As the world embraces non-contact warfare, geography reminds India that some conflicts still end with boots on the ground.
The images from recent conflicts are seductive in their cleanliness as we see precision drone strikes filmed from altitude, cruise missiles streaking across the desert landscape, warships launching salvos from beyond the horizon, interceptors laboriously climbing into the night skies attempting to wrestle with the incoming missiles. A new gospel of warfare has taken hold, that modern conflict is and ought to be, a contactless affair.
For nations separated by ocean or geography, this doctrine may have some merit. When your adversary is distant, you can afford to trade missiles and sanctions, probe with drones and call a ceasefire when the calculus shifts. Victory, in such contests, can be measured in degraded infrastructure and broken political will. The current conflict in the West Asia is a testament to that. The truce is being projected as a win by both sides, which can give grounds for an acrimonious narrative war, something that has a potential to spiral out.
India does not have that luxury. It shares 3,488 kilometres of partially disputed, poorly demarcated and active land border with China. It shares another 3,323 kilometres with Pakistan, including a Line of Control in the North that is not a border so much as an argument settled in barbed wire and blood. Another few thousands of kilometres of porous boundaries exist on India’s eastern flank too which demand sober attention. These are not adversaries across a sea. They are neighbours who can and do, place boots, tanks and artillery within walking distance of Indian territory.
The enduring lesson of military history, one that continues to reassert itself, is that in territorial disputes, land remains the only true currency of victory. Air-missiles-drones campaign and stand-off capabilities, however decisive they may appear, rarely settle questions of sovereignty on their own. A nation may achieve overwhelming dominance in the skies and still find the strategic question unresolved if it does not translate that advantage into presence on the ground. Contemporary conflicts have only reinforced this principle. Prolonged campaigns relying primarily on firepower from a distance have repeatedly demonstrated the limits of non-contact warfare, while the decisive phases of recent operations have invariably involved the commitment of ground forces to establish credible territorial control.
The US-Israel air campaign against Iran, which hopefully has ended in the truce signalled on April, 8th 2026, offers perhaps the most consequential live demonstration of this thesis in a generation. Operation Epic Fury began on 28 February 2026, with the United States and Israel launching nearly 900 strikes in 12 hours targeting Iranian missiles, air defences, military infrastructure and leadership
The air-missile campaign has been, by any tactical measure, formidable. Iranian ballistic missile launches had fallen considerably, from 350 on 28 February to a handful by the time the truce was signalled. Hundreds of Iranian missile launchers had been rendered inoperable and by some unconfirmed reports, 80 percent of Iran’s capacity to strike Israel may have been eliminated. And yet Iran had not surrendered. The Strait of Hormuz remained choked. Global oil prices had surged dramatically. Targets in rest of West Asia had been struck. War was expanding, not contracting.
Meanwhile reports in the media suggested that the US was actively mustering Marines and elements of the 82nd Airborne Division for a potential ground assault on Iranian soil. The reason for this is the one that military history has always insisted upon: territorial control through ground forces is the decisive instrument of political victory. This fundamental truth has also been elucidated by the editorial board of The New York Times in its opinion piece on March 17, 2026, which concludes that air power alone almost never topples a government and that only troops on the ground can seize the instruments of state power and install a new leader.
These operations have also underscored a significant shift in the balance between naval power projection and land-based denial capabilities. Even the most advanced naval assets, representing the pinnacle of maritime technological achievement, have had to adapt their operational posture in contested littoral environments. These major naval formations may have periodically adjusted their standoff distances and operational patterns in response to evolving threat landscapes, including advanced missile systems, unmanned aerial platforms and asymmetric tactics employed by coastal forces. These adjustments reflect not a failure of naval power but rather a maturing recognition that sustained operations within range of sophisticated land-based A2AD (Anti-Access Area Denial) systems carry risks that must be carefully managed and accounted for.
It is also tempting to view these air-missile-drone capabilities as the decisive instruments of modern conflict. Yet a dispassionate assessment of recent operations reveals a troubling paradox; the very platforms celebrated for their technological sophistication often inflict disproportionate damage upon civilian populations and critical infrastructure. Stand-off strikes, however precisely targeted, operate within an inherent margin of error that, across the scale of a sustained campaign, translates into innocent civilians being killed apart from devastated urban centres, displaced populations and the systematic destruction of economic foundations like power grids, transport networks, industrial capacity and commercial hubs that take decades and enormous capital to rebuild. The economic consequences extend well beyond the immediate theatre of conflict, disrupting global supply chains, destabilising markets and imposing reconstruction costs that burden nations and the international community for generations. It is here that the enduring value of land forces comes into sharpest relief. A trained soldier on the ground functions with the discrimination of a scalpel, capable of distinguishing combatant from civilian, of isolating a threat without levelling the neighbourhood around it and of holding ground in a manner that restores order rather than compounding chaos. Land Forces bring the human judgment, restraint and adaptability that no sensor suite or algorithm can fully replicate.
For India, this is not a distant spectacle. It is a strategic crucible.
For India, this reality is existential. In the Galwan Valley in 2020, there were no missiles fired. Just soldiers, clashing at 14,000 feet in the freezing dark. China did not contest that terrain with drones. It sent men. The question of who controlled that ridge mattered enormously, because geography translates directly into strategic depth, surveillance advantage and the ability to threaten infrastructure. But these are only the military implications. The national fallout of territory ceded or won cuts far deeper: into morale, into political legitimacy, into the stories a nation tells itself about its own sovereignty.
This is why India must resist the intellectual fashion of viewing standoff warfare as a complete solution. Non-contact capabilities like missiles, rockets, drones, loitering munitions are indispensable and must be built aggressively. But these are not the whole arsenal. The infantry soldier, acclimatised and trained for high-altitude close combat; the armoured column capable of exploiting a breakthrough; the special forces unit that can strike at will remain irreplaceable.
The uncomfortable truth is that India must prepare for a war that begins in the information and aerial domain and ends, as wars with neighbours almost always do, with men staring at each other across a contested ridgeline, deciding who blinks first. Thus, the capability and willingness to deploy boots on ground must be retained at all times.
The West Asia today is a reminder, that aerial weapon can shape but it cannot possess. It can degrade but it cannot decide. Missiles have a transitory effect; they cannot hold a mountain, open a strait or change a regime by themselves.
In that final moment of reckoning, no drone can substitute for resolve. No missile can hold ground. Only a soldier can.
Very well articulated .