Affordable Mass: The IAF's Missing Edge Against China

In September 2025, Boyd Miller, principal deputy director for strategic logistics on the US Joint Staff, delivered a blunt message to an audience of defence industrialists and officers.

The United States, he said, needs more munitions and more production capacity if it is to prevail in the wars of today and tomorrow. Conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, he said, have shown that the consumption of ammunition in modern warfare 'defies our expectations'. The modern battlefield is not merely a contest of exquisite platforms, but a contest of industrial endurance, where scalable, affordable weapons matter as much as sensors and engines.

'Platforms without munitions are glorified paperweights,' Miller warned, adding that 'the nation that scales first, wins.'

While Miller spoke to an American audience about US logistics challenges, the core insight applies with even greater force to India and the Indian Air Force.

Like the US, India faces a rapidly rising China with years of consolidated industrial modernisation behind it. The IAF's challenge is not simply acquiring advanced aircraft. It is acquiring sufficient numbers of weapons, systems, and attritable platforms that it can sustain a protracted high-intensity conflict with a peer adversary. In the absence of a doctrine of affordable mass, paired with an industrial ecosystem capable of backing it, the IAF risks fighting the wrong war with the wrong tools.

Ukraine's battlefield over the past three years provides an unvarnished view of how modern conflicts are consuming weapons. Lethal drones and swarming loitering munitions have caused disproportionate effects relative to their cost.

Ukrainian companies like Terminal Autonomy have built loitering attack drones such as the AQ-400 Scythe in numbers that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. With unit costs estimated around $30,000, the Scythe and similar designs are produced in hundreds per month with woodworking shops and modest factories, an approach oriented towards cost, ease of manufacture, and sheer quantity.

Even smaller drones have reshaped attrition rates. Non-profit groups like Escadrone were producing 1,000+ attack drones per month that weigh just a few kilogrammes and cost under $500 each, carrying small warheads capable of engaging light armour and unarmoured targets.

At the extreme end of scale and range, Ukrainian industry scaled up production of the Fire Point FP-1 deep-strike drone from scratch in 2024, reaching a reported production of thousands of units per month, nearly 200 per day, with unit costs in the low tens of thousands of dollars, far cheaper than traditional cruise missiles and deep enough to strike with range, and a third of the price of a Russian Shahed drone. Interestingly, Fire Point didn't even exist before the war started.

The scale is astonishing. Recent studies show Ukraine's domestic drone industry exploded with about 1.5 million UAVs of various kinds produced in 2023 and the output appears to have exceeded 4.5 million in 2025.

These weapons are the backbone of Ukraine's operational logic. They are attritable by design, intended to be used in large numbers, and their industrial model privileges volume, speed, and low cost. They are the very definition of affordable mass, giving combat power that can be consumed and replenished without bankrupting the force or grinding operations to a halt.

India, however, remains largely anchored in an older paradigm. The Indian Air Force does not yet appear to have fully internalised the logic of affordable mass, with its force structure still oriented around high-performance, low-quantity platforms.

Indigenous programmes such as Astra beyond-visual-range air-to-air missiles and the Smart Anti-Airfield Weapon (SAAW) precision glide bomb are important steps towards self-reliance, but they have been ordered in small numbers. The SAAW, for example, is a capable long-range glide weapon designed to destroy critical infrastructure from over 100 km away, yet its procurement remains slow.

One of the more talked about indigenous projects is the Combat Air Teaming System (CATS) Warrior loyal wingman drone. Designed to operate alongside manned fighters like Tejas, the Warrior promises to act as an autonomous combat companion capable of reconnaissance, strike, and electronic warfare roles. The IAF is likely to procure 200–250 such systems, with each expected to cost under $5 million, which is a significant premium compared to the low-cost drones now shaping the battlefield in Europe.

But there is a paradox here. Programmes like CATS Warrior, while technologically ambitious and strategically attractive, risk falling into the same trap as many advanced aircraft. They bring high capability at the expense of scalability. A $5 million loyal wingman is affordable compared to a $100+ million fighter, but it is not cheap enough to be attritable at scale, especially against an adversary like China, which can field thousands of missiles and drones at low unit cost and replenish its stocks faster.

Moreover, loyal wingman concepts often derive their value from synergy with manned platforms. Lost network links or jamming in high-intensity combat environments could reduce these systems to expensive targets. In other words, loyal wingman programmes are necessary but not sufficient if India's goal is to generate affordable mass for the IAF.

If the IAF is to adopt the doctrine Miller hinted at for the US, it must integrate a spectrum of systems calibrated not only for quality but for volume. That means continuing advanced programmes like Astra variants and CATS Warrior, but also prioritising true attritable systems, like inexpensive unmanned aerial vehicles, swarming loitering munitions, low-signature attack drones, and simple, large-scale mass weapons that can be produced quickly and en masse.

The United States' own debate over affordable mass is instructive here. One of the more compelling concepts to emerge is DARPA's LongShot programme, an air-launched, missile-carrying vehicle designed to extend the reach of crewed fighters without requiring another expensive, recoverable aircraft.

LongShot is deliberately narrow in ambition. It does not attempt to replicate a fighter's full mission set or survivability, nor does it rely on complex autonomy or persistent basing. Instead, it accepts expendability, leverages existing aircraft for launch, and focuses on delivering weapons forward at a fraction of the cost of a manned platform.

As several analysts have argued, its value lies not in elegance but in arithmetic. It allows air forces to place more missiles in the fight, force adversaries to expend interceptors, and absorb losses without strategic shock.

The relevance for the IAF is not the specific technology but the design philosophy. LongShot represents a conscious choice to trade recoverability and sophistication for scale, speed of induction, and industrial feasibility. It is an acknowledgement that in a high-end fight, extending magazine depth and complicating enemy targeting may matter more than preserving every airframe.

For India, adopting a similar mindset, like air-launched, one-way or attritable systems that multiply missile presence without multiplying aircraft costs, would go much further towards affordable mass than pursuing ever more complex unmanned platforms that risk becoming boutique assets in limited numbers and take longer to integrate.

India has nascent capabilities in these domains. Dozens of start-ups are now building drones and other platforms that could contribute to affordable mass, but without a coherent policy framework and sustained production orders, these firms cannot survive, innovate, or evolve.

Scaling industrial capacity, codifying procurement priorities, and ensuring predictable demand are as critical as the technologies themselves. Without them, even the most promising start-ups remain isolated experiments rather than engines of warfighting scale.

Yet India's industrial base is not yet optimised for this type of mass production. Unlike Ukraine, where dozens of small firms and unconventional producers (even hobbyists and start-ups) contributed to drone output, India's defence industrial ecosystem remains dominated by a few large state actors with long development cycles and bureaucratic procurement timelines.

China's aerospace industry outpaces India not just in technology, but in the ability to produce and sustain combat aircraft, missiles, and drones at scale. China's indigenous aerospace industry has been building in volumes that dwarf India's, and it does so with an integrated supply chain that is difficult to disrupt. In a protracted conflict over the Himalayas or the South China Sea, this volume advantage becomes decisive.

This is not to suggest that India abandon high-end capabilities. On the contrary, platforms like the Tejas Mark-2, the future AMCA, and indigenous engines must be pursued. But without a broader industrial strategy that aggressively scales production, India will find itself fighting costly battles with slender inventories.

Affordable mass is not cheapness. It is cost-effectiveness calibrated to operational consumption rates. It acknowledges that attrition will happen and prepares for it. The war in Ukraine demonstrated this not just in theory but in fact. Russia launched over 14,700 one-way drones and tens of thousands of missiles into Ukraine over just a two-year span, forcing defenders to adapt and produce domestically at unprecedented rates.

If India's planners take Miller at his word—that deterrence requires both exquisite weapons and scalable systems they can produce by the tens of thousands—then the IAF's strategy must look beyond incremental modernisation to industrial transformation.

That would mean incentivising private sector drone producers, creating streamlined production lines for simple weapons, embracing modular designs that can be rapidly manufactured, and planning procurement around sustained conflict scenarios, not just acute crises.