India’s Army Logistics Corps Begins Five-Day AI Training Programme

Gati Shakti Vishwavidyalaya (GSV) has opened a five-day Skill Development Programme on AI in Military Logistics and Sustainment at the Manekshaw Centre in New Delhi, running from June 29 to July 3, 2026. The course is built for officers of the Indian Army’s Army Service Corps (ASC), the branch that handles supply, transport, and sustainment for frontline units. The curriculum moves through machine learning, deep learning, generative AI, and agentic AI, with each layer tied to demand forecasting, predictive maintenance, automation, and operational efficiency. The inaugural session on June 29 framed the effort as the first programme of its kind dedicated exclusively to defence logistics.

The course is the latest step in a deeper pipeline between GSV and the Indian armed forces. The Indian Army and the Indian Air Force signed an MoU with GSV in September 2024 to build in-house logistics expertise using Indian academic resources, a partnership explicitly tied to the PM Gati Shakti National Master Plan and the National Logistics Policy. The new AI programme is the first course from that pipeline built around AI as its core subject rather than around supply chain management or transportation planning. The cohort at the Manekshaw Centre this week is meant to be the first to put that framing into practice.

How the Five Days Are Built

The programme runs five working days at the Manekshaw Centre, the Army’s flagship doctrine and training facility in Delhi Cantonment. By design, the curriculum is built around four AI stacks: machine learning, deep learning, generative AI, and agentic AI, each paired with a logistics application rather than taught in the abstract. The format blends expert-led lectures, interactive discussions, case studies, and hands-on learning, with the GSV aviation-logistics faculty leading the academic sessions.

The four stacks were chosen so that each one maps to a distinct logistics problem. Machine learning and deep learning feed the predictive layer that demand forecasting and maintenance planning depend on. Generative AI enters the picture for content generation and decision-support under tight timelines. Agentic AI, the newest of the four on the syllabus, is the one Lt Gen Sanjay Mitra flagged for its potential to take autonomous action inside resource-constrained operational environments.

The cohort studies under Brigadier Ajay Sharma, SM (Retd.), as Programme Director, with Dr. Vipul Kumar Mishra coordinating as Programme Coordinator. Professor Kaushik Das of Aviation Logistics leads the academic work and Dean (Academics) Professor (Dr.) Jitesh J. Thakkar delivers the programme overview that ties the course to GSV’s longer-running research on the Management Information Systems of the Army Service Corps (MISA) and lists the six logistics areas the four AI stacks will be applied to:

• Decision-making across operational environments
• Demand forecasting for ASC supply chains
• Predictive maintenance for sustainment operations
• Automation across logistics workflows
• Operational efficiency
• Resilient sustainment operations in complex environments

What the Three Senior Voices Set Out

Three senior officers framed the opening session, each from a different node in the Army’s logistics chain. Major General Shyamji Yadav, who delivered the inaugural opening address, set the programme in the context of emerging technologies and operational preparedness. The framing was deliberately broad: AI was presented less as a technology to adopt than as a layer to absorb across logistics doctrine.

Lieutenant General Mukesh Chadha, the Director General Supplies and Transport, delivered the keynote. He described the initiative as the first programme of its kind dedicated exclusively to military logistics and sustainment. Chadha tied the effort to India’s Viksit Bharat 2047 vision, which sets a national development target for that year. His message was that the Army has to build agile and future-ready logistics systems to stay aligned with that wider national plan.

Lieutenant General Sanjay Mitra, Director General Operational Logistics and Strategic Movement, zoomed in on two of the newer AI categories. He called out predictive analytics and agentic AI as the technologies most likely to address complex logistics challenges across the defence logistics operation. His focus was on resource optimisation and operational effectiveness rather than the broader national framing.

Professor Thakkar, who had covered the programme overview earlier, was the academic counterpart in the room. The three officers set different but complementary frames. Yadav grounded the programme in preparedness, Chadha in national vision, and Mitra in operational practice. Together, they cover the strategic, doctrinal, and tactical sides of the same problem.

Who Set the Frame at the Inaugural Session

Where This Sits in the GSV-Army Pipeline

The five-day AI course sits at the front end of a pipeline between GSV and the Indian armed forces that began with an MoU on September 9, 2024. The Indian Army and the Indian Air Force signed the agreement with Gati Shakti Vishwavidyalaya, Vadodara, in New Delhi, with Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw present. That agreement was framed around building in-house logistics expertise using Indian academic and research resources rather than foreign training pipelines, and it explicitly tied the partnership to the PM Gati Shakti National Master Plan and the National Logistics Policy.

Singh told the September 2024 signing that an efficient logistics system is vital for rapid mobilisation and resource delivery in challenging environments, the language the new AI course is now extending into a specific curriculum. GSV’s broader institutional identity was set up around that pipeline: the university is headquartered in Vadodara with logistics and transportation as its core academic focus. It has signed similar agreements with the Indian Navy too, extending the same framework beyond the Army and Air Force. The AI programme now adds a definite subject to a relationship that, until this week, was mostly framed in terms of doctrine, planning, and supply chain management.

Why AI Is Now an Operating Layer, Not a Topic

The framing across the inaugural day kept landing on the same idea: AI is being absorbed into military logistics as an operating layer, not as a one-off subject. Major General Yadav’s emphasis on operational preparedness, Lt Gen Chadha’s call for future-ready systems, and Lt Gen Mitra’s focus on predictive analytics all point in that direction. The repeated phrase across the addresses was “future-ready logistics,” and the curriculum is built around that outcome.

The programme also makes a quiet institutional move. Professor Thakkar’s overview explicitly tied the new AI course to MISA, the Management Information Systems project of the Army Service Corps, and to GSV’s AI-enabled work on it. That makes the five-day course a pilot for a wider AI integration into MISA’s planning and forecasting tools. Officers in this cohort could become the bridge between the classroom content and the production MISA systems once they return to their units.

The course format reflects the operating-layer framing. GSV has put a four-part structure at the centre of the week, with sessions that exercise different parts of the syllabus rather than running as pure lectures. The mix is closer to an applied lab than to a conference-style briefing, and that choice matters because the ASC’s mandate is operational rather than academic.

What the Format Puts on the Table

• Expert-led lectures
• Interactive discussions
• Practical case studies
• Hands-on learning sessions

Demand forecasting runs at the scale of corps-level logistics plans in the Indian Army, where small percentage gains in accuracy translate into tonnage of supply moved faster. Predictive maintenance touches the Army’s transport fleet and equipment, where unscheduled downtime carries direct readiness costs. Resilient sustainment operations, the application area tied to agentic AI on the syllabus, covers the supply and re-supply of units across long operational lines. Automation, in turn, looks at the high-volume routine work in depots and on convoys that absorbs officer time today. The class is an attempt to attach modern AI methods to those specific lines of effort, and the curriculum is built to make that attachment explicit through the week.

From Lecture Hall to Sustainment Theatre

The MoU that fed into this course was signed in the presence of two Cabinet ministers and explicitly tied to the PM Gati Shakti National Master Plan and the National Logistics Policy. Both frameworks ask for faster, more transparent movement of goods and equipment across Indian territory, and the Indian Army’s logistics branch sits inside that national logistics push. India’s commitment to militarising AI at scale is also visible through parallel defence-tech work outside GSV.

Outside India, the Pentagon cleared eight AI vendors for classified networks in May 2026, with Anthropic excluded from the list. Palantir’s Maven Smart System has become a permanent Pentagon program of record for AI targeting and logistics. India is moving along a different path, leaning on universities and in-house training instead of direct commercial procurement, but the destination is the same. The Indian Army is now treating AI literacy in logistics as a non-optional part of an officer’s skill set.

For the cohort in the room, the five days are a compressed introduction to a much longer AI integration. ASC officers who graduate from this programme will be carrying whatever they take from it back into supply depots, transport units, and sustainment operations across India’s military footprint. The first real test of whether the course works will be in how those graduates run logistics day-to-day months from now, not in the exam they take on July 3. The systems they will work with on the other side, including MISA’s planning and forecasting tools, are the ones GSV has already been upgrading for the ASC. GSV’s announcement of the new AI programme on June 29 set the bar for the cohort now studying it.