Recently, China teased in a video an aircraft carrier that is likely to be its fourth and the first one using nuclear power. Strip away the geopolitics for a moment. Set aside the China threat, the Hormuz blockade, the Red Sea crisis, the INS Vikramaditya structural audit, and the industrial arguments about Cochin Shipyard. Ask a simpler question: what does an aircraft carrier actually do that justifies the cost, the political will, and the roughly ten-to-twelve-year timeline from order to commissioning?
The answer is not one thing. It is a convergence of things that no other naval platform can replicate simultaneously — and it is precisely that convergence that makes the carrier the decisive instrument of maritime power projection rather than simply the most expensive one.
Begin with air power reach. Land-based combat aircraft are limited by the range of their home airfields. Operating from a carrier battle group stationed in international waters, those same aircraft—or their shipborne equivalents—can provide air cover, strike capability, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance over a maritime area the size of several Indian states, without requiring overflight rights, basing agreements, or the political complexities that attend both. A carrier battle group is, in the most literal sense, a piece of sovereign Indian territory that can be moved to wherever India’s interests require air power.
This matters enormously for a country like India. Consider the Strait of Hormuz: over two-thirds of India’s oil imports transit waters that pass through or near it. Land-based air power in India cannot meaningfully cover that chokepoint. A carrier battle group operating in the Arabian Sea can. The difference between having that capability and not having it is not measured in sorties. It is measured in the leverage India possesses during a crisis affecting that transit.
Consider next the sustained presence problem. Destroyers and frigates can show the flag. Submarines can lurk and deter. But neither can provide what naval planners call “persistent air superiority”—the continuous ability to intercept incoming missiles, drones, and aircraft over a wide area for days or weeks at a stretch.
That requires airborne assets cycling continuously from a flight deck. The USS Eisenhower’s deployment to the Red Sea in 2023–24 involved sustained combat air patrol missions over months, intercepting Houthi anti-ship missiles and drones, conducting strikes on Yemen, and providing the air umbrella under which surface ships operated. No surface combatant without a flight deck can perform that function.
India’s MiG-29K fighters operating from INS Vikrant or INS Vikramaditya, or the next-generation carrier-capable jets India is seeking, provide exactly this capability. But that capability requires a hull to stand on—and the hull needs to be in the right place, available, not in a drydock undergoing its scheduled maintenance.
The strike function is equally significant. Carrier air wings can reach targets hundreds of kilometres inland from the coast. In scenarios involving a Pakistani port used for hostile purposes, a Maldivian facility being developed by a hostile power, or any number of contingencies along India’s maritime periphery, carrier-launched strike missions provide options that circumvent the political and logistical complications of land-based operations. The ability to impose military consequences “at a time and place of India’s choosing” — a phrase that appears in various iterations of Indian maritime doctrine — is, in practice, substantially a function of whether India has a carrier battle group it can position off an adversary’s coast.
None of this is theoretical. The United States’ deployment of carriers to the eastern Mediterranean after October 2023 was not a combat exercise. It was a deterrence signal—two carrier strike groups telling regional actors that the cost of escalation would be decided in Washington, delivered by aircraft, at a time and altitude not of the adversary’s choosing. The signal was received.
India needs the same instrument of credible signalling in the Indian Ocean Region. INS Vikrant exists. INS Vikramaditya exists, with conditions. A third carrier does not, and given the ten-to-twelve-year construction timeline, it will not exist when India most needs it unless the order is placed significantly before that need becomes acute. The technological case, the operational case, and the strategic case converge on the same point: India’s third carrier is not a future requirement. It is a present decision.