How India's Sudarshan Chakra Shield Will Look Like

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled the Sudarshan Chakra Shield, an air defence programme that aspires to guard India’s skies from drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic projectiles, many observers instinctively reached for a familiar analogy, Israel’s Iron Dome.

The Iron Dome is one of the few missile defence systems that has proven its worth in combat. Images of its interceptors arcing across the night skies of Tel Aviv have become a global symbol of technological ingenuity and national resilience.

But framing India’s ambitions through Israel’s example risks missing the point. The Sudarshan Chakra is not an attempt to replicate the Iron Dome on a grander scale. India is a subcontinent-sized power facing state adversaries armed with advanced weaponry, not a small nation confronting mostly unguided rockets fired by non-state militias. The operational environment, strategic rationale, and technological demands are altogether different.

To understand how India’s Sudarshan Chakra Shield will look, one must examine four central dimensions: scale, operational context, affordability, and architecture. Each reveals why India’s shield will be less a compact dome and more a sprawling, layered umbrella, shaped by its geography, adversaries, and resources.

The Challenge of Scale

The first and most daunting challenge is India’s geography. India is roughly 150 times larger than Israel.

Israel’s small size, comparable to Meghalaya, makes the Iron Dome feasible. With a handful of batteries strategically placed, Israel can cover most of its population centres and critical infrastructure. Radars detect incoming rockets within seconds, and interceptors, with a range of 4 to 70 km, can neutralise threats almost immediately.

The system’s centralised command and compact operational area allow for rapid response times, critical for countering the short flight times of rockets launched from Gaza or southern Lebanon.

India’s scale, however, demands a fundamentally different approach. Its borders stretch across diverse terrains and it faces two nuclear-armed adversaries.

Instead, the United States developed a bifurcated missile defence architecture. The Ground-based Midcourse Defence (GMD) system, with interceptors in Alaska and California, is designed for limited protection against intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) from Russia, North Korea, and China. Regional systems such as Aegis, both ship- and land-based, and THAAD protect specific theatres, including US forces in East Asia or allies in Europe.

Russia follows a similar logic, concentrating its A-135, S-400, and the newer S-500 systems around major population centres like Moscow and St Petersburg, and around key military installations, leaving vast swathes of its 17 million square kilometres uncovered.

India will adopt a similarly selective approach. The Sudarshan Chakra Shield will not blanket every inch of its territory but will prioritise protective bubbles around critical nodes.

These would include the National Capital Region (Delhi), nuclear command-and-control sites, towns with major military bases such as Ambala or Pune, industrial hubs like Mumbai’s financial district, and power infrastructure such as nuclear plants and oil refineries.

High-value cities like Bengaluru, home to India’s tech industry, or Hyderabad, a pharmaceutical hub, will likely be prioritised. Sparsely populated rural areas or less strategic regions may remain unprotected due to cost and feasibility constraints.

State Adversaries, Not Militias

The second defining dimension of India’s Sudarshan Chakra Shield is the nature of the threat it must address. This is what makes it fundamentally different from Israel’s Iron Dome.

Israel’s Iron Dome was conceived with one narrow mission in mind: defending Israeli cities and military sites from unguided rockets fired by non-state militias such as Hamas and Hezbollah. These rockets are crude, relatively cheap, and notoriously inaccurate. They follow simple, predictable arcs that radars can track almost instantly.

The genius of Iron Dome lies not just in its interceptor missiles but in its algorithms. The system quickly calculates which incoming rockets are likely to hit populated areas or critical infrastructure, and which will fall harmlessly in the desert. Only the dangerous ones are intercepted.

This efficiency makes the system affordable and sustainable. Its engagement ranges of 4 to 70 kilometres are more than enough in Israel’s compact geography, where distances are small and reaction times are measured in seconds.

India faces a very different kind of battlefield, both in terms of scale and diversity. Its adversaries are not militias lobbing crude rockets over the border but two nuclear-armed states, fielding modern, diverse, and constantly evolving arsenals.

Pakistan’s missile programme spans a wide spectrum, from short-range systems capable of hitting border cities within minutes to long-range missiles that can reach deep into India’s heartland. Many are nuclear-capable, meaning even a single failure of interception could be catastrophic.

On top of this, Islamabad has embraced drones as a tool of asymmetric warfare. In May 2025, during Operation Sindoor, it unleashed swarms of low-cost drones against Indian positions, aiming to overwhelm defences either by forcing the waste of expensive interceptors or by slipping through gaps in coverage.

China’s challenge is even broader and more advanced. The PLA Rocket Force (PLARF) commands the world’s largest conventional missile arsenal.

From across Tibet and Xinjiang, it can unleash short- and medium-range ballistic missiles, long-range cruise missiles, and increasingly, hypersonic glide vehicles. These travel at extreme speeds and manoeuvre unpredictably, making interception nearly impossible with current technology.

The DF-17 hypersonic system can evade traditional missile defences. The DF-21D “carrier killer” and the DF-26 “Guam killer” are designed to target US assets, but their range easily blankets Indian bases and naval groups.

Alongside these, China has invested heavily in stealth aircraft and drones designed to penetrate air defence networks, giving it multiple pathways to bypass Indian defences.

Unlike Pakistan, China has the industrial scale and technological sophistication to sustain a prolonged missile and drone saturation campaign.

Together, these threats, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, drones, hypersonic, and stealth platforms, form a multi-layered, state-backed threat environment very different from the crude rockets that Israel’s Iron Dome was built to stop.

Recent conflicts elsewhere underline the urgency of these challenges. In the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, Azerbaijan used Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones and Israeli-made Harop loitering munitions (which India also used during Operation Sindoor) to devastating effect, crippling Armenian armour and air defences.

In Ukraine, Russia’s relentless use of Kalibr cruise missiles and Iranian Shahed-136 drones has pushed Kyiv’s air defence network to its limits. In response, Ukraine has built a drone ecosystem from scratch and successfully struck multiple targets inside Russia from within Russian territory.

Pakistan’s waves of drone attacks in 2025 mirrored these global lessons. Although India’s air defence systems successfully intercepted most of them, this highlights how even low-tech tools can challenge traditional defences.

The Price of Protection

Missile defence is not simply an engineering challenge. It is an economic one. The hardest truth of any shield is that it can be overwhelmed if the attacker is willing to expend enough firepower.

A single advanced interceptor can cost between one and five million dollars, while the drone, rocket or missile it is tasked to shoot down may cost only a few thousand. This asymmetry creates what military planners call the cost-exchange problem, where the defender almost always pays more per shot than the attacker.

Israel’s Iron Dome manages this problem by being selective. Its algorithms calculate which rockets pose a danger to populated areas and only engage those, conserving interceptors and keeping the system sustainable. Even with that efficiency it relies on heavy American subsidies to replenish interceptor stocks after major conflicts.

India cannot afford to fire expensive interceptors at every incoming threat, especially if adversaries use saturation tactics. Pakistan has already experimented with massed swarms of low-cost drones to try to exhaust Indian magazines.

China, with its industrial depth, could mount missile salvos designed specifically to overwhelm layered defences. In such scenarios the economics of defence can become as decisive as the technology itself.

That is why the Sudarshan Chakra must embed affordability into its design. Lasers, electronic warfare systems and cheaper indigenous interceptors are not luxuries but necessities. They provide low-cost counters to drones and cruise missiles while preserving the high-end missiles for ballistic and hypersonic threats.

Affordability also explains India’s choice of selective coverage, with protective bubbles around critical cities and assets rather than blanket national defence. The shield’s credibility will depend not only on its ability to intercept but also on its ability to sustain defence through long campaigns without being bankrupted by the cost of interception.

System of Systems

India’s Sudarshan Chakra Shield will not be a single, self-contained weapon like Israel’s Iron Dome.

Where Iron Dome marries radar, battle management, and interceptors as one compact package, India must build an adaptive system of systems, a layered federation of sensors, shooters, and command networks drawn from multiple countries and indigenous programmes, all stitched together to cover different threat bands across a vast geography.

At the outer edge sits space-based surveillance: early-warning satellites to spot hot launches, cue ground networks, and lengthen the decision window. Feeding that window would be long-range ground radars, high-power, wide-aperture systems positioned to watch arcs from Tibet and Xinjiang and Pakistan, plus coastal chains along the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal.

Together, these form the first tier of detection and tracking, handing off to mid-course and terminal sensors as a threat races inward.

The shooter layer would be deliberately diverse. Russian S-400 regiments already protect critical zones with high-altitude, long-range interceptors. Israeli systems such as Barak-8 for medium and long-range air defence and Spyder for quick-reaction short-range tasks are optimised for cruise missiles and manned or unmanned aircraft.

Indigenous weapons fill in and thicken the coverage. Akash for area defence, QRSAM for mobile point-defence of forces and vital nodes, and the PAD and AAD pair from the Ballistic Missile Defence programme for endo- and exo-atmospheric ballistic intercepts.

Directed-energy weapons, still experimental, enter at the very close-in layer as a low-cost, deep-magazine counter to quadcopters, loitering munitions, and swarming drones.

Binding these disparate elements is the Integrated Air Command and Control System (IACCS), the backbone that fuses air pictures, reconciles tracks, assigns shooters, and enforces engagement rules.

India has made tangible progress integrating static and mobile radars into IACCS. The harder lift would be to achieve full interoperability across Russian, Israeli, and Indian platforms so that tracks, threat classifications, and fire-control quality data can move seamlessly.

NATO has wrestled with this problem for decades and even the US military still fights through interface friction. India will need common data models, secure high-bandwidth links, disciplined time synchronisation, and rigorous joint tactics so a cue from one sensor can trigger a shot from another system without human latency.

Within this architecture, BMD could provide the ceiling. There could now be a "green signal" for operational deployment of Phase-1 of the indigenous two-tier shield, which DRDO says is designed to track and destroy ballistic missiles in the 2,000-km class at different altitudes, both endo and exo, to raise kill probability.

In July last year, India successfully flight-tested an endo-atmospheric interceptor under Phase-II, with the defence ministry stating it demonstrated the indigenous ability to defeat hostile nuclear-capable missiles in the 5,000-km range class.

If fielded, Phase-1 would anchor city and asset-centric protective bubbles, while Phase-II adds depth against longer-range, higher-speed threats.

Phase-1 of this air-defence system is targeted for the 2028–29 timeframe, adding a homegrown, high-reach layer against aircraft, cruise missiles, and select ballistic profiles. As these missiles arrive, they will slot into IACCS tasking, giving commanders more engagement options and easing dependence on imports.

Below the high tiers, the architecture becomes multi-layered and overlapping. Long-range radars cue medium-range shooters such as Barak-8 and future Kusha rounds. Those in turn are backstopped by mobile point-defence systems like QRSAM and Spyder and close-in effectors such as Akash NG, guns, electronic attack, and emerging lasers.

Coastal and sea-based batteries extend coverage over approach corridors, while hardened, redundant command posts preserve control under attack.

The goal would be no single point of failure. Every defended asset should sit under stacked domes of early warning, mid-course discrimination, and terminal defeat, so that leakers face multiple shots on the way in.

This approach is not theoretical. India’s existing integrated, multi-layered network, blending Indian and foreign surface-to-air systems under IACCS, thwarted waves of Turkish-origin drones and Chinese-origin missiles during Operation Sindoor in May, demonstrating how sensor fusion and layered fires can blunt mixed salvos.

Scaling that success is the next step. India would need more sensors, more shooters, tighter data links, and faster battle management, and that is perhaps why the Prime Minister set a deadline not for next year or a year after that, but for a decade.

If India gets the plumbing right through standards, interfaces, latency, and cyber-hardening, the Sudarshan Chakra Shield would become remarkably flexible. It will not be a monolith but an evolving federation that can absorb new satellites, radars, interceptors, jammers, and lasers as they mature. In a threat environment that shifts yearly from cheap swarms to hypersonics, that agility is the real deterrent.