Why India Must Accept Trump’s Offer of F-35 fighter bombers

The absence of a top-quality strike aircraft such as the F-35 is detracting from the IAF’s ability as a whole

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_II#/media/File:Formation_of_F-35_Aircraft_MOD_45157750.jpg

By Ajai Shukla
The Diplomat, 1st August 2025

In February, U.S President Donald Trump, in one of his trademark off-script surprises, offered to supply the Indian Air Force (IAF) with America’s most capable and secretive combat aircraft: the F-35 Lightning II “joint strike fighter” (JSF). This is the first time that Washington has signaled interest in supplying India with the F-35.

New Delhi should waste no time in accepting Trump’s offer and in integrating this immensely capable fighter-bomber into India’s strike arsenal.

India’s first step towards building a potent air strike capability must be to acknowledge that the induction of 36 Rafale fighters into the IAF’s fleet has failed to create the deterrence needed to keep Pakistan and China at bay. 

After the IAF’s strike on the Jaish-e-Mohammed encampment at Balakot in February 2019, in which it lost at least one MiG-21 fighter, Defense Minister Rajnath Singh insinuated that this would not have happened had the IAF possessed the Rafale. But five years later, with the IAF having inducted all 36 Rafales, India’s embarrassed leaders admitted to losing at least one Rafale in Operation Sindoor.

The unpalatable truth is that the IAF has been technologically leap-frogged by the Pakistan Air Force (PAF), and even more so by the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF), which will soon be operating three different types of 5^th-Generation fighters. 

By sharing radar and data links with the PAF, and integrating them with the onboard avionics in Pakistani fighters, the PLAAF has created an integrated battlespace network that is superior to the aviation systems, data links, and onboard platforms and electronics that equip the Indian fighters. 

In combating the PLAAF, a devastating ground strike capability must be one of the IAF’s primary requirements. Already, Beijing is relentlessly building roads and railways to the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the de facto border between India and China. 

In the 1962 Sino-Indian war, one of New Delhi’s most unforgivable and inexplicable blunders was to renounce the use of air power. This time around, as evident from the rapid and ongoing creation of air force infrastructure along the China border, India’s first response must take the form of interdiction strikes. 

This targeting of the enemy’s war-making infrastructure is referred to as “interdiction,” and is of two types: “battlefield interdiction” and “deep interdiction.” In the latter, Indian fighter-bombers like the F-35 would strike China’s railroads and highways into Tibet, isolating the Chinese military and preventing its reinforcement by road and railways from mainland China. 

The absence of a top-quality strike aircraft such as the F-35 would detract from the IAF’s ability as a whole. To mask its ideological proclivity for air superiority fighters, the IAF argues that the medium, multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA) can also strike enemy ground forces.
Strike it can, but nowhere as effectively as the F-35, which is designed ground up for this role. To use an athletics analogy, decathletes hurl the discus, throw the javelin, and also sprint 100 meters. None of them, however, achieves world standards in each of these events.

The Indian Army has not forgotten the IAF’s irrelevance during the Kargil conflict. When IAF fighters should have been supporting infantry by hammering air strikes onto Pakistani positions, fire support for India’s assaulting infantry came almost exclusively from the army’s own guns. Meanwhile, the IAF was searching for a way to equip its Mirage-2000s to deliver bombs accurately onto mountaintops.

Another argument fallaciously made against the F-35 is that its design—optimized for ground strike—renders it vulnerable to enemy fighters. In fact, owing to its stealth capabilities, U.S. Air Force combat simulations have found the F-35 to be the equal in air-to-air combat of four fighters of the 4^th Generation, which the IAF is now procuring.

Given these qualities and capabilities, it should be easy to make a case for acquiring the F-35. But the fighter jocks that dominate the IAF’s decision-making have a longstanding bias in favor of air dominance fighters. 

Like most air forces, the IAF has a tradition of focusing less on destroying enemy infrastructure and ground troops and more on that fighter-jock ambition of shooting down enemy fighters in air-to-air duels. 

The F-35’s mission profile will change all this. In the near-to-medium future, the IAF’s most likely missions against China or Pakistan will center on deep interdiction strikes: air-to-ground punitive raids against terrorist camps or ISI locations; retaliation for yet another terrorist outrage; or pre-emptive strikes against Pakistani ballistic missile silos when a nuclear launch against India seems imminent, .

With the IAF desperately short of medium, multi-role combat fighters, the government of India issued two global tenders for medium, multi-role fighters. The first tender, issued in August 2007 for 126 fighters, fizzled out into the purchase of 36 Rafale fighters from French aerospace manufacturer Dassault. A second tender for 110 more fighters, issued in 2019, is still being processed. 

Six fighter jet manufacturers responded to the first tender. Four of them were twin-engine fighters: Boeing’s F/A-18E/F Super Hornet; Russian Aircraft Corporation’s MiG-35; Eurofighter GmbH’s Typhoon, and Dassault Aerospace’s Rafale. Additionally, two single-engine aircraft were offered: Lockheed Martin’s F-21 and Saab’s new Gripen E. 

Any renewed procurement of fighter aircraft by the IAF seems likely to begin with the same six manufacturers that competed in the aborted 2007 tender, now offering improved variants of their medium fighters. In addition, another two fighter aircraft—Boeing’s F-15EX Eagle-II and Russia’s Sukhoi-35—could be fielded in the current tender. The participation of these big, twin-engine fighters could raise the cost of the new contract to a prohibitive $15-20 billion. In this climate, Trump's offer of F-35s should be actively considered. 

True, this would result in the entry of another fighter-type into the IAF, making inventory management an even greater logistics nightmare. The IAF chief warned last year that the air force already operates too many different aircraft types, with origins in too many different countries. The F-35 would constitute an unwieldy seventh fighter type in its inventory.