Air Marshal Tejpal Singh, Deputy Chief of Air Staff, spoke at the NDTV Defence Summit 2026 in New Delhi, demanding that new weapons be integrated within a few years rather than a decade.
Singh said the Indian Air Force cannot wait for a 20‑year horizon to become fully fifth‑generation; instead it must map current capabilities, identify urgent needs, and build a flexible architecture that supports future systems.
He outlined four pillars: autonomous systems, distributed sensing, resilient communications, and open mission suites. Singh warned that the focus should be on combat architecture, not just aircraft, and urged the force to adopt a modular, interoperable approach.
The marshal stressed that operators, designers, software engineers and manufacturers must collaborate across the life‑cycle, testing prototypes before procurement. “Failure is part of the game,” he said, “and it drives adaptive development.”
Singh will chair a high‑level task force that will draft guidelines for rapid weapon integration, with its first meeting set for November 2026. The guidelines will feed into the Air Force’s forthcoming procurement review scheduled for September.