How to Fight and Win Space Wars: India Has the Capability, Not the Doctrine

India today has a satellite constellation, an indigenous launch capability, and a demonstrated kinetic anti-satellite weapon. What it lacks is a settled, tested, and institutionally owned body of thought on how to fight and win a war that begins or extends into space. That gap is not a minor administrative lag. It is the most formidable weakness in India's unstated national security strategy, and the vast majority of those outside a small group of practitioners are not discussing it in public. On 27 March 2019, India joined the club of a few countries capable of destroying a live satellite in low Earth orbit by launching a missile directly at it, as part of the Defence Research and Development Organisation's Mission Shakti. The test was a credential. It answered the question of whether India could physically hit a target in orbit. It did not answer the far harder questions that follow: when such a weapon should be used, against what class of target, with what authorisation chain, and with what expectation of how the adversary and the rest of the watching world will respond. Years later, those questions remain more debated in seminar rooms than settled in doctrine. A Neighbour That Has Already Chosen The most consequential change in India's space threat environment did not happen in India. On 19 April 2024, the People's Liberation Army dissolved its Strategic Support Force. This body had fused space, cyber, and information warfare under one roof since 2015. It split its space functions into an independent Aerospace Force that reports directly to the Central Military Commission. This was not a demotion. Reporting straight to the apex military body, alongside a newly created Cyberspace Force and Information Support Force, places counter-space operations on the same institutional footing as China's army, navy, air force, and rocket force. Beijing did not restructure its space warfighting arm because space had become less important. It restructured because space had become important enough to require direct political-military control rather than a shared, layered command. The broader body of Chinese military writing on space, catalogued in Andrew Erickson's edited volume on Chinese aerospace power, treats space control not as an auxiliary support function but as a precondition for winning any future conflict against a technologically superior opponent. That framing matters for India because it is not built around symmetry. It is built around denying an adversary's dependence on space, which means the doctrine behind it is designed to strike first, strike precisely, and strike in ways that are hard to trace back to their author. A force that treats space denial as a precondition for victory will not wait for a declaration of war to begin shaping the space environment in its favour. An Institution Still Becoming Itself India's institutional response has been real, but it has incrementally evolved in measured steps. The Prime Minister approved the Defence Space Agency at the Combined Commanders' Conference in Jodhpur in September 2018, and it became operational in 2019. Drawing personnel from all three services and functioning under the Integrated Defence Staff, it was established in Bengaluru as India's principal military space organisation. Its origins can be traced, in part, to the Naresh Chandra Task Force of 2012, which had called for dedicated Special Operations, Cyber and Space commands to prepare the armed forces for increasingly contested and rapidly changing domains. More than a decade later, however, only one of those three initiatives has matured into a full tri-service command. That gap matters. A space organisation designed primarily to coordinate existing capabilities is not the same as a command empowered to develop, integrate and employ them. The distinction becomes especially important as space shifts from being predominantly an enabler of military operations to a contested battlespace in its own right. Senior officers associated with the initiative have publicly outlined a trajectory in which the Defence Space Agency would evolve into a full-fledged defence space command, serving as the nodal institution for the country's military space requirements rather than functioning primarily as a coordinating mechanism. Recent industry and policy discussions have taken the idea further, envisaging a quantum-secure, cyber-hardened tri-service Space Command by 2047, supported by encrypted satellite communications, resilient positioning and timing, and a private sector treated as a strategic partner rather than simply as a supplier. These are sensible and necessary directions. But institutions do not acquire strategic weight merely by changing their names or organisational charts. Their real strength comes from the authority they possess, the resources they control, the doctrine that guides them and the command relationships that allow decisions to be taken when time is measured in minutes rather than days. That is where the next phase of India's space journey must focus. The institutional framework is taking shape. The more difficult task now is to give it a doctrine that defines how India will deter, respond and prevail when space itself becomes contested. Capability Is Not Deterrence Without Doctrine A kinetic anti-satellite missile answers one question: can the nation destroy a satellite? It answers nothing about whether it should, against what category of target, at what point in a crisis, and what the nation is prepared to accept in return. Without a doctrine that has been debated, war-gamed, and understood across the political and military leadership, a demonstrated capability sits in the arsenal as a blunt option rather than a calibrated instrument of deterrence. An adversary watching India's 2019 test learned that India can strike. It learned nothing about when India would choose to, which is precisely the information that makes a capability deter rather than merely exist. The problem is sharpened by two features peculiar to the space domain. First, attribution is slow. A satellite that suddenly degrades or goes silent may leave India uncertain about what actually happened for days or even weeks. There is no physical wreckage to examine, and the same failure signature can point to a technical malfunction, a radiation event, a collision or deliberate interference. That uncertainty becomes a strategic problem when every response is made conditional on definitive attribution. A doctrine built around perfect attribution before action is authorised risks producing hesitation when speed matters most. India therefore needs the ability to assess intent, assign confidence levels and act proportionately even when the evidence remains incomplete. Second, the debris created by any kinetic engagement in orbit does not discriminate by nationality. A destructive test or strike threatens the attacker's own satellites in adjacent orbital planes as much as the target's, which is why India's 2019 test was deliberately conducted at a low altitude to limit the debris field's lifetime. Any future counter-space doctrine has to be built around this constraint from the outset, favouring reversible effects such as jamming, dazzling, cyber intrusion, and orbital shadowing over destructive ones wherever the mission allows, and reserving kinetic options for scenarios where the strategic stakes clearly outweigh the shared cost of a debris-fouled orbit. The Missing Institution of Thought What India lacks is not raw talent. It is a standing institution whose sole mandate is to think about space warfare at the strategic level, not at the engineering level. The Defence Research and Development Organisation builds the hardware. The Indian Space Research Organisation builds and operates the civilian space architecture. The service space cells, now under the Defence Space Agency, operate what exists. None of these bodies is chartered to run adversary-realistic wargames, stress-test escalation thresholds, or interrogate whether India's command structure can make a space-related decision within the minutes or hours a real crisis would allow. A dedicated centre for space warfare studies, fusing officers from all three services with DRDO scientists, ISRO engineers, and private industry, is overdue. Its output should not be another set of technology roadmaps. It should be doctrine documents, red-teamed wargame findings, and command post exercises that expose gaps before an adversary does. Space situational awareness deserves the same seriousness. ISRO's NETRA programme is a useful start toward indigenous tracking of debris and threats in orbit. Still, a credible military capability requires a layered, redundant network of ground-based radar, optical telescopes, and space-based sensors, fused with the Defence Space Agency's operational picture in near real time, not reported after the fact. Reducing the weeks it currently takes to explain why a satellite went dark to hours is not a technical nicety; it’s an operational necessity. A Whole-of-Nation Enterprise India's civilian space industry has grown faster than the country's military space capabilities. That gap should not be viewed simply as a weakness. If managed intelligently, it can become a strategic advantage. Military space capabilities must be driven by the military, supported by the civil sector, with separate financing and structures. Civil Industry bodies have argued for critical infrastructure status for space assets and production-linked incentives for satellite manufacturing. Such measures are important because resilient space architectures require sustained, long-term investment, particularly as India moves towards proliferated small-satellite constellations. A military space architecture built around numerous small, relatively inexpensive, and rapidly replaceable satellites is inherently more resilient than one dependent on a small number of exquisite, costly geostationary assets. The same principle should apply to the wider ecosystem. Private satellite constellations, launch providers, data companies, and ground infrastructure should be incorporated into military planning as recognised sources of surge capacity. They should not remain on a separate civilian track until a crisis forces their hurried integration. A whole-of-nation space architecture therefore needs to be more than a partnership between government and industry. It must be an integral part of national defence capability building. The Way Ahead Five measures can close much of the gap between India's present capabilities and its stated strategic ambitions. First, complete the transition from the Defence Space Agency to a full-fledged tri-service Space Command with independent budgetary authority. A strategic capability of this importance cannot depend primarily on personnel and resources borrowed from the three services. A dedicated command needs the authority, resources and institutional permanence to plan beyond individual service cycles. Second, promulgate and periodically revise a dedicated military space doctrine, distinct from civilian space policy. The doctrine should define what constitutes a hostile act against India's space architecture, identify response options short of kinetic action, and establish clear command and decision-making authorities. Ambiguity may have value for deterrence, but institutional uncertainty does not. Third, build a genuinely indigenous and layered space situational awareness network capable of compressing the attribution timeline from weeks to hours. In a crisis, knowing that something has happened is not enough. India must be able to determine what happened, assess intent, identify the likely source and decide on an appropriate response before the opportunity for effective action disappears. A doctrine without timely and reliable information cannot survive the pressure of a real contingency. Fourth, institutionalise annual space wargames that reflect realistic adversary behaviour and are graded against established military planning principles, rather than treating them as technology demonstrations. The purpose of a wargame is not to prove that a system works. It is to expose where command arrangements, intelligence, communications, decision-making and escalation management fail. Those weaknesses are far cheaper to identify in an exercise than during a crisis. Fifth, broaden India's counter-space options beyond the kinetic capability demonstrated in 2019. Reversible capabilities, including electronic and cyber means, should be developed alongside directed-energy and co-orbital technologies. The objective should be to create a graduated range of responses, enabling political and military leaders to impose costs, signal resolve, or deny an adversary's advantage without being forced to resort immediately to the most escalatory option. China has already reorganised its military thinking around the assessment that space is not merely an enabler of warfare but a domain in which strategic advantage can be created and contested. India has much of the foundation required to make a similar shift. It possesses a capable space industry, an established launch ecosystem, a growing private sector and demonstrated counter-space expertise. What remains is the harder part: a coherent doctrine, a dedicated institutional structure, and a culture of realistic wargaming. The real test of India's space power will not be how effectively it responds after an adversary has disrupted its satellites. It will be whether the adversary believes that doing so would achieve little at acceptable cost. That is the point at which space capability becomes deterrence, and deterrence is most credible when it is visible in preparation long before the first shot is fired. About The Author Lieutenant General A B Shivane, PVSM, AVSM, VSM (Retd), is a former Strike Corps Commander and Director General of Mechanised Forces with four decades of distinguished service, including tenure as ADG PP and Space. A prolific author and strategic thinker, he has written over 350 publications and four books, and he continues to advise defence institutions, think tanks, and the private drone industry.