Six F-35s fly with Indian fighters at Jodhpur in Tarang Shakti

Six US Air Force F-35 Lightning IIs have been flying with Indian fighters at Jodhpur in Exercise Tarang Shakti, the first time the aircraft has taken part in a joint drill on Indian soil. More than 200 US personnel are with the jets. Jodhpur Air Force Station sits in Rajasthan, about 200 kilometres from the Pakistan border. The South China Morning Post, reporting on Tuesday, put the flying window as having begun on 26 September and running toward next Monday.

India's own aircraft in the mix include the Russian-designed Sukhoi Su-30MKI, the French Rafale and the indigenous Tejas. Other participants named in the same account are Australia, the United Arab Emirates, France, Germany, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, with several observer nations. The drill is therefore not a bilateral flypast. It is a crowded airfield on which a fifth-generation American jet is sharing a mission board with a mixed fleet.

What India can see, and what it cannot

Sushant Singh, a South Asian studies lecturer at Yale and a former Indian Army officer, told the paper the participation signals a degree of military confidence that communiques do not manufacture, and that it lets India compare Western networked air power with its Russian, French and home-built fleet. Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan made the operational point: Rafales, Su-30MKIs and Tejas flying beside the F-35 is a test of whether different generations can work in one mission. Sameer Patil said the Indian side will also look at the aircraft's stealth characteristics.

That last item is the limit. Washington has not opened the jet's sensitive systems for an Indian workshop. A drill shows how the aircraft arrives, talks to other jets, and leaves. It does not hand over the coating process or the mission software. Patil tied the interest to India's own fifth-generation project, the Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft, which has been held up by the difficulty of ultra-precise stealth manufacturing and by the search for a suitable engine. Tarang Shakti does not solve either problem. It gives pilots a look at an aircraft that has already solved them for someone else.

Why Jodhpur, and why now

Jodhpur is a western airbase. Putting six F-35s there, 200 kilometres from Pakistan, is a choice about who can see the ramp. The number is small. Six jets and 200 people is a detachment, not a wing. It is large enough to fly realistic mixed missions with Su-30s and Rafales, and small enough to leave at the end of the exercise. The political signal is the location and the first-time claim, not a change in India's order of battle.

The timing sits inside a wider American presence in the region. A US carrier is already described as heading for the Middle East war, and US bombers have just left a British base after a threat Washington linked to Iran. Tarang Shakti is a separate theatre. The jets at Jodhpur are not the jets over the Gulf. The connection is only that the same air force is busy in both places, and still sent a detachment to Rajasthan.

The comparison that matters after Monday

When the F-35s leave, India will still fly Su-30MKIs, Rafales and Tejas. The useful residue of the drill is whether those three types could take a feed from a stealth jet and act on it, and whether Indian controllers could put them in the same lane without a muddle. That is a procedures question, not a purchase. No sale has been announced. The AMCA engine problem remains a factory problem in Bengaluru, not a solved item at Jodhpur.

The public facts are the six jets, the 200 people, the three Indian types, the partner list, and the 200-kilometre distance to the border. Outcomes of specific sorties have not been published. Next Monday is the date the current account gives for the end of the flying. Until then the ramp at Jodhpur is the place where India's mixed fleet is being measured against an aircraft it does not own.