India’s Unmanned Warfare Transformation

India’s Army is not buying drones — it is rebuilding the architecture of land warfare around unmanned, autonomous and attritable systems, a procurement signal of INR 1.0–1.9 lakh crore through 2035 against a INR 2–3 lakh crore economic footprint. This report reconstructs that roadmap and prices the opportunity beneath it, and its central finding is uncomfortable for an industry organised around airframes: the money, the margin and the sovereignty sit not in the platform the Army buys but in the subsystems it buys again with every unit — a roughly INR 40,000 crore import-substitution prize in sensors, seekers, propulsion, RF and silicon. Eighteen chapters, thirty-one figures and fifty-three tables; three proprietary frameworks (the Autonomous Warfare Stack, the Attritable Warfare Index and the Drone Industrial Sovereignty Matrix); a full market model (TAM/SAM/SOM, a procurement-wave model and an indigenous-content model); the competitive landscape and capability-gap map; strategic implications with playbooks for startups, MSMEs, large firms and venture investors; three quantified scenarios and a risk heat map. Every purchase includes a twenty-five-slide investor briefing deck (editable).