be integrated into operational thinking rather than treated as specialist appendages. Jointness must connect service expertise at the operational level and sharpen accountability, not merely redraw higher headquarters.
Above all, the human system must remain central. New technology can reduce workload in one place while creating new demands elsewhere. Artificial intelligence, automated planning and autonomous systems will still require trusted data, technical competence, disciplined authority and ethical judgement. The decisive advantage will belong not to the force that buys novelty first, but to the institution that learns fastest and makes new capability routine.
This is also why heritage has operational value. Remembering Pathania’s air combat, Pereira’s forward control, Conquest’s initiative, Harish Chandra’s repair culture or the unnamed crews who kept transports flying is not nostalgia. Each story illuminates a professional quality the future force will continue to need: courage, judgement, cooperation, adaptability and technical mastery.
The Invisible Strength
On IAF Day, it is natural to look upwards. The fly-past deserves admiration. It displays skill, precision and the visible edge of national power. But the deeper achievement lies beyond the formation: in the command post, radar cabin, technical bay, weapon store, classroom, hospital, transport convoy and family support system; in the unit that learns and adapts; and in the institution that can move from routine readiness to combat or disaster response without having to invent itself anew.
The IAF is structurally strong because Operations, Maintenance and Administration have been developed as enduring professional systems. Its history shows that these systems are neither static nor infallible. They have been tested, found wanting at times, reformed and tested again. That willingness to learn is itself a form of combat power.
Air power is often measured at the moment a weapon is released. It should also be measured in the years of preparation that make responsible release possible, and in the capacity to recover, regenerate and continue. The aircraft may be the most visible expression of the Indian Air Force. The institution behind it is the real national asset.
Every aircraft airborne represents an institutional effort largely invisible from the ground. That invisible strength is what allows the IAF not merely to fly, but to serve, fight and touch the sky with glory.
Author
Manish Khanna, the author is a former Air Marshal of the IAF. He was the AOC-in-C of Southern Air Command and has been the Commandant of the College of Air Warfare.
