The New CDS Has a Three-Letter Plan. AI Is the Thread Running Through It
India got a new Chief of Defence Staff on 31 May 2026. General N. S. Raja Subramani took charge as the country's third CDS, succeeding General Anil Chauhan, whose tenure ended the previous day. He also becomes Secretary of the Department of Military Affairs.
In his very first address after taking charge, the new CDS reaffirmed his commitment to implementing the Prime Minister's vision of JAI. Jointness, Atmanirbharta, and Innovation. It is a framework Prime Minister Modi articulated and that the previous CDS, General Chauhan, described as the mantra given by the Prime Minister. The new CDS has now carried it forward as his own guiding principle.
It is a neat slogan, but it is not only a slogan. Each of the three letters describes a hard, unfinished task. And artificial intelligence runs quietly through all three. This article explains how, in plain terms.
Source: CDS Gen Subramani on the JAI vision
J. Jointness
Jointness means the Army, Navy, and Air Force fighting as one integrated force rather than three separate ones. The end state is theatreisation, where commands are organised by geography and mission rather than by service.
General Chauhan was blunt about how far India has to go. He noted that India lags ten to fifteen years behind countries that have already built joint theatre structures, and called these structures one of the most transformative reforms India will undertake. The new CDS has made jointness his stated primary focus.
Here is where AI enters. Jointness is, at its core, a data problem. Three services that each see the battlefield through their own sensors, their own radios, and their own software cannot fight as one. They need a shared picture, updated in real time, that every commander can trust. Building that shared picture from radar feeds, drone video, satellite imagery, and signals, fast enough to be useful, is exactly the kind of work AI does well.
This is not theoretical. In his final days in office, General Chauhan released the Joint Air Defence Doctrine and launched a Tri-Services Tele Directory application built in-house by the Directorate General of Signals. Small steps, but the direction is clear. Jointness at machine speed needs machine assistance.
Source: CDS Chauhan on the JAI triad and theatreisation
A. Atmanirbharta
Atmanirbharta means self-reliance. In defence, it means building and inducting indigenous weapons rather than importing them. The new CDS called it a central pillar of national security and committed to accelerating the development, induction, and integration of indigenous systems.
For AI specifically, atmanirbharta is the hardest of the three letters, and the most important. An imported AI system is not sovereign. If the model, the chips, or the cloud that runs it sit outside India, then the data and the capability sit outside Indian control.
This is where India's wider AI effort matters to defence. The IndiaAI Mission, with its ₹10,000 crore outlay, is funding Indian companies to build foundation models from scratch. Firms like Sarvam and BharatGen, profiled in an earlier Bidfoil piece, are building models trained on Indian data and hosted on Indian infrastructure. That is atmanirbharta in AI, taking shape.
The honest gap remains hardware. As an earlier piece on GPUs explained, India cannot yet manufacture the advanced chips that train frontier AI, and is limited in how many it can import. True atmanirbharta in AI is not yet achieved. It is being built, one layer at a time, and the chip layer is the slowest.
I. Innovation
Innovation is the letter the new CDS leaned on most heavily in his first address. He said innovation in thought and action will drive the capability development of the armed forces, and that collaboration between the military, industry, academia, startups, and the research ecosystem will be the key enabler for modernisation.
This is a meaningful shift in tone. For decades, Indian defence development meant large public-sector laboratories working slowly behind closed doors. The new framing puts startups and private industry at the centre. Programmes like iDEX, the defence innovation scheme, exist precisely to pull small Indian companies into defence problems.
Source: CDS Subramani on innovation and collaboration
For AI, this matters because the most useful military AI is not always the most expensive. The lesson of recent years is that efficiency beats brute scale. A small, cheap, edge AI chip on a drone, described in an earlier Bidfoil piece, can do real work in the field without any datacentre behind it. A nimble startup can often build a working solution faster than a large laboratory. Innovation, in the AI age, rewards the small and the fast.
The Honest Part
JAI is a framework, not a finished capability. It names three correct goals. It does not, by itself, achieve any of them.
Jointness still faces what General Chauhan himself acknowledged as the natural turf battles between services that every nation attempting integration has faced. Atmanirbharta in AI is still limited by the chip layer that India does not yet control. Innovation still depends on whether the collaboration between the military and the startup ecosystem turns into actual fielded systems, or stays in pilot projects and demonstration halls.
What can be said is that the direction is right, and that AI sits at the centre of all three letters rather than to the side of them. Jointness needs AI to fuse data across services. Atmanirbharta needs AI built and run in India. Innovation needs the small, fast, efficient AI that startups can deliver.
The new CDS has inherited a clear framework and a long list of unfinished work. The three letters are easy to say. The thread running through them, the quiet work of building Indian AI that actually serves the Indian military, is the hard part. The next few years will show whether the thread holds.