Every army trains for the first battle. Very few plan seriously for the fortieth day. That gap, between the opening salvo and the long grind that follows, is where wars are won or lost. India has spent the last decade fixing its opening salvo. It now needs to think hard about the fortieth day.
The Quiet Arithmetic of War Wastage Reserves
War Wastage Reserves, known in service parlance simply as WWR, are the ammunition, spares and consumables an army keeps on hand to fight without waiting for fresh production. Indian doctrine has long spoken of a 40-day intense war reserve as the ideal.
For years, the reality fell well short of that ideal. A Comptroller and Auditor General review found that through the early 2010s, a large share of ammunition for artillery guns and tanks sat at barely ten days’ stock, against the accepted fallback floor of twenty days, known as the Minimum Acceptable Risk Level.
The 2016 Uri strikes forced a correction. Emergency financial powers were handed to the three Vice Chiefs, procurement timelines were compressed, and a decade-long push to close the ammunition gap began in earnest.
Operation Sindoor in May 2025 became the next hinge point. Four days of high-intensity precision strikes and air-defence engagements against Pakistan consumed munitions at a rate that peacetime budgeting rarely accounts for.
India’s effort to address critical ammunition shortages – exposed by Uri and Operation Sindoor – requires more than doubling inventory. Modern combat rapidly drains precision-guided munitions and air-defence interceptors, demanding that reserves be continuously updated based on actual usage patterns rather than outdated peacetime formulas
The government’s response, a decision to double War Wastage Reserves from existing levels, is the right instinct. But a reserve is only as useful as the assumptions behind it, and those assumptions need updating.
A short, sharp exchange of the Sindoor kind draws down precision-guided munitions and air-defence interceptors far faster than small arms rounds. A reserve built around the last war’s consumption pattern will always be slightly wrong for the next one.
The lesson is not simply to hold more stock. It is to hold the right stock, reviewed continuously against how the last conflict was actually fought rather than how the last five-year plan assumed it would be fought.
Recuperation: The Forgotten Half of the Equation
Stockpiling is only half the problem. The other half is recuperation, the speed at which a nation can replenish its reserves once a war has begun depleting them. A country can hold an impressive war reserve and still lose a long war if its factories cannot turn raw material into finished rounds fast enough once the shooting starts.
Ukraine has offered the starkest lesson here. Stockpiles that Western states had built up over decades of relative peace were exhausted within months of sustained artillery duels, and production lines calibrated for peacetime demand took years, not weeks, to scale up to meet demand.
NATO members are now openly discussing what used to be an unfashionable idea, namely maintaining warm production lines and pre-positioned tooling that can be switched to surge output on short notice, rather than relying purely on stored stock.
The ongoing US-Iran war of 2026, now five months old, offers the starkest confirmation yet. Several weeks of strikes and layered air defence against Iranian retaliation left American stockpiles severely depleted.
CSIS estimates that Patriot interceptor inventories are down by roughly two-thirds, from about 2,200 to under 1,000, and THAAD interceptor stocks have been cut by half, from 452 to under 280, while Precision Strike Missile reserves have fallen by nearly half.
Replenishment is measured in years, not months, because production lines run at a fraction of wartime consumption rates. For a superpower, this is sobering: even the world’s best-resourced military found one regional war enough to hollow out its high-end interceptor reserves.
India’s own ordnance and private defence manufacturing base has grown considerably, helped by the Make in India push and a defence production figure that crossed 1.5 trillion rupees in the last financial year. That is genuine progress.
Deep stockpiles are useless if factories cannot replenish them once war begins. As demonstrated by high-intensity global conflicts, peacetime production cannot match wartime consumption. India must fund warm, scalable manufacturing lines capable of rapidly surging output rather than relying solely on pre-existing inventory
But peacetime output growth is not the same as surge capacity in wartime. Few of India’s ammunition and missile production lines have been stress-tested for what happens if a conflict runs not four days but forty or more. Recuperation capacity, the ability to double or triple output of a critical munition within weeks of a war starting, deserves the same planning attention as the reserve stockpile itself.
War Stamina and National Endurance
Beyond ammunition lies a broader, less-discussed concept: war stamina. This is the capacity of an entire nation, not just its armed forces, to sustain a prolonged conflict: fuel reserves, transport capacity, medical surge capability, industrial labour, foreign exchange to pay for imported subsystems and the political will to bear casualties and economic disruption without the state fracturing under the strain.
The Iran-Israel exchange in mid-2025 illustrated this well. Israel’s vaunted layered air defence, built on interceptors like Iron Dome, David’s Sling and Arrow, performed impressively, but post-exchange reporting suggested interceptor stocks came under real pressure.
Replenishing high-end interceptors takes months, not days, because their supply chains involve specialised components that cannot be surged on demand. A nation’s endurance is only as strong as its slowest supply chain.
Ukraine has shown the same on the land-warfare front, where artillery barrel wear, drone battery cells and even basic items like winter clothing became limiting factors as much as any single weapon system.
For India, war stamina means asking uncomfortable questions that go beyond the Ministry of Defence’s usual remit. Does the country have sufficient strategic fuel reserves to sustain mechanised operations on two fronts simultaneously?
Are medical services, both military and civilian, structured to absorb mass casualties over weeks rather than days? Is the electronics and semiconductor supply chain, on which every modern precision weapon depends, resilient to the kind of external pressure an adversary would apply the moment a conflict began?
These questions sit uneasily across several ministries, which is precisely why they tend not to be asked.
What Recent Conflicts Actually Teach
Three lessons stand out from the conflicts of the past few years. First, precision munitions and air defence interceptors are consumed far faster in modern conflict than legacy planning assumes, and these are exactly the categories where India remains most dependent on complex, often imported, supply chains.
Second, industrial recuperation speed now matters as much as stockpile depth, because no reserve, however large, survives a war that outlasts its planners’ expectations.
Third, national endurance is a whole-of-government problem. Fuel, medical capacity, transport and finance all belong in war planning, not just in the three-service headquarters.
Strategic endurance extends far beyond the armed forces to include fuel reserves, healthcare capacity, financial resilience and supply chain security. A nation’s true stamina depends on its weakest link, requiring cross-ministry coordination to handle prolonged strain and casualty surges during an extended crisis
Operation Sindoor gave India a live, if brief, test of all three. It validated indigenous systems, provided planners with real consumption data rather than theoretical models, and highlighted where reserves and production capacity needed strengthening.
The value of that experience will be wasted if it yields only a larger stockpile figure, rather than a genuinely rethought reserve and recuperation architecture. It must be realised that Op Sindoor was a short, intense standoff exchange, not a full-fledged war for which India must be prepared. The two-front scenario would further aggravate the situation.
Recommendations for Indian Planners
A few concrete steps would move India from stockpiling instinctively to deliberate planning.
First, treat WWR planning as a living exercise rather than a fixed target. Reserve levels for precision munitions, air defence interceptors and artillery ammunition should be reassessed after every major operation, using actual consumption data rather than five-year-old projections, and the annual review should be presented to the Cabinet Committee on Security rather than buried in internal service audits.
Second, invest as seriously in recuperation as in reserves. This means contracting with private-sector manufacturers to maintain warm, tested production lines for critical munitions, capable of doubling output within a defined number of weeks of a war starting, with the government underwriting the cost of idle capacity in peacetime, as it already underwrites strategic fuel reserves.
India must turn operational insights into institutional policy by treating reserves as living targets, funding standby manufacturing capacity, eliminating critical import dependencies, sizing stockpiles for simultaneous two-front conflicts and establishing a unified, whole-of-government defence planning mechanism
Third, identify and reduce import dependence on the components that actually constrain surge capacity, chiefly semiconductors, guidance electronics and specialised propellants, rather than merely celebrating overall indigenisation percentages that can mask a critical single point of failure in the supply chain.
Fourth, build a genuine two-front reserve posture. Planning that treats Pakistan and China as sequential rather than simultaneous threats risks a reserve designed for one front collapsing under the demands of two active fronts. Reserve stock and recuperation capacity should be explicitly sized for simultaneous, not sequential, contingencies.
Fifth, broaden the definition of war stamina beyond the Ministry of Defence. A standing, whole-of-government mechanism linking defence production, petroleum reserves, the health ministry’s surge planning, and the finance ministry’s war contingency funding would ensure that endurance is planned as a national capability rather than improvised once a conflict begins.
Finally, resist the temptation to measure success solely by the size of the reserve. A reserve without a clear operational purpose, a tested recuperation plan, and the broader national stamina to use it is a number on a ledger rather than a genuine deterrent is not required.
India’s recent record of turning hard lessons into policy, from Uri to Sindoor, is genuinely encouraging. The task now is to ensure that instinct hardens into a permanent system, one that endures well beyond the memory of the last operation that prompted it.
The writer, a PVSM, AVSM, VSM has had an illustrious career spanning nearly four decades. A distinguished Armoured Corps officer, he has served in various prestigious staff and command appointments including Commander Independent Armoured Brigade, ADG PP, GOC Armoured Division and GOC Strike 1. The officer retired as DG Mechanised Forces in December 2017 during which he was the architect to initiate process for reintroduction of Light Tank and Chairman on the study on C5ISR for Indian Army. Subsequently he was Consultant MoD/OFB from 2018 to 2020. He is also a reputed defence analyst, a motivational speaker and prolific writer on matters of military, defence technology and national security. The views expressed are personal and do not necessarily carry the views of Raksha Anirveda
