China faces the opposite constraint.
Its output of civilian drones grew 37.3 per cent last year, while its arms imports fell 72 per cent, dropping out of the top 10 recipients for the first time since the early 1990s. Its advantage is a manufacturing base with thousands of drone and component makers, fierce price competition, and product cycles measured in months – built for churning out and replacing cheap drones at speed.
But factory output does not equal military power. Whether Chinese forces could keep communications running under jamming, coordinate across services and match their hardware with training has never been tested in combat, and cannot be verified from outside.
India shows a third type of bottleneck. Still the world’s second-largest arms importer, it has cut Russia’s share of its purchases from 70 per cent a decade ago to 40 per cent. Buying from more suppliers increases autonomy, but it moves the integration bill – making French jets, Russian missiles and Israeli sensors work together – inside the armed forces.
In last May’s air battle with Pakistan, at least one Indian Rafale went down – a loss a French commander acknowledged while crediting Pakistan’s handling of the battle rather than its Chinese-made jets.
Subsequent reporting described Pakistani fighters taking targeting data by data link from a surveillance aircraft, and firing from a range Indian pilots did not expect. However advanced, a plane that cannot share information is an island.