From KAL to Sheshnaag, India Is Joining the Drone Arms Race at the Front
India quietly crossed an important defence technology milestone at Pokhran on September 20 when the indigenous KAL long-range one-way attack drone successfully completed its maiden flight trials. Developed by Noida-based private defence technology company IG Defence, KAL is designed for a range of up to 1,000 kilometres, endurance of seven to eight hours and a payload of up to 50 kg. Those specifications place it broadly in the same class of long-range attack drones that have transformed battlefields from Ukraine to the Middle East.
The significance goes much further than another successful drone test. KAL represents India’s arrival in one of the fastest-moving areas of military technology at precisely the moment when the nature of aerial warfare is changing. The Iranian Shahed family demonstrated what relatively inexpensive long-range one-way attack drones could achieve. Russia subsequently turned the concept into an industrial-scale weapon in Ukraine, while the United States, China and other military powers are developing their own answers. India is not watching this revolution unfold from a distance. It is already building within it.
KAL Is Not Alone
What makes the KAL story even more significant is that it is not India’s only effort in this category. Bengaluru-based NewSpace Research and Technologies has developed the Sheshnaag-150, a long-range swarming attack system designed for operations beyond 1,000 kilometres with more than five hours of endurance. Its concept goes beyond sending one drone towards one target. Multiple unmanned aircraft are intended to coordinate attacks, saturate defences and execute precision strikes as part of a larger intelligent swarm.
This is exactly how a defence technology ecosystem begins to mature. India does not have one laboratory working on one prototype and hoping that it eventually succeeds. Different companies are pursuing different architectures and ideas within the same emerging battlefield requirement. One can improve range, another autonomy, another swarm coordination, another navigation resilience and another manufacturing economics. Competition between Indian companies can ultimately become competition between Indian technology and the best systems available globally.
The Private Sector Is the Bigger Story
Both KAL and Sheshnaag also carry another important message. These are products emerging from India’s private defence industry. Indian companies are no longer confined to supplying parts, machining components or waiting for foreign technology to arrive through licensed manufacturing. They are increasingly designing complete systems around Indian military requirements and building intellectual property around technologies that will matter in future wars.
That change has not occurred in isolation. Over several years, the armed forces and the defence establishment have created more opportunities for startups, MSMEs and private companies to demonstrate equipment, compete against requirements and move prototypes towards procurement. By March 2026, the government’s iDEX ecosystem had engaged 676 startups, MSMEs and innovators, with hundreds of development contracts signed and dozens of prototypes receiving procurement clearance. Government testing facilities have also progressively been opened to private players.
The result is increasingly visible on the ground. Pokhran is no longer merely a place where established weapons are demonstrated. Events such as the Indian Air Force’s Dronathon-2026 are bringing indigenous unmanned and counter-drone systems directly into a military testing environment. That interaction between soldiers, airmen, engineers and private companies is crucial because drone technology evolves far too quickly for a traditional development cycle measured in decades.
Drones Are Rewriting the Economics of War
The reason this matters so much is simple. Modern warfare is becoming increasingly unmanned because drones offer an extraordinary combination of cost, range, lethality and expendability. A modern combat aircraft represents an enormous financial investment and carries a trained pilot whose loss cannot be measured merely in money. Sophisticated missiles are also expensive and exist in finite inventories. A one-way attack drone changes that calculation because it can carry a meaningful warhead hundreds of kilometres without risking a pilot or an expensive reusable aircraft.
Recent conflicts have made this impossible to ignore. Iran’s Shahed-family drones became central to its 2026 campaign in the Gulf, where large numbers of comparatively inexpensive unmanned aircraft were used to create sustained pressure while forcing defenders to expend air-defence resources. Analysts studying that campaign have described drones as no longer auxiliary weapons but central instruments of modern air warfare.
Ukraine has demonstrated another side of the same equation against Russia. Long-range drones have repeatedly struck refineries and energy infrastructure deep inside Russian territory. Reuters reported that Ukrainian attacks disrupted about 700,000 barrels per day of refining capacity across 16 Russian refineries during the first part of 2026, while later attacks forced major facilities such as Syzran and Saratov to halt operations. A drone does not need to destroy an entire refinery to achieve strategic effect. Damaging one critical processing unit can interrupt production worth vastly more than the attacking drone itself.
Cheap Weapons Can Create Expensive Problems
That is the great attraction of this new class of weapon. A relatively inexpensive drone carrying a substantial warhead does not have to destroy an airbase, refinery or military installation completely. Hitting a radar, fuel farm, parked aircraft, ammunition storage area, power system or critical industrial component may be enough to cause damage many times greater than the cost of the weapon that delivered it.
The economics become even more uncomfortable for the defender when drones arrive in numbers. Every incoming aircraft has to be detected, tracked and either intercepted or accepted as a threat. Sending expensive surface-to-air missiles against inexpensive drones can produce a deeply unfavourable cost equation, while allowing them through can expose valuable infrastructure. Swarms add another problem by attempting to overwhelm the number of targets a defence network can engage simultaneously.
This does not mean conventional aircraft and missiles are disappearing. Instead, drones are increasingly taking over missions for which employing a far more expensive weapon makes little economic sense. Missiles, fighters and bombers remain essential for targets and missions requiring speed, penetration, payload or specialised capabilities, but unmanned systems are giving militaries another layer of firepower that can be produced, deployed and lost in far greater numbers.
For Once, India Is Not Arriving Late
This is where India’s progress deserves particular attention. India’s defence technology story has too often involved catching up. A capability matures elsewhere, India identifies the requirement, approaches foreign partners, negotiates technology transfer or licensed production, begins manufacturing parts domestically and gradually develops the knowledge required to produce its own solution.
Drone warfare offers a very different picture. The technology itself is still developing. Militaries are still discovering how to combine long-range strike drones, swarms, electronic warfare, artificial intelligence, autonomous navigation and counter-drone systems. Even countries with enormous defence budgets are adapting their doctrine and industrial capacity as lessons emerge from Ukraine and the Middle East.
India is already there while those rules are still being written. KAL is being tested. Sheshnaag is undergoing development and flight testing. Indian companies are building swarm software, strike platforms and counter-drone systems while the armed forces are creating opportunities to put those technologies through realistic trials. India has entered this technological cycle before the rest of the world has finished defining it.
From Catch-Up to Potential Leadership
That could prove to be the biggest achievement of all. India does not need to spend the next decade merely manufacturing an Indian equivalent of today’s Shahed. The opportunity is to move through successive generations of indigenous systems, increasing range, reducing cost, improving autonomy, strengthening resistance to electronic warfare and developing swarms capable of operating as coordinated strike networks.
Private-sector competition makes that possibility far more powerful. KAL and Sheshnaag need not represent the final products of India’s drone revolution. They can represent its beginning. As more companies enter the field and military requirements become more demanding, today’s 1,000-kilometre attack drone can become the foundation for a much broader indigenous unmanned warfare industry.
For decades, India has often found itself chasing defence technologies after other countries had established a sizeable lead. Drone warfare presents something different. The revolution is happening now, and Indian engineers, startups and defence companies are already participating in it. For once, India is not standing outside asking for access to tomorrow’s military technology. It is building that technology at home while the global race is still wide open.
If that momentum continues, KAL and Sheshnaag may eventually be remembered not simply as two Indian drones, but as early signs of the moment when India stopped routinely playing catch-up and began positioning itself to help shape the next generation of warfare.
