Yudh Abhyas 2026 puts U.S. counter-drone vehicles on Indian ranges for the first time

The Indian and United States armies opened the 22nd Yudh Abhyas on 9 September and will keep it running until 28 September on two ranges at once. One half sits at the Mahajan Field Firing Ranges near Bikaner in Rajasthan. The other sits at Auli in Uttarakhand, a high bowl at about 2,500 metres and roughly 95 kilometres from the Line of Actual Control with China.

The new hardware is the point. The U.S. Army has brought the Mobile Low, Slow, Small Unmanned Aircraft Integrated Defeat System, known as M-LIDS, onto Indian soil for the first time under the Operation Pathways framework. The kit rides on a pair of Oshkosh M-ATV vehicles. It combines electronic warfare, the FAAD command system, KuRFS radar, an XM914 30 mm cannon and Coyote Block 2 interceptors. It is a training deployment, not a sale.

Arctic-trained soldiers from the 11th Airborne Division at Fort Wainwright, Alaska, are on the mountain side. The 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force is on the exercise to put long-range precision fires and a shared command net into the same problem set as the counter-drone screen.

Desert rockets and mountain guns

The desert phase is built around rockets and howitzers. India is fielding Pinaka multi-barrel launchers and K9 Vajra guns. The U.S. side is bringing HIMARS. AH-64E Apache helicopters are in the series for the first time, with Hellfire missiles, 70 mm rockets and 30 mm chain guns. The mountain phase uses M777 ultra-light howitzers lifted by Chinooks, the kind of move that matters when roads run out.

The drill has a command-post half and a field-training half. It is meant to end in a combined live-fire shoot that ties American and Indian long-range systems onto one digital picture. That only works if radios, target data, fire-control rules and airspace control talk to each other. M-LIDS is there to throw a defensive layer around the posts and batteries while that picture is being built.

U.S. Ambassador Sergio Gor, quoted in Indian coverage, called the work a matter of learning from each other and building trust and capabilities. About 350 troops from each army were planned in earlier briefings. Exact headcounts on the ground this week have not been published in full.

Why Auli is not a random hill

Auli is a ski town that happens to sit close to the same kind of altitude and weather the Indian Army has had to plan around since the 2020 stand-off in eastern Ladakh. Training there is not a signal of an imminent operation. It is a choice of ground that looks like the ground staff officers now study. Bikaner supplies the opposite problem: heat, distance, dust and space for rockets to fly.

Drones have changed both those problems. Cheap aircraft have already been used in Ukraine, in the Gulf and along India's own borders. A counter-drone pair of trucks will not settle that. It does give two armies a shared week to practise detect, jam and shoot against the same targets, under the same range rules, with the same after-action arguments.

Yudh Abhyas began in 2004 as a counter-insurgency exchange and has grown into a two-theatre conventional drill. The 2026 edition is the first to treat small unmanned aircraft as a central threat rather than an add-on. That is the fact that will travel with the after-action report, long after the Apaches fly home.