Indian Military Exercises Along Border Regions – Posturing & Signaling

Since October 2025, the Indian Armed Forces have embarked on a series of military exercises along all of India’s borders with its neighbors. To keep the space off-limits to civilian traffic, NOTMARS and NOTAMs have been issued, continued military exercises until January 2026. Such a long list of notifications marking areas off-limits at different times and locations all the way until January 2026 has raised questions. Continuous mass movements of armed assets so close to the borders of neighbors logically raise questions. What is going on? Why are the Indian Armed Forces launching so many different military exercises with weapons pointed at their neighbors? This is what to know.

Several exercises testing the Indian Armed Forces multi-dimensionally 

The military exercises being carried out reserved rather large spaces, making them almost completely off-limits to certain or all types of civilian traffic. The pattern being observed makes it clear that the exercises consist of large-scale deployments in air and at sea.

Some other exercises involving the Air Force closer to India’s borders with Nepal and Bangladesh appear to be of a more muted nature, intended to drill readiness and response times. Exercises in India’s eastern front in general largely consisted of practice runs for combat aircraft or smaller scale rehearsals for new combat arms deployments. Examples of such include work-in-progress doctrines such as Rudra which is a brigade sized unit consisting of infantry, artillery, special operators, and UAVs under a single command. Divyastra is also notable as a new concept being tested out in Arunachal Pradesh and neighboring regions. It is a concept for a new kind of artillery battery formation for the Indian Army, which combines traditional artillery formations with UAVs. [The Economic Times]

It must be noted that these exercises follow on from Exercise Teesta Prahar in May which was conducted in northern West Bengal. The naming of the exercise was not an accident, as this large-scale exercise involving armored units, rocket artillery, infantry, and tactical helicopter formations was intended to simulate a new kind of warfare for the difficult terrain.

The pattern appears to be rather clear. For India’s Western Front facing Pakistan, its deployment package will consist of mass combined-service formations, with the Navy being an insensible participant. It is in line with India’s past warfighting traditions, attempting to ensure the firepower and numbers edge where it matters most in the new age of warfare.

For its Eastern Front facing Bangladesh, China, and potentially even Nepal, the deployment package will consist of out-of-the-box high-tech combined arms and potentially even combined-command formations. Here, special operations capable forces serve as a key anchor alongside potent Air Force asset deployment to attempt to overcome difficult terrain and physiography.

Given below are detailed descriptions of notable exercises from the time period between October 2025 and January 2026:

a) Exercise Trishul – 3^rd October to 10^th November 2025 

Judging from the name itself, Trishul has indeed been a combined-arms effort involving the Indian Army, Navy, and Air Force operating in tandem. The operational area for Trishul has predictably been Rajasthan and Gujarat, pointing a combined arms spear towards Pakistan.

It makes perfect sense for Trishul to focus there, as the rather flat terrain of the Gujarat-Rajasthan axis was and is always going to serve as the primary entry axis for a general advance into Pakistan’s Punjab and Sindh provinces, which comprise its economic and population cores. A rather large naval component is also attached to Trishul, led by the Indian Navy’s Western Naval Command. The flagship of the Indian Navy here happens to be the aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya, accompanied by a sizeable collection of heavily armed and newer-production destroyers, frigates, corvettes, and support vessels. Submarines attached to the Western Fleet are conventional diesel-electric attack submarines equipped for ship-to-ship combat.

Indeed, the Western Fleet is the primary offensive arm of the Indian Navy intended for combat against Pakistani naval and air assets. Its dual-domain focus is reflected in the fact that INS Vikramaditya was joined by INS Vikrant, which is typically the flagship of the Eastern Fleet. It is important to note that INS Vikrant was deployed to the Western Fleet’s zone of operation during Operation Sindoor, giving out a clear signal that both of the Indian Navy’s aircraft carriers would be deployed towards Pakistan for combat operations.

INS Vikramaditya currently hosts nearly all of the Indian Naval Air Arm’s combat aircraft, the carrier-based MiG-29K variant which would be able to provide a degree of combat power in conjunction with Indian Air Force formations. The naval Rafale-M variants remain on order, and it will be several years before these jets are made ready for deployment aboard INS Vikrant. Therefore, the vessel’s own capabilities of power projection may remain muted, but its carrier battle group consisting of other combat vessels may nonetheless pose a serious challenge. [AeroTime]

In combination with the Indian Army’s armored formations, among which the best tend to be deployed under its Western and Southern Commands, Trishul was intended practice the Indian Armed Forces’ capabilities of mustering the resources required to go on the offensive. Something of this scale was done during the 1965 India-Pakistan War previously, which saw Indian Army formations cross the Radcliffe Line to threaten the city of Lahore itself.

About 30,000 personnel were deployed by the Army, and amphibious landings were conducted on the Saurashtra coast of Gujarat serving as a practical exercise for its logistics infrastructure to be able to support the advance of such a force. Amphibious landings by the Indian Armed Forces is a notable development as they have historically either avoided them entirely due to their complex logistical requirements and very high vulnerability, or they have only practiced amphibious landings in exercises with US help. This time, amphibious landing operations were carried out almost entirely by the Indian Armed Forces themselves. INS Jalashwa, an amphibious transport dock ship and other Landing Craft Utility (LCU) vessels domestically designed and produced deployed sizeable Army and Navy MARCOS contingents. [The Diplomat]

Of course, the effectiveness of such operations still remain limited by India’s non-existent combat experience with amphibious landings and its lack of a dedicated Marine Corps-type combat arm. Despite that, Pakistan’s southern coastline along the Thatta belt, the Indus Delta, and the Karachi coast could be ideal landing zones for such operations if naval and air supremacy are established. This seems to have been the focus as the lead branch for Trishul was the Indian Navy.

Location: Western Indian Ocean, Rajasthan, Gujarat

Target: Southern Pakistani coast & the central-to-southern Pakistani delta.

b) Cold Start – 6th to 10th October 2025

The ‘Cold Start’ exercises took place in separate occasions in Babina and Mhow, Uttar Pradesh. As the title of the exercise suggests, they were exercises intended to rehearse primarily the Indian Army’s and Indian Air Force’s readiness for the strategic combat doctrine also known as Cold Start. The theoretical basis for Cold Start is to overwhelm Pakistani military forces rapidly prior to any military exchange, so that favorable diplomatic conditions can be extracted for use by India on the negotiating table.

At its core, the primary reasoning behind the doctrine has always been to drastically cut down the time required for the Indian Armed Forces to fully mobilize for a confrontation. It is said that during the 2001 India-Pakistan standoff in the aftermath of the terror attack targeting the Indian Parliament that year, it took the Indian Armed Forces 28 days to fully mobilize in bulk to make it to the standoff. Such a long time frame is unacceptable for any military in the 21st century, much less a force that is vulnerable to pressure from all across the world.

Exercise Cold Start on the other hand, is intended to achieve a very specific purpose. This exercise has involved drones of all sorts, including surveillance and combat drones. . Such assets were deployed in limited numbers during Operation Sindoor, providing limited use yet managing to put pressure on Pakistani assets positioned along the border zone. A large focus of the current exercises is effective air defense capabilities, intending to drill against enemy UAV and light aircraft incursions. This is likely to be a direct result of unprecedent Pakistani UAV activity during Operation Sindoor. The Pakistan Army and Air Force themselves had gone on to deploy drones to great effect against Afghan Taliban and Pakistani Taliban targets during its own confrontation with Afghanistan. [India Today]

India is at risk of being left behind and evidently, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has proven that effectively deployed drone formations can decimate armored columns and can also effectively harass supply lines. This is currently a key vulnerability of Indian Army forces positioned towards Pakistan. Forming the Indian Army’s armored fist are T-72s, BTRs, BMP-2s, T-90s, the exact types of vehicles that have met fiery ends on the Ukrainian battlefields quite frequently in viral video clips.

Without a drone counter of their own, they will be rather vulnerable to Pakistani drone deployments, and 2025’s Cold Start exercises are precisely intended to test those drone counters. Across its three branches, the Indian Armed Forces maintains a steadily-growing fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) from a diverse range of sources, including the MQ-9 Reaper for naval operations. In the event of confrontations, IAI Herons and IAI Eitans have been deployed the most, providing surveillance and light attack capabilities.

Smaller drones that have proved their capabilities in eliminating individual human targets are also slated for serial production later by India’s state-owned Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO). DRDO is also in the middle of the development phases of the Ghatak, Rustom and Archer platforms, some of which would be capable of firing ATGMs and other munitions. It is important to mention that India’s domestic drone production efforts have advanced at a snail’s pace, and serial deployment will still be a considerable number of years away. Nevertheless, Cold Start 2025 will remain a blueprint shaping how drones are deployed by India for the foreseeable future.

Locations: Babina, Uttar Pradesh & Mhow, Madhya Pradesh.

c) Indra 2025 – 6th to 15th October 2025

Held at the Mahajan Field Firing Range in western Rajasthan, Indira 2025 about armored gunnery and joint counter-terrorism drills. The fact that it was a joint India-Russia exercise is no surprise as the bulk of India’s armored units are composed of Russian-produced T-90 and T-72 main battle tanks. It might have seemed to be a rather larger exercise at first glance, but the armored section of the exercise was limited to gunnery practice. A significant feature of the field gunnery exercises have been those using infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers. These platforms prominently include the BMP-2 operated by both Russian and Indian forces for mechanized infantry and tank support missions.

Much time was spent in joint UAV operations focused more on counter-terrorism, and getting the visiting Russian troops used to operating in desert conditions. Experience operating with divergent doctrines is something that Indian military planners seem to want to continue honing. In its conception, Indra 2025 could have been something much larger that could effectively utilize the vast plains of Rajasthan. Until that happens, the exercises will continue to serve a purely geopolitical purpose. It is of course, an expression of India’s geopolitical balancing act. [TASS]

Russia remains and is set to continue to remain a harsh-weather ally of India, with India being an unassailable market for military equipment and natural resources. In a time when Russia has been facing consistent sanctions pressure and hostility, combined with the apparent rapprochement between the United States and Pakistan, India signals its intention of keeping its friends close.

On the other hand, the limited stature of the exercises does indicate India’s desire to maintain balanced ties, rather than leaning too heavily on Russia or Western partners on the opposite end.

Location: Mahajan Field Firing Range, Rajasthan.

d) Ajeya Warrior 2025 – 17th to 30th November 2025

The yearly Ajeya Warrior exercises are all about mechanized infantry deploying heavy weaponry for conducting high-intensity warfare. Held across the desert expanses of Rajasthan, this joint India-UK training exercise tested the ability of participating forces in covering large distances across flat and barren land. The joint nature of the exercise is intended to provide company-level formations with the ability to independently operate integrated systems and execute strategies on their own initiative.

Indeed, the number of participants for the exercise stood at 240, and while there may be questions raised about effective knowledge transfer, 2025’s Ajeya Warrior included extensive UAV drills. Company-level UAV drills are new, signaling a force-wide initiative. It remains to be seen whether future exercises will scale such deployments up to include multiple company-level formations operating in the same area of operations.

Perhaps more than being a statement of operational readiness, Ajeya Warrior serves to signal to NATO forces that India remains an inter-operable force that has a lot to teach. Rajasthan remains an effective training ground for desert conditions. Indeed, the territory of India itself houses a wide range of different biomes that offer harsh trials for any sort of military deployment.

Ajeya Warrior is also to be seen within the framework of the India-UK Vision 2035. This is a long-term agreement for defense cooperation between the two states, encompassing joint R&D, strategic development, and even general geopolitical alignment as part of India’s balancing act. For more direct military affairs, Ajeya Warrior 2026 will be the one to truly watch. [UK Government website]

Location: Mahajan Field Firing Range, Rajasthan.

e) Poorvi Prachand Prahar – 11th to 15th November 2025

Combined arms exercises in Arunachal Pradesh were undertaken in Arunachal Pradesh to posture against the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Taking place chiefly in high-altitude, forward areas at the extreme ends of Indian territory, this theatre-level exercise sought to drill Indian troops and officers in what is generally considered to be one of the Indian Armed Forces’ most vulnerable battlefronts.

High-altitude warfare operations where Indian forces must generally fight uphill remain a key vulnerability for them. Therefore, the requirement stands for combined arms formations to be able to check any Chinese advances decisively. Yet, perhaps due to the current operational shortcomings of the Indian Air Force, the exercise focused primarily on effective logistical support for ground troops through airlifts and supply drops.

Indeed, the primary challenge exposed by conflicts such as the 1962 Sino-Indian War and the 1999 Kargil War appeared to consistently have been logistics. Past cases of troops perishing due to exposure and lack of effective logistical support haunt operational planning.

Battlefield awareness and surveillance in difficult terrain were also practiced, with ISR-focused Air Force flight missions and Army UAV deployments. Keeping forces informed of enemy unit movements. With the absence of large air formations, Indian military planners are clearly not targeting any punitive expeditions crossing over across Arunachal Pradesh and into Chinese territory proper. Poorvi Prachand Prahar, staged primarily for Arunachal Pradesh, sought to develop a repeatable, reliable template enabling stationed forces to formulate robust defensive doctrines. [The Hindu]

The purpose it serves in terms of posturing is simple. It is to signal to China that its shortcomings in high-altitude warfare are being paid attention to. This is to be seen in light of controversies over the de jure ownership of a part, or all of Arunachal Pradesh that are evident between India and China. Thus, the ultimate intended message is that no Chinese ‘special military operation’ in Arunachal Pradesh will go over like the 1962 Sino-Indian War did.

Location: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, & Nagaland

f) AviaIndra – 15th to 22nd December 2025 & Other Drills

2025 has seen year-long weapons and flight drills by the Indian Air Force. Among the service branches, it can be considered a laggard due to the fact that it is under-strength by a significant margin compared to its officially sanctioned strength. It is the Air Force that has suffered the humiliation of a shootdown during Operation Sindoor.

Exercise AviaIndra set for 15 to 22 December is a joint exercise between India and Russia. The Indian Air Force’s mainstay fighter fleet consists of Sukhoi Su-30MKIs and Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-29, both being Russian-designed platforms. The exercise therefore seeks to transfer the best of Russian Air Force learning from its experiences during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Reports about the 2025 edition of the exercise make mention of the presence of IL-76 and Tejas platforms participating, with the former pointing to exercises involving airlift capacities and the latter pointing to an attempt to regain confidence following the crash of a Tejas during the Dubai Air Show.

The real value for the Indian Air Force in Exercise AviaIndra is the chance it provides for their pilots to test their interoperability and applying the knowledge for deployment strategies. Further exercises unrelated to AviaIndra in November and December have had various purposes ranging from operational capability testing, weapons drills, and joint-operations training with Army and Navy units. These exercises are set to continue into the first months of 2026 in the Indian North East. It is necessary to note that AviaIndra exercises are typically held in both India and Russia or a different Central Asian state acting as a host.

Confidence reinforcement following Sindoor and diplomatic posturing

As of the time of writing, the established consensus surrounding the result of the India-Pakistan military confrontation as part of Operation Sindoor is that Pakistan gained the upper hand. Popular narratives painting the exchange as a ‘war’ are inaccurate despite military operations targeting one another. It lacked the protracted military focus necessary for it to constitute a war in the way it is commonly understood. Instead of a war, the events following the Pahalgam attack had been a sprawling geopolitical chess game where China played the role of an ‘encouraging overseer’ while India and Pakistan confronted one another.

Pakistan had to have welcomed the challenge as India utilized Pahalgam to create a ‘rally around the flag’ effect domestically. It was the first combat debut of Pakistan’s new Chinese-produced J-10CEs and JF-17s, Turkish-produced surveillance and drone systems, and its own domestically produced data link system. Successfully shooting down one Rafale was enough for Pakistan to win the media war. It provided proof for three key Pakistani assertions:

1. The Pakistan Air Force’s Chinese-made fleet is capable of defeating the most advanced Indian Air Force combat aircraft.
   
2. The Pakistan Armed Forces as a whole are capable of advanced 21st century warfare where the integration of combat arms and technological solutions to winning the information edge are more important than ever before.
   
3. Pakistan is capable of seizing control of the global narrative on its own terms without India’s shadow.
   
4. The Pakistan Air Force is not tied down by its inability to deploy the F-16s as they wish.

It must still be noted that follow-up strikes from India resulted in significant damage to Pakistani military bases across the entire width of the country. While these strikes exposed Pakistan’s vulnerabilities with its lack of strategic depth, the media and public relations fallout has not been comparable to what followed after the downing of the Rafale. It was a much-required morale boost considering the fact that Pakistan’s wars against India in the previous century had results slanted against Pakistan.

The gaining of Pakistani-administered Kashmir in 1948 is the only notable victory, although the war goal involved capturing all of Kashmir. One cannot of course, forget the result of the Liberation War of Bangladesh and the concurrent Indo-Pakistan War of 1971 that began in its latter stages. The humiliation from that experience undoubtedly shapes Pakistan’s military posturing against India, cognizant of its numeric disadvantages.

Thus, the Pakistani success has also signaled globally the message that Pakistan can enforce a qualitative parity or even an advantage against India. This can be seen as the humiliation driving new experimental doctrines and large-scale military exercises that have been including all of its service branches. Quite telling is the fact that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has stated in the Lok Sabha that “Operation Sindoor is ongoing. Any reckless move by Pakistan will be met with a firm response”. [Prime Minister of India – Website]

Indeed, only a ceasefire was agreed upon by India and Pakistan instead of a formal peace treaty. Modi’s words keep further military aggression against Pakistan on the table, keeping Pakistani strategists guessing. At the same time, it may very well reflect an understanding among Indian military planners that they must follow up Operation Sindoor with a decisive blow against Pakistan, as they show signs of getting involved in an Afghanistan-shaped quagmire.

As for military exercises, they serve the basic purpose of keeping personnel and equipment ready. The morale loss from being unable to dominate Pakistan militarily and the very recent crash of a Tejas Mk.1A during an air show in Dubai has stung, since the Tejas is being positioned to bring the Indian Air Force up to full strength. It currently maintains 29 squadrons, compared to a sanctioned strength of 42 due to the retirement of legacy platforms such as the MiG-21s and MiG-27s. 2030 will also see the retirement of SEPECAT Jaguars, a platform designed for close air support. [Deutsche Welle]

Until more modern and capable platforms can be deployed regularly in all three branches, extensive and regular armed exercises work to keep the Indian Armed Forces ready and busy. The elephant in the room states that India is indeed trying to signal to its neighbors that it remains a military threat capable of multi-front and multi-domain engagements. Despite rather burning questions surrounding the readiness of its equipment and much of the results of its domestic military-industrial complex, the Indian Armed Forces remain a potent threat for its neighbors.

It is a rather difficult time to be an Indian diplomat as its continued reliance on Russia for essential resources has irritated the United States and the European Union. Both are key for India’s attempts to expand its domestic industrial base and receive the backing necessary to assert itself as an unquestioned regional hegemon.

The idea behind engaging in military exercises with so many different partners may signal an attempt of self-projection as an indispensable market. Such messaging would logically be aimed particularly at Russia and the United States. At the same time, an image of self-reliance intended to serve as a deterrence against Chinese military advances also appears to be the case. The Indian playbook for high altitude warfare against the Chinese appears to be taken directly from Sun Tzu, while attempts are made to plug the real gaps.

In the case of Bangladesh, recent sociopolitical developments may have encouraged or provided operational justification for the increased deployment of formations in West Bengal and the Siliguri Corridor. Some of these included demonstrations in front of Indian diplomatic missions and the residence of Assistant High Commissioner Dr. Rajeev Ranjan in particular. The activity of the Indian media industrial complex in its attempts to control the framing of Sharif Osman Hadi’s assassination and the events since then including the lynching in Mymensingh are notable. Not only do such actions serve to provide India with the narrative-setting power, they also work to drum support for aggressive actions towards Bangladesh, if they are ever to be taken. [The Business Standard]

On the other hand, the Bangladeshi High Commissioner to India, Riaz Hamidullah along with staff in their diplomatic compound was surrounded and aggressively heckled by members of the Akhand Hindu Rashtra Sena extremist group. This sequence of incidents have caused renewed strain on India-Bangladesh diplomatic relations, leaving near-term future relations on an uncertain track. [Prothom Alo]

On the military side of affairs, the XVII ‘Brahmastra’ Corps & XXXIII ‘Trishakti’ Corps are the premier formations positioned for a general orientation towards Bangladesh, but are more operationally geared towards a high-altitude confrontation with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Certain regional news outlets have also reported that regional Border Security Force (BSF) units are on heightened alert. Recent incidents such as the shooting of 2 Bangladeshi nationals in the Companiganj border region underscore the tensions that have been flaring up since the beginning of December.

Also notable is the III ‘Spear’ Corps responsible for the Indian North East in general. The visit of Lieutenant General Rajiv Kumar Sahni, who is the Director General of the Indian Army’s Electronic & Mechanical Engineering (EME) Corps is significant, as the purpose is to assess the readiness of new UAV and electronic warfare capabilities being inducted. Other social media and internet channels indicate similar visits from Lt. Gen. Sahni to the headquarters of corps-level formations situated around Bangladesh’s borders with India. [III Corps official Instagram account]

The situation demands further sustained observation.

Verification Note: Information is sourced from and corroborated from various news sources, documents, and government archives. Sources are carefully weighed for authenticity, and superfluous claims without evidence are discarded. Information is then analyzed and interpreted to come to conclusions. Map created using Google My Maps.