Build Combat Architecture Before Fifth-Gen Jets Arrive, Says Air Marshal Tejpal Singh

Air Marshal Tejpal Singh, Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, has said the Indian Air Force cannot afford to wait for an ideal future force while pressing operational needs go unmet, and must instead prepare the underlying combat architecture that fifth-generation warfare will demand.

Delivering a special address titled "Fifth Generation and Beyond" at the NDTV Defence Summit 2026, he said the service has to simultaneously take stock of existing capabilities, identify urgent requirements and build for what comes next. The challenge, he argued, is more demanding than a simple generational handover.

According to the Air Marshal, a leap from one generation of aircraft to the next may not be feasible, but a jump in generations of combat architecture is achievable. He suggested beginning with autonomy, distributed sensing, resilient communications and open mission systems well before the aircraft normally associated with fifth-generation warfare enter service, noting that the future Indian Air Force will inevitably be a fifth-generation force.

He stressed that the goal should not be technological uniformity but operational coherence in a battlespace marked by technological diversity. Urgency and transformation, he added, need not compete: whatever is inducted today should have a clear path into the combat structure being built for tomorrow.

Not every platform has to be fifth generation, he said, but the force as a whole must become future compatible. That requirement extends to people, both in industry and in the Air Force. An air warrior, he said, is not trained for a single system or aircraft but must understand technology, data, artificial intelligence, space, cyber, electronic warfare, joint operations and, above all, systems thinking.

The Air Marshal also called for a changed relationship between operators and industry, with designers, software engineers, test establishments and manufacturers working closely across a system's entire life cycle. Not every experiment needs to become a procurement programme, he said, adding that the freedom to try, fail, modify and retry is central to developing an adaptive combat system.

On timelines, he said a new weapon should not turn into a five- or seven-year integration effort, a software update should not wait nine months, and a new algorithm should move quickly from the laboratory to controlled operational experimentation. A successful system, he added, must also be capable of being manufactured and scaled.