India to project power across Indo-Pacific by 2047: Def secy

NEW new delhi: republic of india is on trend to suit a full integrated military force capable of projecting power across the vast Indo-Pacific region by 2047, when the country marks its Independence centenary, defence secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh said on Tuesday.The national defence shield under Mission Sudarshan Chakra will be operational in the 2030s, giving the country an impenetrable, layered missile defence system to protect its critical strategic and civilian assets, he said.“We have just released our Defence Forces Vision 2047 (a roadmap for a future-ready Indian military), which rests on the vision of transitioning our military into a technologically advanced, fully integrated and multi-domain force. This is going to go through a transition process up to 2030, followed by a consolidation period from 2030 to 2040 during which we hope to see the maturation of Mission Sudarshan Chakra…and, ultimately, from 2040 the era of excellence when we become a fully integrated, self-reliant, all-domain military force capable of projecting power across the Indo-Pacific and beyond,” Singh said at the CII Annual Business Summit 2026.In March, India unveiled Defence Forces Vision 2047 to transform its military into a world-class force by 2047 through a series of measures including wide-ranging strategic reforms, capability enhancements and organisational changes. The goals include creating a drone force, a data force, a defence geospatial agency, a space command, a cyber-command, a cognitive warfare action force and a national defence shield under Mission Sudarshan Chakra.In his address, Singh also discussed the challenges. While India is on the growth trajectory to become a $30 trillion economy by 2047, its vulnerabilities will also expand along with its economic footprint, he said.“Our supply chains, sea lines of communication, and our digital infrastructure will span the globe but they will also be vulnerable to threats…There is a shift happening where societies are becoming deeply interconnected yet vulnerable to cognitive warfare. The lines between the civilian and the military, the virtual and the physical, and even war and peace are getting blurred,” Singh said.“Our approach is multi-alignment, and strategic autonomy. We are not a camp follower of any country. We need to be a pole in our own right, and to do that our military power must reflect and be commensurate with our growing economic heft.”He said the two-front security challenge India faces along its northern and western borders is not hypothetical. “This is a reality that requires credible deterrence…In this increasingly multi-polar Asian architecture, India maintains strategic autonomy while deepening defence partnerships with like-minded foreign democracies whether through the Quad or the EU.”India, he said, advocates for conflict prevention and conflict management. “And when we enter a conflict we also try to ensure that conflict termination happens quickly so that we don’t unnecessarily end up in stalemates of the kind that we are seeing both in Europe and the Middle East right now.”Strategic autonomy is not possible without technological sovereignty, he said.“Historically India has been one of the world’s largest arms importer when we were trapped in a cycle of being assemblers of foreign technology often subject to geopolitical whims and supply chain bottlenecks of other nations. Through the Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative, we have made self-reliance the cornerstone of our defence posture. We are on a transformative journey from being the world’s largest importer to a global defence manufacturing hub,” Singh said.He said that through the revised Defence Procurement Manual 2025, the government has ensured a complete level playing field for the private sector, removing past provisions for public sector reservation or nomination.“What we need from the industry is the ability to deliver things on time. Don’t over promise and deliver late. Don’t make complaints against one another during the procurement process. That creates a lot of difficulties in our system because once you start complaining against one another, the procurement often stops and we end up with the kind of long delays that have been the case at least in the past,” Singh added.