Snakes And Ladders

In the classic board game of snakes and ladders, players are enticed with the possibility of victory only to have their hopes dashed by a piece of bad luck by stepping on the wrong counter on the board and having to start from scratch. In the experience of a typical player in this game, a slow and steady upward movement towards winning the moment is cut short by one wrong move, negating all the progress made up to that point and pushing you back to the starting point.

In light of the recent round of military hostilities between India and Pakistan, many new and some old aspects of an ever-evolving conflict between the two sides have resurfaced in the subcontinent in the backdrop of a near war like situation between the two countries. In my view though, this latest round of hostilities between India and Pakistan has followed a similar pattern to an engagement of snakes and ladders, where India set out to teach Pakistan a lesson for its support to terrorism.

And during the course of those battlefield events, India rose from strength to strength within a span of four days to reach a point where it could land a decisive winning blow on its opponent, similar to a player going up the boardgame using ladder after ladder,  only to step on the head of a snake which negated most of what it had achieved.

While the military accomplishments of India certainly remain large, telling, impactful and recorded for future analysis, the narrative and diplomatic war which followed the actual military events paint a picture in which India’s opponent got the better of it.

This article is an attempt to dissect those historical events codenamed “Operation Sindoor” and try to make an informed conclusion as to who won which round and who didn’t.

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Chronology of events

First, let’s recount the sequence of events leading up to the clash based on the information which has come into the public sphere despite the continuing fog of war.

On the 22nd of April, a horrific and dastardly terrorist attack was perpetrated on innocent holiday makers in the Baisaran valley of Pahalgam in Kashmir. In a satanic display of sadistic behaviour, armed gunmen killed 26 innocent tourists based on religious denomination, many of them right in front of their newly wed wives. The group which claimed responsibility for this heinous act was called “The Resistance Front”, an offshoot of the Lashkar E Taiba terrorist organisation which has adopted a more secular nomenclature in the hope of disguising the fact that they are an Islamist Jihadi terrorist group. Some of this name changing farce has been encouraged by the ISI and its handlers to deceive the FATF into keeping their country out of the grey list.

An outraged Indian nation and an equally enraged prime minister vowed revenge on the perpetrators of this crime and their backers in Pakistan.

Initially, India adopted the tactic of siege warfare in the ensuing two weeks to surround Pakistan from all sides and used diplomatic, economic and geopolitical pressure to drain the enemy country of its strength and stamina during this period.

India put the Indus Water Treaty under abeyance to indicate to Pakistan that they had a weapon in their armoury to punish the Pakistani people by depriving them of a resource which is indispensable for their existence. The weaponisation of dams inside Kashmir is an option this administration has been working on for some time. It signals to the enemy that India has a weapon which the other side cannot replicate making it a truly valuable weapon in India’s array of options. Even a sudden stoppage or release of water without sharing the attendant data with the Pakistani side can affect the agrarian society of Pakistani Punjab in devastating ways. The Pakistani economy, already surviving on life support and increasingly dependent on loans and bailouts from countries who want to use the withholding of those loans as a pressure tactic to mould the behaviour of the Pakistani state to their preference, can hardly afford such a massive economic threat to its water supply. This option if weaponized to its full potential can allow India to hold a truly indestructible weapon in its hands.

The aim during this preliminary phase was to make the Pakistani population sweat over the impending military strike upon its country. Some of this tactic was also meant to test the readiness of their response times and to monitor their build-up capacities while also using up precious Pakistani fuel reserves in preparatory manoeuvres and to burn up the foreign exchange reserves of a country essentially surviving on dole.

During this period, the Indian PM, his ministers and the CCS continued to assure an increasingly impatient and sometimes despondent Indian public baying for revenge that their desire for a severe military retribution would be fulfilled in some manner soon.

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The opening move

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On May 7th, India launched Operation Sindoor (named aptly in my view to signify the avenging nature of the operation) by hitting nine terrorist camps inside Pakistan occupied Kashmir but mostly significantly, also inside Pakistani Punjab. The attacks were aerial in nature and carried out by a combination of loitering munitions, cruise missiles and ground attack missiles launched from aircraft well inside Indian airspace. UAVs, drones and military satellites were used to record as much of the strikes as possible and as much of the damage caused as the battlespace would allow at the time. The prime targets of this phase of the assault were the two terrorist headquarters of the Let and JeM located at Muridke near Lahore and Bahawalpur respectively, inside Pakistani Punjab. The strikes caused significant damage to the training schools, the seminaries and the mosques inside both complexes. The body counts are not known yet but going by the scale of the damage as recorded by independent reporting, they seem significantly high. The complexes themselves were utterly destroyed, and the scale of the rubble indicates that these places are likely to remain unusable for the near future.

This initial opening move by India, was accompanied by a large aerial combat. As the aircraft from the Indian side went into battle mode before launching their strikes on their designated targets, they were detected by the other side and an aerial engagement using BVR missiles seems to have taken place. It is largely agreed by both sides that the aircraft of both sides stayed on their own side of the international border, launching missiles from a safe distance within their own airspace. The scale of this initial air engagement seems to have been very large. Some analysts have mentioned the possibility of more than a hundred aircraft having participated in this fight.

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India commits the first unforced error

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Several critics and analysts have noticed that these Indian air strikes were conducted without truly destroying or supressing the enemy’s air defence mechanisms, which is likely to be the main reason behind some of the losses of fighter aircraft on the Indian side on the first night. Rumours abound as to the number of warplanes lost and their typology in the initial air engagements. Most of the circumstantial evidence seems to suggest that these losses are likely to include some high-end variants on both sides.

Both sides agree that the planes of neither side crossed the international border or the LOC during this initial phase and released their air-to-air BVR missiles from well inside their own territories. Logically speaking, if that’s the case, then those air crashes which have evidently occurred on either side of the border must belong to their own side. These details are being hidden by both sides and will likely remain classified to the extent possible due to propaganda reasons, which is par for the course in a war scenario.

There is some evidence to suggest that the Chinese PL-15 air-to-air missile which the Pakistani air force had fielded on their JF-17s, had an export variant of increased range, which was unknown to the Indian side, thereby allowing Indian warplanes to fly into striking range of this missile unaware that the existing intel on the range of their opponent’s missile was out of date. This constitutes an Indian intelligence failure.

The PAF also used some clever battlefield tactics to fly their warplanes without switching on their radar signatures, choosing instead to get their intel from an Airborne Warning and Control System, (AWACS) plane flying far behind them using a secure data link. This trick allowed them to fly in terrain hugging mode to mask their presence from the Indian AWACS radar coverage and allowed them to close the distance between themselves and the Indian warplanes making their BVR missiles more lethal.

Nonetheless, all the circumstantial evidence available suggests that the decision to launch airstrikes without suppressing enemy air defences on the first night is the main reason which led to the losses on the Indian side.

The Indian External Affairs Ministry clarified to the world that the first round of strikes had been launched only on terrorist targets and terrorist training facilities within Pakistan and were not intended to hit any military installations or any civilian areas. This political stance seems to the reason behind India’s reluctance in hitting air defence installations in the first round.

This clarification has been a cornerstone of any Indian military action directed against terrorism emanating from Pakistan, because India makes a strict distinction between non-state terrorist hubs and state infrastructure. A practical reason India gives itself for making this distinction is the fact that there are no equivalent terror camps on the Indian side for the Pakistanis to target, which thereby implies that any Pakistani response would exemplify a desire by the state of Pakistan to fight on behalf of terrorists, which in turn would be the textbook definition of the behaviour of a terrorist state.

In my view, this distinction is completely flawed because, on the Pakistani side there is no such distinction held at all between elements of the state of Pakistan (essentially the military and the ISI) and the terrorist groups it harbours and uses as proxies for conducting terrorist acts against India and Afghanistan. This ploy by Pakistan is meant to give an impression to the outside world that the Pakistani state and the terrorist elements that live within it, are two distinct entities and therefore if the latter commits a crime in some other country, one can’t hold the Pakistani state responsible, thereby giving them plausible deniability.

There is no legal basis in international law for this kind of a distinction when identifying state responsibilities related to violent acts of terrorism. And in any case, it isn’t even factually true that within Pakistan these entities exist independent of each other.

The entire terrorist network bred inside Pakistan serves as a vector of the Pakistani military intelligence (called the ISI) and their cadre are often trained by retired members of the Pakistani military. They are creations of the Pakistani state and have been created to allow the state to pursue its military objectives through the use of proxies, which is a cheap and sustainable way to pursue its war aims against a larger opponent. Pakistan routinely blurs the line between members of its legitimate military and illegitimate proxy groups, often sending actual Pakistani army soldiers to fight in Jihadi attire to give the impression that their own armed forces are not involved, as evidenced by the Kargil war in 1999. The earliest example of this obfuscatory behaviour by Pakistan was the illegal invasion of the state of Jammu and Kashmir which it launched in 1948 using a mix of armed irregulars and regular Pakistani army personnel in an attempt to grab the princely state of J and K. Even in this latest terrorist act in Pahalgam, one of the terror perpetrators is suspected to be a former para-commando of the Pakistani SSG.

The fact that this distinction is meaningless for Pakistan was exemplified by their own display of public outpouring of grief and support for the slain terrorists in which army personnel in battle fatigues were clearly seen standing solemnly right next to identifiable jihadis. The coffins of the slain terrorists were draped in Pakistani flags advertising the fact that these were state assets of Pakistan and not individuals acting on their own.

Of course, the globe knows that this distinction advanced by Pakistan is all nonsense. Which is why after 9/11, 2001, the United States made a public announcement that they will go after the terrorists and their backers implying that everyone is aware that this distinction being attempted by Pakistan is a lie. Indian PM Narendra Modi has also made this point clear when he said that he’ll go after the backers of the terrorists during his first clarion call speech just prior to the Indian response.

The reasons which lie behind the backers of terrorists sometimes escaping justice or accountability have to do with various unrelated strategic aspects of war fighting against terror groups and other geopolitical considerations, which don’t make it into the public space and have nothing to do with a deficiency of conceptual clarity.

Nonetheless, perhaps in the hope of staying on the right side of international law, India still chose to attack only terrorist targets inside Pakistan and not military installations on the first night of its response. This adherence to its own political narrative forced India into sparing enemy air defences and radar installations on the first night of the operation, since those would have been considered military targets. Consequently, the enemy air defences retained their active capacities on the first night and the resultant radar visibility that Pakistan benefited from, led to some air losses on the Indian side.

It was a classic case of a political decision made on the Indian side leading to real world losses for the Indian military on the battleground. This decision by India to avoid hitting the Pakistani air defences on the first night, was very similar to the Vajpayee government’s decision to avoid crossing the line of control in the Kargil war of 1999, in deference to international requests at that time. Today most analysts of the Kargil war agree that that political decision forced India to pursue a more gruelling, arduous and costly campaign which they still won through innovation, tactical flexibility and fierce courage on the battlefield. But at least it won India the political admiration of the United States in that instance, leading to the birth of the Indo-US Strategic Partnership.

The decision not to conduct “Suppression of Enemy Air Defences” (SEAD) operations on Pakistani air defences on the first night of Operation Sindoor, just because they didn’t qualify as terrorist targets, was a case of international political optics prevailing over battlefield considerations and it did lead to battlefield losses on the Indian side. But unlike Kargil, where India benefited in terms of its geopolitical strategy by imposing a political restriction on a military operation, this time there wasn’t even the gift of a geopolitical victory to balance out the losses on the military side, thereby making this once of the most severe errors committed by India in its recent clashes with Pakistan.

Nonetheless, just like the Kargil episode, India once again adapted and retooled its approach and through rigorous professionalism and tactical agility regained the battlefield initiative and ended up prevailing in the conflict.

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India’s biggest statement: Pakistan’s citadel gets hit this time

While the aerial battle on the first night did provide some setbacks for the Indian AirForce, their ground attack mission on the same night, of targeting the terror hubs within both POJK and Punjab, remained largely and significantly successful. India targeted nine major terror training camps and hubs within POJK and Punjab using missiles, armed drones and loitering munitions.

The choices of Muridke and Bahawalpur in Pakistani Punjab hold the most significance in this phase of the battle, since the heart of the Pakistani army and its extended establishment resides within Punjab. The terror hubs which they have created also exist in Punjab for the same reason. Punjab is the citadel of the garrison which the Pakistani state represents. Not since 1971 has the Indian army struck Pakistani Punjab in a war with Pakistan.

In the imagination of the Pakistani army’s own conception of their fortress of terrorism, Punjab was always perceived by them as out of reach of their enemies. Needless to say, perceptions of this kind are often deluded in the case of Pakistan. In a country where it is still believed by many that 1971 was a victory for Pakistan and where dietary considerations are often spoken publicly as reasons for military victories, such delusions should not come as a surprise. What might come as a surprise, is that this kind of caveman thinking does influence the thinking of some of their top brass within the military, many of whom might be legitimate engineers and military experts in the 21st century, the century in which these people find themselves living in, whether they like it or not.

Researchers of the Kargil war have uncovered that one of the main generals who concocted the plan for the Kargil intrusion based his estimation of the enemy’s resolve to fight (one of the most vital aspects of military planning before launching any operation), on the idea that they were Hindu money lenders who don’t have much of a stomach for a fight. This is on record. Pakistan’s defeat along with the death of thousands of their soldiers in that war is also on record.

Nonetheless, as a matter of precaution, some of the high value terror targets who are state assets of Pakistan were removed from these important locations in Punjab for precautionary measures, even while most Pakistani military specialists were sceptical that India would actually hit these installations within Punjab in their initial wave. Their hopes were belied on the 7th of May.

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A massive doctrinal shift by India

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Since Narendra Modi became Prime Minister of India for the first time in 2014, this is the third time that he has ordered strikes across either the LOC in POJK or the international border into “Pakistan proper” to eliminate terrorists. The first retaliatory strike in Uri was confined to POJK, but the two subsequent strikes have targeted Pakistan proper.

This latest attack by India has been the largest of the three so far launched during Modi’s tenure, in terms of scale, power, reach, scope, penetration and damage done to the enemy. More than a hundred and fifty Pakistani service personnel have apparently been killed in this operation, several airbases destroyed and possibly as many as six to eight Pakistani warplanes destroyed, making this the most consequential “response strike” of this kind in retaliation to terrorist attacks.

This has substantially demonstrated to everyday Indians that much of Pakistani nuclear sabre rattling over all these years was bluster. It has also revealed to some Pakistani citizens that their nuclear weaponry doesn’t shield them from periodic conventional Indian attacks. The Pakistani tactic of throwing a terror attack at a prominent target in India and then waving the nuclear flag immediately afterwards in the hope of warding off a substantial Indian response has been punctured severely by these sequential episodes. 

This is a gigantic change in the strategic understanding of the region within the populations of both sides. Many people on either side might not admit it now, but there was a time not long back when a fair number of people on both sides of the border felt that any strike into Pakistan would lead to some kind of nuclear conflagration. Fuelled by an irresponsible, ignorant and immature visual and print media, such ideas were widespread within the populations of both India and Pakistan, thereby giving the Pakistanis an undeserved propaganda victory.

It wouldn’t be fair just to chastise Indians for this thinking. Many people in the policy circles of Washington D.C were also of the opinion that throwing conventional strikes at a nuclear Pakistan was too dangerous to try. Many such analysts still carry this view, though Indian punitive actions over the last ten years have started to shift their understanding of the nature of India Pakistan clashes somewhat. That while the nuclear threshold does still undoubtedly exist, its threshold is not as low as many of them were led to believe initially.

So, while some Indians today are fuming at an early call of halt to the hostilities in “Operation Sindoor” when a ceasefire was announced on the 10th of May, they would be well advised to remember that it wasn’t that long back in recent history when aerial strikes inside Pakistani Punjab on places like Sargodha, Nur Khan Base in Rawalpindi, Bahawalpur and Muridke were considered flights of imagination. Because they were considered far too risky for fear of nuclear escalation by the same people. Once a bluff of this magnitude is called successfully, it’s always easier and less embarrassing for people who were advancing the idea that such an act was too risky, to pretend that the bluff never really fooled them in the first place.

The fact that the Indian military undertook the risk filled task of exposing this bluff to the people of the subcontinent and beyond, is a watershed moment in the security infrastructure of the subcontinent and it’s understanding globally.

Luckily the Indian military top brass, having an intimate knowledge of the adversary’s capacities and doctrinal thinking, knew better and though they never wanted to reach a nuclear threshold during the fighting, they realized that there is enough space under that threshold for India to substantially punish the enemy. Gen. V. P Malik of Kargil War fame has said as much in his book “Kargil: From Surprise to Victory”.

As has been sufficiently evidenced in the Russia Ukraine war, the presence of nuclear weapons in the arsenal of a country doesn’t necessarily immunize them from conventional strikes by an adversarial country if that country is willing to call their nuclear bluff. According to some estimates Russia has suffered more than a million casualties in this war while being in possession of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. And unlike the India Pakistan case, Ukraine isn’t even a nuclear weapon state. This is a massive shift in the doctrines of warfare between nuclear states from the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis where all possible effort was made to avoid the sparking of any conventional fighting during the naval blockade of Cuba, given the heightened concern that any such fighting could immediately shoot up to the level of a nuclear exchange. This is the reason why the United States and the Soviet Union never fought each other directly during the entire tenure of the Cold War, preferring to weaken each other’s global hold in various places by indulging in proxy wars.

The use of terrorism to strike countries which possess nuclear weapons has also lead to the steady erosion of this doctrine of deterrence, where most security analysts are now focusing on the relatively newer threat of those weapons falling into the hands of transnational terrorist organizations who are deemed more likely to use the weapons because of the lack of a return address, compared to a state using the weapons as an act of protecting the state.

Ordinary Pakistanis will be increasingly aware of this loss of deterrence in their own minds, whether they have the seriousness of mind or the courage to admit it publicly. In a country where the military controls the media narratives and the levers of the state when it comes to public opinion, expressing this concern openly might be hazardous, but that still doesn’t mean that the Pakistani public would be unaware of this loss of deterrence within the privacy of their own minds. If the voices of these people in Pakistan, who have realized that their state is not safe from significant Indian conventional attacks even while possessing nuclear weapons, can organize in any major way to challenge the propaganda drama of the Pakistani army, it will create a major problem for the Pakistani military establishment. These people have realized that the Pakistani army is lying to keep itself powerful while leading them over the edge. 

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The Pakistani response and India’s incredible air defence performance.

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Pakistan responded to the Indian strikes on terror hubs by attacking military, civilian and religious sites along the international border along Jammu, Punjab and Rajasthan. Predictably Pakistan made no effort at discriminating between legitimate military targets and civilian areas. The Pakistani military establishment had been shocked by the attacks in Muridke and Bahawalpur and were forced to muster up an immediate response of some sort simply based on public demand, just like they did after the Balakot strikes in 2019. They basically went after all that they could sight and aim at, including air bases on the western frontier.

During this entire period Pakistani and Indian shelling along the LOC heated up and there were regular exchanges of mortar fire, heavy machine gunfire and heavy artillery too. The Pakistanis even tried incursions in Jammu during this period using the artillery cover to attempt the penetration and the members of the intruding party were all eliminated by the Indian BSF. The BSF played a pivotal role in securing the Jammu side of the international border. India even deployed some tanks and mobile artillery guns to inflict damage on the Pakistani side.

According to unconfirmed reports, over the course of two days the Pakistani response included almost a thousand drones aimed at India, some armed and some not. These were accompanied by loitering munitions, missiles and Turkish attack drones. This was the most fierce and intense aerial combat which the subcontinent had seen since 1971.

During this phase of the conflict, the Indian Air Defence System which was largely an unknown aspect of the Indian military phalanx in the imagination of many Indians, rose to astonishing heights and made an indelible mark with its astounding performance. Most military enthusiasts are attracted to fighter planes, warships and other visible offensive hardware which appear enticing and fascinating. Air defence systems, which is an entirely defensive apparatus, doesn’t usually get the kind of glowing attention in the public imagination as offensive weapons often do.

The fact that India had such an incredibly well coordinated and integrated air defence system was a massive surprise to common Indians and Pakistanis alike. Using their own satellite systems, along with supporting surveillance drones and advanced radars, the integrated air defence system was able to call out targets with incredible precision and down them with strikes using all manner of missiles and even anti-aircraft guns from a previous era. Consequently, the Pakistani air assault was completely thwarted.

During the entire period of this assault, there was never any air raid alert or warning siren issued in New Delhi. There wasn’t even a public announcement for people to head for bunkers or basements in the national capital, such was the capacity and efficacy of this aerial defence shield. There were air raid alerts and blackouts in many places in Punjab, including Amritsar, Jalandhar, Ambala and other sites closer to the border but the fact that such a massive attack from the Pakistani side, could not influence the daily lives of anyone in India’s capital is beyond astounding. It is astonishing to contemplate that while fighting an aerial assault from a military whose air power was supposed to match India’s, India was able to protect its capital in the northern part of the country with such confidence and deftness. All India did was issue some blackout orders over some important places of the capital at night.

If one compares this incident with the kind of air drills that Israelis routinely tell the citizens of Tel Aviv to engage in, to protect their civilian population during rocket assaults from Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s rocket brigades, it brings this defensive performance by India into clearer perspective. India was protecting an aerial frontier six to seven times larger than Israel and yet it was able to create a protective dome of defence which took down nearly everything the Pakistanis threw at them.

And during daytime, life went along normally for its citizens while this enormous air battle was being fought along the Punjab and Jammu borders. There wasn’t even an increase in fuel prices, something which is generally associated with any live war. The Pakistanis frustrated at not being able to penetrate the air defence shield of India started attacking civilian targets and religious places along the LOC in places like Poonch, just to make some impact on the Indian wall of defence and to trigger some religious fault lines within India.

This Indian ADS (Air Defence System) has now become the fascination of military enthusiasts the world over. The “AkashTeer” Iron Dome system as it is called in India, successfully integrated all manner of air defence equipment, both legacy and cutting edge, to make a superbly effective battlefield wall of defence which has now been tested in battle, something which makes the system invaluable. They have now got the most priceless gift of all, which is actual battlefield experience. This is likely to make this system even more impenetrable, as they get a chance to iron out any identifiable defects.

India effectively “smartened” legacy anti-aircraft guns like the L70 by giving them radar and a command-and-control system, which can feed surveillance intelligence into the guns to make them more accurate. And with a higher rate of fire to engage low flying drones which can’t really be intercepted by missiles, these anti-aircraft guns became superbly effective at destroying waves of drones. Consequently, systems like this in combination with ZSU-23-4 Shilka brought down hordes of low flying drones as they swept across the border. This Indian innovation gave the Indian Air Defence network an option of deploying a cheap and easily replicable solution to deal with masses of incoming threats of various types. The fact that these anti-aircraft guns were integrated into the larger Indian air defence network such that they could be prepared to face a barrage of this kind based on advance information, makes it even more impressive.

In addition, the missile defence systems, the S-400 and the Akaash (India’s indigenous air defence missile), combined their long-range radars to engage Pakistani aerial threats emanating from its own soil before it could even close the distance to hit targets across the border. The S-400 systems can cover almost the entire Pakistani airspace and were central in making sure the threats which closed in on the entire length of the border were severely diminished before they could get close to engaging with Indian defensive positions. Akaash, India’s homemade surface to air defence missile was equally impressive. Again, being part of the larger air defence network, it could benefit from the intel that the network provided to increase its efficacy.

This multi layered air defence system reminds one of the kind of Air Defence Network that Air Marshall Hugh Dowding had setup over Britain during the Battle of Britain where various elements of defensive equipment were deployed at various sequential levels, all feeding into one centralized network node from where the appropriate response could then be deployed against incoming threats. Also, as was the case with the Battle of Britain, the ability to look deep into enemy territory to identify and locate threats before they could materialize towards the international border was the key to gaining the upper hand.  This beautifully crafted and innovated system was key to the defensive force using just enough resources as was necessary to neutralize all the enemy aerial threats thrown at them at any given point of time, instead of broader wasteful engagements.

Most contemporary military analysts had been intently studying the Ukraine Russia war where the pioneering use of FPV drones and suicide drones was completely revolutionizing the battlefield dynamics. Since this aspect of the battle has to do with the democratization of the aerial battlespace, air defence and the ability of a force to protect itself against swarms of drone attacks has become a critical aspect of modern warfare. In this new age of battle where both surveillance and attack roles are performed by flying robots with AI calling the shots and providing the critical edge on the frontline, the performance of India’s air defence system in an actual war environment against drones and missiles of such numerical magnitude makes this performance a masterclass which will be analysed and taught in military aviation schools across the world for years to come, I believe.

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The ADS performance gives India the chance to achieve air superiority

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The Indian Air Defence Network’s stellar performance during Operation Sindoor mirrored the highly technological and intelligent aspects of sophisticated air defence systems across the world. This performance effectively denied the enemy air superiority, an aspect which if lost, might have led to ever increasing strikes from the other side.

In fact, in this case, the air shield which India put up, defeated Pakistani aerial incursions to such an extent that the aerial assaults that India mounted on Pakistan in response, though moderately severe, seemed much more effective in comparison. Even though the Pakistanis did manage to shoot down some Indian drones and missiles, within the space of two days India’s technologically advanced air defence system had given it the edge over Pakistan in the aerial exchanges between the two sides.

On the night of the 9th and 10th May, Pakistan fired ballistic missiles at India, in order to launch a new phase of the aerial assault. Here too the Indian air defence system effectively cancelled out these ballistic missiles, though one of the missiles which was New Delhi bound, was shot down over Sirsa in Haryana signalling the deepest point of any aerial incursion into India by Pakistan during this conflict.

Since the payload of these ballistic missiles could not be known at the time of their engagement, it wasn’t immediately clear whether these ballistic missiles carried conventional or non-conventional warheads, thereby taking the aerial threat from Pakistan to a more severe level. In military rules of engagement, a ballistic missile strike is considered a much higher level of escalation than any other type of missile strike using drones, loitering munitions or cruise missiles.

A ballistic missile, which does a re-entry into the atmosphere and can contain multiple warheads has always been held as an unacceptable level of provocation in aerial warfare. When Israel was struck with a Houthi ballistic missile on May4th at the Ben Gurion airport, it prompted a massive Israeli air strike over Houthi targets in Yemen. This disproportionately higher level of response is meant to convey to the enemy that they should not assume in their own calculations that the idea of throwing ballistic missiles at their adversary is just an everyday affair and can therefore be contemplated along with other more conventional missile strikes. It is a special type of weapon and therefore using it should bring with it an especially harsh and disproportionate response. Even in the aerial carnages which we keep seeing regularly over the skies of Ukraine, the use of a ballistic missile by Russia does still elicit a special mention.

Keeping this norm of aerial combat in mind, India was forced to step higher in the escalation ladder and had to make sure that the next Indian response could decapitate and immobilize Pakistan’s attempts at going further up the ladder. From all the info at hand, it was the firing of the ballistic missile by Pakistan aimed at New Delhi, which got shot down over Sirsa in Haryana, that prompted the Indian side to deal an even firmer hand in this battle and to scale up the sword disproportionately in comparison to the shield. The Indian response now had to be severe and destabilizing enough to discourage any further attempts by Pakistan to move further up the ladder. This thereby meant that the Indian response now had to jump up a few notches ahead of their adversary on the escalation ladder to retain escalation dominance and escalation control. In effect, this meant that the next act by India had to be severely intense, broad, relentless and punishing. To achieve this aim, India unsheathed its mega weapon for aerial warfare dominance.

Successful SEAD and Brahmos devastates the Pakistani Air Force

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Unlike the aerial engagement on the first night, this time India attacked the air defence systems of all the major airfields in Pakistan in their next step up in the battle for air dominance to achieve Suppression of Enemy Air Defences (SEAD). Using Harop Israeli Kamikaze drones and by jamming the radars signals of the opposing side, India defeated and destroyed the air defence radar networks of several major Pakistani airfields.

India used clever battlefield tactics to detect the location of enemy radar locations by deploying decoys to light up the enemy radars. Once lit up, their positions were revealed and consequently India unleashed specially designed anti radar Harop and Harpy suicide drones, (which are designed specifically to target enemy radar systems by locking onto their radar signals), which smashed straight into their targets.

India’s effective jamming of the Pakistani radars made the HQ-9 Chinese made missile defence systems inoperable and ineffective. This classical use of battlefield tactics to suppress and destroy the enemy radars and air defences immediately gave India the upper hand in this phase of the aerial battle.

During this phase of the battle, the S-400 was used in an offensive role destroying aerial threats across the border including some top line enemy fighter jets, JF-17s and F-16s included. One of the most consequential strikes during this phase was an S-400 missile  strike on a Pakistani AWACS aircraft, apparently launched from a regiment located in Adampur. The PAF plane in question seems to have been the Saab 2000 Erieye, an Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEW&C), also known as AWACS or “flying radar”.

This strike impacted at more than 300 km from the location of the missile launch making it one of the longest successful surface-to-air missile strikes in history. These precious aerial reconnaissance aircraft provide the Pakistani Airforce with the most significant capacity to look deep inside their enemy’s territory. Staying far behind the aerial battlefront and providing vital intel data (gathered from various sources including satellite fed sources) to the battle grid, which is conveyed to the forward air bases and fighters on patrol, the amount of coverage these aircraft provide is a quantum higher than equivalent ground radar stations. The loss of these aircraft, particularly during a live war, results in a massive drop in radar coverage, effectively blinding a major chunk of the battle map for any aircraft already in the air. It was a massive loss to the Pakistani Airforce forcing some of their airfields to restrain themselves from sending more planes into the air to engage the other side, while also effectively blinding many warplanes which were already in the air.

This important strike further multiplied the degradation of enemy radar capabilities in addition to the localized radar decapitation strikes which were occurring all across Pakistan’s air defence battlespace.

With their radars jammed or destroyed, Pakistani air defences were now in a state of confusion, receiving only static over large parts of their air communication networks. They had been effectively blinded.

Once again superior Indian technological expertise had given them the edge in this battle of technologies. And had again proven that when it comes to actual war fighting, India’s ingenuity and adaptiveness on the actual battlefield is a vital advantage for their own side. 

Seizing this opportunity, India struck eleven airfields in Pakistan with the Brahmos cruise missile, India’s supersonic cruise missile, against which Pakistan could not field any response. This unique weapon in India’s arsenal, traveling at almost three times the speed of sound, attacked airbases in Bholari, Sargodha, Nur Khan, Sukkur, Rahim Yar Khan, Jacobabad and several other important airfields and air defence nodes with lethal accuracy, leaving behind a trail of destruction. Brahmos missiles penetrated deep inside Pakistani territory and destroyed air and ground targets at massive distances. From Skardu in the north to Jacobabad in the south, no airbase was safe from the Brahmos. There was virtually no strategic depth left for Pakistan to protect their air assets.

These were lethal decapitation strikes where runways, hangars and air defence installations were destroyed with singular, massive blows. Command centres, repair facilities, grounded reconnaissance planes and fighter planes were also smashed. These strikes were so well directed and so severe that the airfields were now inoperable and the Pakistani airspace was becoming steadily indefensible. If the Pakistanis couldn’t use their warplanes, it effectively meant that Pakistan was sliding inexorably towards ceding control of their airspace to India.

This withering assault by India additionally raised the fearful spectre in the minds of the Pakistani Air Command that their air assets which are normally allocated for the suppression of uprisings on their western border emanating from Afghanistan and the Baloch hinterland, could also be destroyed in this Brahmos storm, thereby further enhancing the conditions conducive for armed revolt in those regions.  

In my estimation, if the Brahmos strikes had continued for two more days, it is entirely possible that at least half of the Pakistani airspace could have morphed into a no-fly zone over which only Indian aircraft could have exercised air dominance.  

As amazing a role as the Indian ADS played in defending Indian airspace on the defensive side, an equally devastating role was played by Brahmos for India on the offensive side. This was truly India’ s wonder weapon for which the Pakistanis had no answer.

The Brahmos decapitation strikes on Nur Khan base in Rawalpindi (just a short distance away from the Pakistani GHQ) and close to the Strategic Plans Division which is the nerve centre of the nuclear command centre of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons along with the hits on Sargodha airbase convinced the Pakistanis that as far as this air war was concerned, their citadel had fallen. If India could destroy the runways and repair facilities at Sargodha and Bholari, effectively grounding most of their F16s and also take out the high-tech command centre in Nur Khan airbase in Rawalpindi, it meant they could hit the GHQ in Rawalpindi too. And that would have meant that there wouldn’t have been any effective air defence left for Pakistan and consequently no effective coordination of the Pakistani Airforce was now possible, since most of the runways at these airfields had also been destroyed.

This rapid decapitation of the Pakistani air force meant that the PAF while still retaining a large number of usable warplanes, could

use almost none of them to either thwart an aerial attack or to launch an attack of their own.

Correspondingly, the speed and impunity of the Brahmos strikes informed Pakistan that they were effectively defenceless against this particular weapon. The rapid tempo of these attacks had given the Pakistanis no chance to gather their wits to muster a defence of any kind. Within a matter of twenty odd minutes, one airfield after another was hit and decapitated with devastating efficacy. Nothing was out of reach of the Indian Brahmos threat, and no aerial defence was available to Pakistan at this point.

At this juncture in the conflict if India had chosen to launch another round of punitive Brahmos strikes into Pakistani territory, they could have practically picked off any target at will, military or civilian.

Pakistan could still have continued to launch drones and loitering munitions to attempt further penetrations of Indian airspace. They could have also launched ballistic missiles from mobile launchers in an attempt to scare India and the world into calling off hostilities, a tactic which would have been unlikely to work with India.

But as far as the use of their own fighter aircraft was concerned, they were quickly sliding towards complete decapitation. Their warplanes were effectively grounded. That could only have meant complete decimation of the Pakistani air force by strikes on parked and hangared aircraft, if and when the next wave of strikes came in. Pakistan was on the mat at this point.

It was at this time in the battle when a ceasefire was arrived at by both sides under controversial circumstances.

The debate about who initiated the ceasefire, who called whom, and what prompted India to agree to the ceasefire request will continue for some time. Its clear based on the evidence available so far that it was the Pakistani DGMO who called for the ceasefire and after an initial period when that request was ignored, it was eventually granted.

What happened behind the scenes to make that sequence of events happen, how that ceasefire was arrived at is a matter of debate and controversy, but I’ll deal with that in a later part of this article.

But that debate about the ceasefire notwithstanding, it was completely clear that the aerial battle had been won by India comprehensively at this point.

And if the conflict had expanded from this point onwards, India was now guaranteed a win, since air wars in Operation Desert Storm and Bosnia have proven that once air superiority is achieved, it’s only a matter of time before the other side capitulates. It is the inability of Russia to attain air superiority in the Russia-Ukraine war which is keeping the Russians from claiming an outright win in that conflict.

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The controversial ceasefire call.

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As discussed above, the last wave of Brahmos strikes on the Nur Khan Airbase in Rawalpindi and the strikes on Sargodha, brought the conflict very close to nuclear threshold lines, at least as far as Western perceptions went.

Nur Khan Airbase was particularly significant in this regard, since the nuclear command authority of Pakistan which controls the entire logistical grid of nodes and storage sites of nuclear armed weapons is located at that base. The compromising of that command authority could have severely degraded Pakistan’s ability to control its nuclear weapons grid. India’s Brahmos missiles smashed into a part of that grid which was located in the backs of trucks when they struck Nur Khan base.

An attack on Rawalpindi, a twin city to Islamabad, brought the war dangerously close to Pakistan’s military nerve centre. It meant that the next wave of Brahmos missiles could easily land on Islamabad itself. At this time, the Pakistani military high command decided not to push the envelope further and requested Washington to ask New Delhi to agree to a ceasefire.

What transpired before that phase were two major diplomatic events, which led to the intervention, partially by the United States and partially by Saudi Arabia.

Just prior to the launch of Operation Sindhoor, US Vice President J D Vance had arrived in India on a state visit and when the conflict broke, he made it clear that Washington was not going to stand in the way of India’s call for retaliation to terrorism perpetrated on its soil. This initial statement by the US Vice President signalled a posture which was essentially pro-New Delhi, since Washington was essentially agreeing to the principle of retaliation to terrorism which India was advancing as the reason behind its attack.

It goes without saying though, that in engagements of this high level between two nuclear armed neighbours, some measure of back-channel diplomacy is always retained between large powers so that the conflict doesn’t escalate into a level which cannot then by managed by both sides. A sub nuclear threshold conflict like the one which the Russians are fighting in Ukraine shows that both sides can inflict severe blows on each other without the nuclear aspect coming into the zone of possibility.

In light of that ongoing conflict, it’s likely that a conventional trading of blows by India and Pakistan was front and centre of the mind of the US Vice President when he initially announced America’s reticence in getting involved in the conflict, tacitly allowing both sides to go at each other.

However, as the conflict entered the third day, it became increasingly clear to both sides that there was an escalation occurring in the means being used to prosecute this war, particularly when two ballistic missiles were launched by Pakistan. India’s response was equally severe when they went after the nuclear nodes of Pakistan. The Indian response was meant to demonstrate to Pakistan that the Indian side was aware of Pakistan’s nuclear machinations and retained the capability of making pre-emptive strikes to prevent the conflict from entering that zone. A case in point of such a strike was the decapitation of the runway at Sargodha, which was the main base of the Pakistani F-16 fighter force, most of them nuclear capable. Such a strike effectively grounded all the F-16s located at Sargodha. The strike on Kirana Hills was also aimed at denying Pakistan the use of its own nuclear arsenal.

And finally, the strike on Nur Khan base was also a strike aimed at decapitating Pakistan’s nuclear capability. These three strikes in succession brought home the message that India was indeed thinking in nuclear terms and was willing to hit those targets which were linked to Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal one way or the other. It remains to be ascertained whether the strikes on the Kirana Hills or Nur Khan lead to any nuclear radiation leakage, but their proximity to nuclear installations certainly took global concerns to a new level.

The initial assessment by many analysts that this conflict would be similar to the Balakot strikes of 2019 where a few camps would be hit and then the aerial engagement following that strike would last maybe a day or two and be limited to the line of control was evidently being belied with the sequence of events.

Consequently, the strikes on Sargodha and Nur Khan base did bring a more urgent and deliberate attempt by Washington to bring the conflict to an end. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State was appointed with the task of putting pressure on both sides to end the conflict. The Saudis were also acting as intermediaries in this process.

After Nur Khan was struck, at the prompting of the Pakistani DGMO, the US State Department reached out to New Delhi to bring the conflict to a close. New Delhi responded with the proposal, that if the conflict needed to stop, it would have to done through a direct call between the two DGMOs and thereby forced the Pakistani DGMO to make a call to the Indian DGMO to call a ceasefire. As we’ve already explained Pakistan had been put on all fours by the Brahmos strikes by this time in the conflict. The first call was ignored by India, but the second call, after further prompting by the US State Department, was heeded by India and the conflict was not allowed to creep into the 11th of May.

At this juncture, in a completely inept display of statecraft by the US President, Donald Trump hastily claimed credit for bringing the conflict to an end, ignoring years of accumulated wisdom on Washington’s side that India doesn’t recognize third party interventions in its conflicts with Pakistan publicly, even if those interventions happen behind the scenes.

After all, former Indian PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee heeded former President Bill Clinton’s call not to cross the line of control in the Kargil war. That was as clear an act of intervention by the US in an India Pakistan conflict as possible. In fact, former Pakistani PM Nawaz Sharif had travelled to Washington DC during that conflict, to urge President Clinton to force India to stop the war. And Clinton refused to intervene, telling Nawaz Sharif to first vacate the positions which they had illegally captured. PM Vajpayee at that time was in close touch with the Americans to make sure they were being given an accurate account of what was happening on the ground. This obviously constitutes major involvement and intervention by the US in an India Pakistan war. So, there obviously is a precedence for American involvement in Indo-Pak conflicts.

But in Trump’s case, he jumped the gun and made the announcement before the war ended. This seeming act of recklessness on his part may have been driven in large measure by his desire to be seen as an international peace maker and also in the mistaken belief that PM Modi, being his “friend” would understand. This intervention by the US could easily have been kept in the background as normal diplomacy goes and later revealed through post conflict analysis.

PM Modi also bears some responsibility for this childish misunderstanding, since his active campaigning for Donald Trump in the United States during the American electoral cycle may have given the US President the impression that PM Modi is indeed his “friend” and therefore wouldn’t mind publicly accepting that the US intervened in an India Pakistan conflict. After all Indian Prime Ministers don’t usually go and campaign for foreign leaders in their electoral cycles. That would be considered a gross violation of norms and India certainly would not want any foreign power to campaign in favour of any candidate in their own elections. Therefore, PM Modi’s seeming willingness to breach this norm in favour of Donald Trump may have given the mistaken impression to the Trump administration that there was indeed something special between these two leaders and therefore they could allow each other some leeway in diplomatic gestures.

In any case, this seeming rush by President Trump to take credit for the ceasefire forced India to make a public stance that no foreign power pushed India to accept a ceasefire, since accepting such a thing publicly would have made India look as if its acquiescing to US demands, a politically dangerous position for an Indian PM to take. This is also because PM Modi was also rightfully keen to take the political credit for the success of Operation Sindoor, since it was him who took the political risk of launching this operation.

This statement by India, in turn further alienated the White House. And a downward spiral of claims and counter claims followed. This childish disagreement might have sown the seeds for a greater misunderstanding which emerged on the diplomatic world once the military phase of Operation Sindoor was completed and diplomatic parlays began the world over by both sides to claim the pedestal of victory. But this diplomatic mess was primarily triggered by President Trump’s hasty decision to take credit for the ceasefire and additionally by India’s inept attempts at capturing the narrative after the fighting ceased. India could have launched a swifter, grander and more politically impactful display of victorious steadfastness by sitting on top of a ceasefire which the enemy had requested, thereby disallowing anybody else to steal that moment and the narrative.