Operation Sindoor: India Strikes Terroist Camps Inside Pakitsan
- Thread starter Defc0n
- Start date
Prithivi with RPDS/ DPICM warheads,
Showering the warheads on the intended targets, this was way back,
No imagine what pralay can do
Operation Sindoor and the Evolution of India’s Military Strategy Against Pakistan
Once more unto the breach, India struck inside Pakistan in response to a terrorist attack. Once more, the two sides escalated — again to unprecedented levels — before agreeing to a ceasefire. It is tempting to consider this latest crisis as a somewhat larger replay of the last Indo-Pakistani crisis in 2019, but in fact it signifies a notable shift in India’s military strategy towards Pakistan, which has potentially grave implications for future crises.
The latest crisis was triggered by a terrorist attack at Pahalgam on April 22, which was especially provocative — and likely calculated to be so — by targeting specifically Hindu men for point-blank execution. Tensions rose immediately, with consistent exchanges of small-arms fire across the Line of Control that separates Indian- and Pakistani-controlled parts of Kashmir. Then, soon after midnight on May 7, India launched its military response, dubbed Operation Sindoor. It used a mix of long-range stand-off weapons, including air-launched missiles and loitering munitions, to target nine sites belonging to terrorist groups Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, groups that have frequently attacked India, including at Pahalgam.
Pakistan made still-debated claims to have shot down Indian aircraft, and launched reprisal drone and missile attacks. The two sides traded tit-for-tat rounds of stand-off weapon attacks against each other’s military installations. The violence intensified on May 9 and 10, with effective Indian strikes against key Pakistan Air Force bases and Pakistan launching its own counter-offensive, Operation Bunyan Marsoos, which was largely thwarted. That uptick drew the concerned diplomatic intervention of the United States before the two belligerents agreed to ceasefire on the afternoon of May 10. Despite some minor violations, the ceasefire seems to be holding, and the crisis seems now to have concluded. For India, this crisis represents an important evolution in its military strategy against Pakistan — shifting from the issuance of threats to change Pakistani behavior, to the direct imposition of costs to degrade terrorists’ capacity. This new cost-imposition strategy has a compelling logic, but will be difficult and risky to execute in future crises.
From Uri to Balakot to Sindoor
Over the past decade, India has progressively transformed its response to Pakistan’s campaign of terrorism. Its actions have grown in scale, using new technologies, triggering larger cycles of violence, and seeking more expansive effects.
For years, despite grave provocations such as the 2001 attack on the Indian parliament, the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai, and even multiple smaller attacks during Prime Minister Modi’s first term in office, India resisted responding militarily to terrorist attacks. That pattern of inaction began to change in 2016, when in response to an attack at Uri, Indian special forces raided terrorist camps just across the Line of Control. At the next crisis, India’s response was notably more aggressive. In 2019, in response to an attack at Pulwama, India launched an air strike targeting a terrorist site at Balakot. As I wrote in these pages, the Balakot air strike sought to deter Pakistan by crossing multiple new thresholds — India used airpower against Pakistan for the first time since 1971, and reached into undisputed Pakistani territory beyond Kashmir — and by deliberately generating risk to intimidate Pakistan. That strike — despite its dubious tactical effects — validated for Indian decision-makers the notion that they could use military force to punish Pakistan without triggering a war or nuclear retaliation.
Operation Sindoor took that evolution further. India struck a larger set of initial targets, with more force, and more types of weapons, including cruise missiles and loitering munitions. Whereas in Balakot the use of air power was a radical departure, in Operation Sindoor, air- and ground-launched stand-off weapons had become India’s primary tool. India already boasted some such capabilities, for example, with its indigenously-produced BrahMos cruise missiles, and Israeli-made Spice bomb kits and Harop loitering munitions. But it made a concerted effort to grow these capabilities since Balakot, most prominently with the procurement of French-made Rafale fighters carrying Scalp air-launched cruise missiles. Its layered, integrated air defenses — including the S-400 surface-to-air missiles that it imported from Russia, to Washington’s great consternation — also proved to be exceptionally effective.
All of these capabilities gave India military options short of starting a war. Over the past decade, India has been able to attack Pakistan repeatedly without mobilizing its large ground formations. The vexed debates over the Army’s erstwhile “Cold Start” doctrine and its perpetually delayed Integrated Battle Groups have now become obsolete. India’s lumbering ground forces, mobilized with great difficulty and cost after the 2001 attack, gave New Delhi an invidious all-or-nothing choice to either remain passive or start a war. And if committed to an offensive, they could not be easily dialed back, making crisis resolution or war termination more difficult. In contrast, missiles and drones are quicker to launch and easier to calibrate — as Operation Sindoor showed, successive waves of sorties can be ratcheted up or down, giving national leaders flexibility to escalate or de-escalate as required. For all these reasons, stand-off weapons, delivered from multiple domains, have emerged as India’s weapons of choice.
Also extending the evolution of recent crises, Operation Sindoor triggered a conspicuously larger cycle of tit-for-tat counterattacks. Consistent with its previous strikes, India had immediately declared that its operation was measured and restrained. Contrary to some of the more inflammatory demands for action, including from Indian parliamentarians, New Delhi was adamant it was only seeking justice against terrorists, and had no intent to attack the Pakistani military. The onus of prolonging or escalating the crisis, it held, would lie squarely with Pakistan. But unlike the previous Uri and Balakot crises, when Pakistan could plausibly deny any losses and suppress the need to retaliate heavily, this time India immediately released video evidence of effective strikes, and Pakistan immediately admitted to casualties. Pakistan had irresistible incentives to hit back, harder than it had after Balakot. It could not allow India to strike its territory with impunity. So, entirely predictably, the crisis quickly crossed the threshold into a military confrontation, lasting four days and involving orders of magnitude more weapons and targets on both sides than previously.
The most strategically significant evolution of India’s actions, from Uri to Balakot to Sindoor, is the nature of the effects that India attempted to create at each iteration. In each case, it tested and pushed the boundaries of what it could do without triggering a war, and what it could achieve. The post-Uri raid was designed only as a symbol of India’s new willingness to introduce military action after years of inaction. The Balakot air strike was designed to demonstrate Indian capabilities to strike deep into Pakistan, and its willingness to cross previously sacrosanct thresholds. As an Indian journalist presciently observed at the time, “If it is Balakot today, it could be Bahawalpur or Muridke tomorrow,” referring to terrorist groups’ headquarters. And, indeed, with Operation Sindoor, India did strike exactly those sites, among others, in a larger retaliation designed to inflict real material damage to the groups.
The evolution of India’s military responses was crystallized by Modi in a victory speech he delivered on May 12. He pronounced that henceforth India would by default respond militarily to terrorism, that Pakistan’s nuclear threats would not deter India, and that India would consider both terrorists and their military backers to be equivalent. All of these positions are a stark departure from Indian practice a decade ago. After successive evolutionary iterations, India implemented this doctrine in Operation Sindoor, and Modi proclaimed that this would be “a new benchmark in [India’s] fight against terrorism” and a “new normal.”
From Symbols to Threats to Costs
India’s new military strategy against Pakistan is therefore no longer satisfied with the symbolism of an aggressive posture, as in Uri, or threatening future punishment, as in Balakot. Its new strategy centers on exacting a direct cost on the Pakistani military-terrorist complex. The central logic of this strategy — its theory of victory — is subtly but importantly different from India’s prior approach. India no longer expects that threatening a major punitive response can dissuade the Pakistani establishment from its campaign of terrorism. Instead, it accepts that Pakistani intent is practically immovable, and seeks to materially degrade the adversary, keep it on the defensive, and thereby thwart its offensive power against India.
Our common theoretical understanding of deterrence is heavily conditioned by the theories’ original roots in the Cold War nuclear rivalry. In that specific context, the goal of deterrence was to avoid a mutually-destructive nuclear holocaust by convincing the other side that direct conflict would in fact be mutually destructive. It relied on making credible threats that aggression by the other side would lead to an uncontrollable gallop to world-ending war. Credible threats of punishment, therefore, were the best pathway to peace. That traditional conception of deterrence was also applied to preventing conventional conflict, and was the underlying concept of India’s approach to Pakistan-based terrorism, from the 2001 mobilization to Balakot.
The execution of Operation Sindoor and the explanation by Modi, however, suggest that Indian thinking has now evolved. Threats of future punishment offer no guarantee of peace because the Pakistani military-terrorist complex cannot be dissuaded. For the Pakistan Army and its terrorist partners, violence against India is not a rational instrument of policy, but a core organizing principle, foundational to their identity and political legitimacy. They will persist with the campaign of sub-conventional provocations regardless of — or in some cases, even enticed by — the prospect of Indian retaliation. New Delhi appears to have now concluded that the best approach for such an adversary is attrition. The adversary’s intent cannot be changed, but the regular imposition of meaningful material costs could at least degrade its capacity to act.
Such a concept accepts that India cannot realistically hope for peace — the absence of terrorist attacks — but should instead accept that the simmering, violent rivalry is protracted and intractable. Future attacks are inevitable. But if India can effectively degrade the enemy — meaning both the terrorist networks and their Army backers — then future attacks may at least be less destructive and less frequent. This strategic concept depends on India retaliating swiftly and heavily to every attack. In traditional deterrence, it is “the threat and not its fulfillment” that maintains the peace — if the adversary has attacked, then deterrence has already failed and all that is left is to unleash mutually-destructive violence. In this alternative concept of coercion that India seems now to be embracing, the retaliation, rather than its threat, is the instrument of coercion — levying tangible costs that force the adversary’s future attacks to be smaller or rarer. This form of coercion, sometimes called “cumulative deterrence,” is especially suited to enduring rivalries, where the two sides expect a continuous cycle of violence.
There are, of course, precedents for this strategy against rivals. The clearest is Israel’s pattern of periodic conflicts against its terrorist adversaries, especially Hizballah and — prior to the current destruction of Gaza — Hamas. Israel decades ago acknowledged it could not alter its adversaries’ hostility toward Israel, but it could “mow the grass” to degrade their capabilities. India’s growing strategic partnership with Israel has manifested not only in highly visible arms transfers, but also apparently in the transmission of these strategic concepts.
In Operation Sindoor, India appears to have trialed this concept. Its initial attack on May 7 struck nine terrorist sites, in which it claims to have killed over 100 terrorists, including a handful of senior leaders. The facilities and personnel can both be reconstituted handily, but the terrorist groups will also have to react strategically. For the first time in a crisis, India struck across the length and breadth of Pakistan, and groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed will now have to spend energy and resources to reconstitute their ranks and develop new hidden facilities. As Modi proclaimed at an Indian Air Force base on May 13, “there is no such place in Pakistan where terrorists can sit and breathe in peace. We will enter their homes and kill them.”
Henceforth vulnerable to direct military action, Pakistan-based terrorists will have to devote a share of their work to defensive preparations, possibly taking resources away from planning operations in India. The United States applied exactly this logic in its years of drone attacks against al-Qaeda’s senior leadership in Pakistan — not only killing valuable leaders, but forcing their successors to expend energy on survival instead of attack planning. Over time and multiple iterations, such operations by India may even sow doubt and distrust in terrorist leaders’ minds about the reliability of their Pakistan Army partners.
India may have — allegedly — already begun implementing this form of action in peacetime. A spate of assassinations, at the hands of “unknown gunmen” have killed several senior terrorist leaders in recent years. And the militant separatist group, the Balochistan Liberation Army, has ratcheted up attacks on the Pakistan Army and Chinese targets in Pakistan. India may provide various forms of support to these actions. To this baseline level of disruption, it may now add occasional large-scale direct military action to impose costs on the adversary.
A Difficult and Risky Path
If India sticks to this apparent new strategic approach, it will face a new set of challenges. First, Modi probably already suffered a commitment trap after Balakot — where India’s credibility depended on a military response to terrorism — and that is now an explicit pledge, a matter of policy. That commitment may be necessary for this concept to work, as I showed above, but it comes at a cost: It reduces New Delhi’s policy freedom and ties its hands in a crisis. Modi has been careful to note that India’s response will come at a time and manner of its choosing — thereby retaining tactical agency — but India has nevertheless ceded the initiative to the terrorists. If groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Muhammad, or the Pakistan Army calculate that a conflict is in their interests in the future, India is now openly committed to indulging their wishes.
Second, in the next crisis, India’s declaration that it will no longer respect the threshold between terrorist and Pakistan Army targets will very likely escalate a future crisis to reciprocal military conflict almost immediately. India still resisted crossing some important thresholds in Operation Sindoor, and crossing them would accelerate the escalation. India did not, for example, cause mass civilian casualties; it has denied striking any nuclear-related facilities, despite some still-unsettled claims to that effect; and it did not target nationally important dual-use infrastructure, such as Karachi port, despite some spurious reporting to that effect. These thresholds exist and will be important markers for how limited or escalatory the next crisis becomes, but they are less clear than the claim India made on May 7 that it did not target the Pakistani military. In a future crisis, claims and counter-claims fueled by misinformation and incomplete information will further complicate India’s task of escalation control.
Third, executing this concept of degrading adversary capacity will, in the future, demand a level of tactical acumen that India has yet to demonstrate. Terrorist group headquarters at Muridke and Bahawalpur were well-known sites, and Indian intelligence agencies certainly have extensive coverage across Pakistan — but they will have to work harder now. In each one of these crises, the terrorists are well known to vacate their “launchpads” in anticipation of possible Indian action. But Operation Sindoor has now kicked off a cat and mouse game where the terrorists, previously enjoying safe haven in Pakistan, will take greater measures to hide in peacetime and go to ground in crisis. They also have a very deep bench of cadres and recruits, so in the absence of very large attrition, Indian intelligence services will have to improve their targeteering skills, just as Israel and the United States have recently done, to identify and strike meaningfully important personnel and facilities.
Finally, Indian decision-makers will have to resist the temptation to consider this cost-imposition strategy as their primary counter-terrorism tool. The security threat is large and entrenched enough that it requires a broad suite of national policy tools, including not only peacetime intelligence operations but also coercive leverage such as the Indus Water Treaty, deft regional diplomacy to isolate Pakistan, and international coordination against terrorist financing. Military operations are only a supporting effort to manage crises. In the face of dazzling military operations, managing public expectations may be an even bigger challenge. Operation Sindoor intoxicated the Indian populace with bloodlust — some quarters greeted the conflict as “pure bliss” and decried the ceasefire. Unless these public passions are managed, they will redound on the government with unrealistic expectations in the next crisis. Ultimately, the Indian government and people should recognize that such a cost-imposition concept is fundamentally astrategic. It does not advance the country to a lasting resolution of any of its security challenges. Only an implausible surrender or some type of political process can do that. Absent a political solution, this strategy anticipates that India’s challenge can at best be contained — only if India can summon the necessary tactical skill and manage the rising risks — but it will never end.
Once more unto the breach, India struck inside Pakistan in response to a terrorist attack. Once more, the two sides escalated — again to unprecedented levels — before agreeing to a ceasefire. It is tempting to consider this latest crisis as a somewhat larger replay of the last Indo-Pakistani crisis in 2019, but in fact it signifies a notable shift in India’s military strategy towards Pakistan, which has potentially grave implications for future crises.
The latest crisis was triggered by a terrorist attack at Pahalgam on April 22, which was especially provocative — and likely calculated to be so — by targeting specifically Hindu men for point-blank execution. Tensions rose immediately, with consistent exchanges of small-arms fire across the Line of Control that separates Indian- and Pakistani-controlled parts of Kashmir. Then, soon after midnight on May 7, India launched its military response, dubbed Operation Sindoor. It used a mix of long-range stand-off weapons, including air-launched missiles and loitering munitions, to target nine sites belonging to terrorist groups Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, groups that have frequently attacked India, including at Pahalgam.
Pakistan made still-debated claims to have shot down Indian aircraft, and launched reprisal drone and missile attacks. The two sides traded tit-for-tat rounds of stand-off weapon attacks against each other’s military installations. The violence intensified on May 9 and 10, with effective Indian strikes against key Pakistan Air Force bases and Pakistan launching its own counter-offensive, Operation Bunyan Marsoos, which was largely thwarted. That uptick drew the concerned diplomatic intervention of the United States before the two belligerents agreed to ceasefire on the afternoon of May 10. Despite some minor violations, the ceasefire seems to be holding, and the crisis seems now to have concluded. For India, this crisis represents an important evolution in its military strategy against Pakistan — shifting from the issuance of threats to change Pakistani behavior, to the direct imposition of costs to degrade terrorists’ capacity. This new cost-imposition strategy has a compelling logic, but will be difficult and risky to execute in future crises.
From Uri to Balakot to Sindoor
Over the past decade, India has progressively transformed its response to Pakistan’s campaign of terrorism. Its actions have grown in scale, using new technologies, triggering larger cycles of violence, and seeking more expansive effects.
For years, despite grave provocations such as the 2001 attack on the Indian parliament, the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai, and even multiple smaller attacks during Prime Minister Modi’s first term in office, India resisted responding militarily to terrorist attacks. That pattern of inaction began to change in 2016, when in response to an attack at Uri, Indian special forces raided terrorist camps just across the Line of Control. At the next crisis, India’s response was notably more aggressive. In 2019, in response to an attack at Pulwama, India launched an air strike targeting a terrorist site at Balakot. As I wrote in these pages, the Balakot air strike sought to deter Pakistan by crossing multiple new thresholds — India used airpower against Pakistan for the first time since 1971, and reached into undisputed Pakistani territory beyond Kashmir — and by deliberately generating risk to intimidate Pakistan. That strike — despite its dubious tactical effects — validated for Indian decision-makers the notion that they could use military force to punish Pakistan without triggering a war or nuclear retaliation.
Operation Sindoor took that evolution further. India struck a larger set of initial targets, with more force, and more types of weapons, including cruise missiles and loitering munitions. Whereas in Balakot the use of air power was a radical departure, in Operation Sindoor, air- and ground-launched stand-off weapons had become India’s primary tool. India already boasted some such capabilities, for example, with its indigenously-produced BrahMos cruise missiles, and Israeli-made Spice bomb kits and Harop loitering munitions. But it made a concerted effort to grow these capabilities since Balakot, most prominently with the procurement of French-made Rafale fighters carrying Scalp air-launched cruise missiles. Its layered, integrated air defenses — including the S-400 surface-to-air missiles that it imported from Russia, to Washington’s great consternation — also proved to be exceptionally effective.
All of these capabilities gave India military options short of starting a war. Over the past decade, India has been able to attack Pakistan repeatedly without mobilizing its large ground formations. The vexed debates over the Army’s erstwhile “Cold Start” doctrine and its perpetually delayed Integrated Battle Groups have now become obsolete. India’s lumbering ground forces, mobilized with great difficulty and cost after the 2001 attack, gave New Delhi an invidious all-or-nothing choice to either remain passive or start a war. And if committed to an offensive, they could not be easily dialed back, making crisis resolution or war termination more difficult. In contrast, missiles and drones are quicker to launch and easier to calibrate — as Operation Sindoor showed, successive waves of sorties can be ratcheted up or down, giving national leaders flexibility to escalate or de-escalate as required. For all these reasons, stand-off weapons, delivered from multiple domains, have emerged as India’s weapons of choice.
Also extending the evolution of recent crises, Operation Sindoor triggered a conspicuously larger cycle of tit-for-tat counterattacks. Consistent with its previous strikes, India had immediately declared that its operation was measured and restrained. Contrary to some of the more inflammatory demands for action, including from Indian parliamentarians, New Delhi was adamant it was only seeking justice against terrorists, and had no intent to attack the Pakistani military. The onus of prolonging or escalating the crisis, it held, would lie squarely with Pakistan. But unlike the previous Uri and Balakot crises, when Pakistan could plausibly deny any losses and suppress the need to retaliate heavily, this time India immediately released video evidence of effective strikes, and Pakistan immediately admitted to casualties. Pakistan had irresistible incentives to hit back, harder than it had after Balakot. It could not allow India to strike its territory with impunity. So, entirely predictably, the crisis quickly crossed the threshold into a military confrontation, lasting four days and involving orders of magnitude more weapons and targets on both sides than previously.
The most strategically significant evolution of India’s actions, from Uri to Balakot to Sindoor, is the nature of the effects that India attempted to create at each iteration. In each case, it tested and pushed the boundaries of what it could do without triggering a war, and what it could achieve. The post-Uri raid was designed only as a symbol of India’s new willingness to introduce military action after years of inaction. The Balakot air strike was designed to demonstrate Indian capabilities to strike deep into Pakistan, and its willingness to cross previously sacrosanct thresholds. As an Indian journalist presciently observed at the time, “If it is Balakot today, it could be Bahawalpur or Muridke tomorrow,” referring to terrorist groups’ headquarters. And, indeed, with Operation Sindoor, India did strike exactly those sites, among others, in a larger retaliation designed to inflict real material damage to the groups.
The evolution of India’s military responses was crystallized by Modi in a victory speech he delivered on May 12. He pronounced that henceforth India would by default respond militarily to terrorism, that Pakistan’s nuclear threats would not deter India, and that India would consider both terrorists and their military backers to be equivalent. All of these positions are a stark departure from Indian practice a decade ago. After successive evolutionary iterations, India implemented this doctrine in Operation Sindoor, and Modi proclaimed that this would be “a new benchmark in [India’s] fight against terrorism” and a “new normal.”
From Symbols to Threats to Costs
India’s new military strategy against Pakistan is therefore no longer satisfied with the symbolism of an aggressive posture, as in Uri, or threatening future punishment, as in Balakot. Its new strategy centers on exacting a direct cost on the Pakistani military-terrorist complex. The central logic of this strategy — its theory of victory — is subtly but importantly different from India’s prior approach. India no longer expects that threatening a major punitive response can dissuade the Pakistani establishment from its campaign of terrorism. Instead, it accepts that Pakistani intent is practically immovable, and seeks to materially degrade the adversary, keep it on the defensive, and thereby thwart its offensive power against India.
Our common theoretical understanding of deterrence is heavily conditioned by the theories’ original roots in the Cold War nuclear rivalry. In that specific context, the goal of deterrence was to avoid a mutually-destructive nuclear holocaust by convincing the other side that direct conflict would in fact be mutually destructive. It relied on making credible threats that aggression by the other side would lead to an uncontrollable gallop to world-ending war. Credible threats of punishment, therefore, were the best pathway to peace. That traditional conception of deterrence was also applied to preventing conventional conflict, and was the underlying concept of India’s approach to Pakistan-based terrorism, from the 2001 mobilization to Balakot.
The execution of Operation Sindoor and the explanation by Modi, however, suggest that Indian thinking has now evolved. Threats of future punishment offer no guarantee of peace because the Pakistani military-terrorist complex cannot be dissuaded. For the Pakistan Army and its terrorist partners, violence against India is not a rational instrument of policy, but a core organizing principle, foundational to their identity and political legitimacy. They will persist with the campaign of sub-conventional provocations regardless of — or in some cases, even enticed by — the prospect of Indian retaliation. New Delhi appears to have now concluded that the best approach for such an adversary is attrition. The adversary’s intent cannot be changed, but the regular imposition of meaningful material costs could at least degrade its capacity to act.
Such a concept accepts that India cannot realistically hope for peace — the absence of terrorist attacks — but should instead accept that the simmering, violent rivalry is protracted and intractable. Future attacks are inevitable. But if India can effectively degrade the enemy — meaning both the terrorist networks and their Army backers — then future attacks may at least be less destructive and less frequent. This strategic concept depends on India retaliating swiftly and heavily to every attack. In traditional deterrence, it is “the threat and not its fulfillment” that maintains the peace — if the adversary has attacked, then deterrence has already failed and all that is left is to unleash mutually-destructive violence. In this alternative concept of coercion that India seems now to be embracing, the retaliation, rather than its threat, is the instrument of coercion — levying tangible costs that force the adversary’s future attacks to be smaller or rarer. This form of coercion, sometimes called “cumulative deterrence,” is especially suited to enduring rivalries, where the two sides expect a continuous cycle of violence.
There are, of course, precedents for this strategy against rivals. The clearest is Israel’s pattern of periodic conflicts against its terrorist adversaries, especially Hizballah and — prior to the current destruction of Gaza — Hamas. Israel decades ago acknowledged it could not alter its adversaries’ hostility toward Israel, but it could “mow the grass” to degrade their capabilities. India’s growing strategic partnership with Israel has manifested not only in highly visible arms transfers, but also apparently in the transmission of these strategic concepts.
In Operation Sindoor, India appears to have trialed this concept. Its initial attack on May 7 struck nine terrorist sites, in which it claims to have killed over 100 terrorists, including a handful of senior leaders. The facilities and personnel can both be reconstituted handily, but the terrorist groups will also have to react strategically. For the first time in a crisis, India struck across the length and breadth of Pakistan, and groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed will now have to spend energy and resources to reconstitute their ranks and develop new hidden facilities. As Modi proclaimed at an Indian Air Force base on May 13, “there is no such place in Pakistan where terrorists can sit and breathe in peace. We will enter their homes and kill them.”
Henceforth vulnerable to direct military action, Pakistan-based terrorists will have to devote a share of their work to defensive preparations, possibly taking resources away from planning operations in India. The United States applied exactly this logic in its years of drone attacks against al-Qaeda’s senior leadership in Pakistan — not only killing valuable leaders, but forcing their successors to expend energy on survival instead of attack planning. Over time and multiple iterations, such operations by India may even sow doubt and distrust in terrorist leaders’ minds about the reliability of their Pakistan Army partners.
India may have — allegedly — already begun implementing this form of action in peacetime. A spate of assassinations, at the hands of “unknown gunmen” have killed several senior terrorist leaders in recent years. And the militant separatist group, the Balochistan Liberation Army, has ratcheted up attacks on the Pakistan Army and Chinese targets in Pakistan. India may provide various forms of support to these actions. To this baseline level of disruption, it may now add occasional large-scale direct military action to impose costs on the adversary.
A Difficult and Risky Path
If India sticks to this apparent new strategic approach, it will face a new set of challenges. First, Modi probably already suffered a commitment trap after Balakot — where India’s credibility depended on a military response to terrorism — and that is now an explicit pledge, a matter of policy. That commitment may be necessary for this concept to work, as I showed above, but it comes at a cost: It reduces New Delhi’s policy freedom and ties its hands in a crisis. Modi has been careful to note that India’s response will come at a time and manner of its choosing — thereby retaining tactical agency — but India has nevertheless ceded the initiative to the terrorists. If groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Muhammad, or the Pakistan Army calculate that a conflict is in their interests in the future, India is now openly committed to indulging their wishes.
Second, in the next crisis, India’s declaration that it will no longer respect the threshold between terrorist and Pakistan Army targets will very likely escalate a future crisis to reciprocal military conflict almost immediately. India still resisted crossing some important thresholds in Operation Sindoor, and crossing them would accelerate the escalation. India did not, for example, cause mass civilian casualties; it has denied striking any nuclear-related facilities, despite some still-unsettled claims to that effect; and it did not target nationally important dual-use infrastructure, such as Karachi port, despite some spurious reporting to that effect. These thresholds exist and will be important markers for how limited or escalatory the next crisis becomes, but they are less clear than the claim India made on May 7 that it did not target the Pakistani military. In a future crisis, claims and counter-claims fueled by misinformation and incomplete information will further complicate India’s task of escalation control.
Third, executing this concept of degrading adversary capacity will, in the future, demand a level of tactical acumen that India has yet to demonstrate. Terrorist group headquarters at Muridke and Bahawalpur were well-known sites, and Indian intelligence agencies certainly have extensive coverage across Pakistan — but they will have to work harder now. In each one of these crises, the terrorists are well known to vacate their “launchpads” in anticipation of possible Indian action. But Operation Sindoor has now kicked off a cat and mouse game where the terrorists, previously enjoying safe haven in Pakistan, will take greater measures to hide in peacetime and go to ground in crisis. They also have a very deep bench of cadres and recruits, so in the absence of very large attrition, Indian intelligence services will have to improve their targeteering skills, just as Israel and the United States have recently done, to identify and strike meaningfully important personnel and facilities.
Finally, Indian decision-makers will have to resist the temptation to consider this cost-imposition strategy as their primary counter-terrorism tool. The security threat is large and entrenched enough that it requires a broad suite of national policy tools, including not only peacetime intelligence operations but also coercive leverage such as the Indus Water Treaty, deft regional diplomacy to isolate Pakistan, and international coordination against terrorist financing. Military operations are only a supporting effort to manage crises. In the face of dazzling military operations, managing public expectations may be an even bigger challenge. Operation Sindoor intoxicated the Indian populace with bloodlust — some quarters greeted the conflict as “pure bliss” and decried the ceasefire. Unless these public passions are managed, they will redound on the government with unrealistic expectations in the next crisis. Ultimately, the Indian government and people should recognize that such a cost-imposition concept is fundamentally astrategic. It does not advance the country to a lasting resolution of any of its security challenges. Only an implausible surrender or some type of political process can do that. Absent a political solution, this strategy anticipates that India’s challenge can at best be contained — only if India can summon the necessary tactical skill and manage the rising risks — but it will never end.
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Come on, you already know the answer.
The IAF is not gonna buy anything unless the jets are proven in Rajasthan and Ladakh in summer and winter trials resply.
And you already know the vanilla Felon has no chance against PLAAF without all new GaN systems.
And you already know the FMS bureaucratic process + delivery time for 40 jets will take 10-11 years at the earliest. Even if we start today, 40 jets will become operational by 2036. And this timeline is possible only if we make a blind purchase, without any evaluation of any sort, and the practicality of that is pretty much zero.
Perhaps. But it also means the IAF is sticking to their current plan.
If we go by what ACM Singh said, ie, 5th gen import only if AMCA fails, then the time frame for induction of the import is the the late 2030s to early 2040s. So you have no choice but to follow this schedule.
They deployed theirs in 2016. It's called Space-Ground Integrated Information Network or SGIIN. Apart from comm and ISR satellites they are even establishing a network of space-based supercomputers called the Three-Body Computing Constellation.
China Building World's First Supercomputer In Space Using AI-Powered Satellites
The "Three-Body Computing Constellation" could rival the most powerful ground-based supercomputers once fully deployed.
www.ndtv.com
They are way ahead of us in this department.
We are building such constellations too, it's gonna take 5-10 years, but ready in time for AMCA. So yes, only indigenous tech will seamlessly integrate with our constellation, without major changes to the Rafale's MDPU. If we are to integrate the Rafale seamlessly too, we will need the F5 hardware at the bare minimum, and access to raw sensor data. That's why the IAF's focus on AMCA instead of an imported 5th gen. That's also why I pointed out that if we are to import anything, it's gonna have to have unique capabilities that AMCA does not possess, like the Mig-41, maybe NGAD, ie, stuff that's going to be relevant in the 2040s.
Rafale was integrated with B-NET long ago. Pretty much the entire IAF is now using B-NET.
There's some history surrounding both. Some Soviet soldiers accidentally walked into the basement FM Paulus and his men were in and arrested him while all sides were in shock. Pure happenstance, he didn't surrender. And Rommel was named as the lead conspirator in Hitler's assassination even when he had nothing to do with it. Hitler knew this, so he told Rommel to shoot himself in exchange for his family being taken care of. After his death, public reports said Rommel died out in the field when his car caught enemy fire.
Unlike Paulus and Rommel, absolutely outstanding men, this Munir is quite literally digging his own grave.
4 missiles but only 3 warheads. What a conundrum.
It is itself a proof that India just fought a two front war and won. If some Chinese is coming to defend Pakistan that means Pakistan has already lost it.
Damn then 7-8 Prithvis let alone Pralays can devastate their air fields for days!
If we go for a stop-gap, it'll obviously be because we're desperate in the face of an unsurmountable threat. We've never been in such a position before - whenever PAF made a new induction that represented a quantum leap in capabilities, we've always had our answer ready for induction within a year or two, because we used to closely watch their acquisition programs and ran ours in parallel accordingly. Their induction of F-104 saw us inducting MiG-21 the same year, their induction of F-16 saw us inducting M2K within 2 years.
We formulated MMRCA keeping 2000s-2010s PLAAF in mind, but bungled more than a few things as the J-20 (especially J-20B) flew & the realization finally struck us - we can't compete with PLAAF by relying on foreign imports, with or without license production. A lot of tussle over limited resources meant that neither foreign deals nor domestic ones could get adequate funding in time.
So now we're left in a situation where let alone PLAAF, but even PAF's impending induction of J-35 will not have any answer from us for at least 10-15 years. This is a planning disaster no matter which way you cut it.
If we want to make up for it by going for a stop-gap import, the regular procurement process won't do. We'll have to cut a lot of corners, and tailor our usage of the platform accordingly, even if that means operating it in a limited mission set.
But if even that proves to be untenable (either due to geopolitics or technical incompatibility), we're gonna have to modify our doctrine to suit the new realities. As I said previously, this would involve a very heavy emphasis on the Rocket Forces to degrade & destroy enemy airpower & infrastructure on the ground before sending our own aircraft up - just to even the odds slightly though we would still be fighting a disadvantaged battle once in the air.
There's also a third possibility - if we make the assessment that current MRFA contenders will not offer us the edge we seek (either due to platform or integration limitations), we may abandon the program entirely as there's no need to spend so much money on what would essentially be a second-line aircraft.
+36 more off the shelf Rafales to justify the 2016 deal, followed by ordering of additional MKI airframes (with Super UPG built-in) would have to be the way to go for filling numbers in the meantime before AMCA comes.
The money saved would go into fast-tracking the IRF and the realization of a 1500-km precision strike option (AFAIK, a land-attack version of LRAShM, already in the works for IRF).
It may have been physically installed on Rafale, but is it usable or not? That would depend on where the progress on software integration is currently at. PAF has shared a cockpit voice recording supposedly of Rafale pilots - if that isn't outright faked, it would mean we were not communicating on SDR. But if we were, it would've been easy for us to to cite this as the reason as to why what PAF showed was impossible, but we never denied it.
So right now I'm leaning towards the possibility that SDR on Rafale isn't operational, most likely because the software isn't yet integrated with Rafale's system. I don't know whether the hold-up is due to French reluctance or some technical incompatibility we're still working on fixing.
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This opinion is based around the fact that the J-35's stealth is actually stealth when the USAF claims even the B-2 is no longer stealthy.
The J-35 is just a LO/VLO jet in some RF bands, that's no longer something that's hidden from radar.
Going beyond the current MKI numbers is pointless. Even back then, the IAF said they are only buying more jets out of desperation rather than meeting actual operational requirements. 190 was the real number. Options were only for 40 more. And the last 42 jets we ordered were never supposed to be exercised. Instead we imported them in kit form directly from Russia due to the LCA delay. So we already have an oversupply of MKIs.
As for MFA, wouldn't it be obvious that the IAF knows more than you about that? They worked on FGFA, they know about the F-35, they have exercised with the F-22, but still prefer their LCA, MRFA, AMCA route. Even after ACM Bhadauria saw the F-35I closely, he came back to India and said "MRFA, AMCA."
People are gonna laugh if you think that PAF's "radio intercept" of the Rafale was real. B-NET was integrated long ago. It's just a radio. These things are practically plug and play. Even Vayulink is integrated on Rafale.
Everyone wants to sell their planes. Who asked the Indian government to keep MRFA thing open? All interested parties will run their pieces to get their product an edge.
The same is true for AMCA. That doesn't mean we don't need it.
As I said before, it doesn't matter if something meets someone else's arbitrary standards of stealth or not. If a platform offers a significant RCS advantage, even if limited to bands where FCRs & missile seekers operate in, then it's something to be taken seriously.
Any such procurements would be out of desperation. The Super upgrade would allow the MKI to perform a lot more roles satisfactorily, while the cost per airframe keeps reducing as we build more & the level of indigenization increases. Super-MKI will be a very hard bargain to ignore as we retire older jets.
Tejas Mk-2 will be a true game-changer in this department, but it won't begin mass production till next decade. We need at least a few more squadrons of fully multi role-capable aircraft in the meantime, without breaking the bank. An upgraded version of something we already operate in large numbers makes a lot of sense.
Well, you need to understand that "I'd like to have X aircraft, but I can't get it cuz of the geopolitical landscape" is not something he's allowed to say publicly.
You just have to read between the lines. If something changes post Op. Sindoor, we'll know.
Till such time that IAF puts out a statement addressing it, we can't automatically dismiss it as fake. We categorically denied their allegations of damaging Adampur base the very next day, and it has since been proven through sat imagery that we were right.
The only aspect we have remained absolutely tight-lipped about is surrounding the air engagement, and the Rafale in particular.
There's already a rumour (discussed on the forum too, IIRC) that Meteor is not yet operational on IAF Rafales. While we have certainly purchased the missile & it's been seen on board IAF Rafales, it's non-operational status might explain why only MICAs were available to our Rafales during Sindoor.
If that is true, why was Meteor not operational? Does it have something to do with the Rafale being (yet) unable to communicate via SDR/Datalink with our AEWs, therefore Meteors weren't carried because Rafale's own FCR, under a heavy EW environment, probably won't see anything out at the ranges where Meteor really shines?
Is that why only MICAs were carried?
All we can do right now is extrapolate based on guesstimates. Until IAF sets the record straight.
Hope @vstol Jockey knows something about this Meteor/Datalink business on our Rafales.
1. One thing is for certain the intl. press is no friend of India when it comes to information dissemination. For all their harping about fact verification and delayed publication, they latched onto the "poor" performance angle just a few moments later in comparison to X. A point to be considered for any further conflicts. I have noticed that this bias is pre-Kargil. That can only mean that this is an entrenched issue. Another issue that came up was the media management support that the Turks and Chinese ran for lumber one military. They have been experimenting and honing their skills for a while it seems.
2. Without third parties harping for them, I noticed the Pakistanis themselves have limited IR/PR abilities. The ARMA videos/distorted AI pictures came mostly from across the border. I hope people with relevant contacts within the system can pass this along or already have done so.
3. A social media/media management cell with a decent budget is definitely needed.
4. Even regular op updates in text w/o pictures can have a calming effect on media/society.
2. Without third parties harping for them, I noticed the Pakistanis themselves have limited IR/PR abilities. The ARMA videos/distorted AI pictures came mostly from across the border. I hope people with relevant contacts within the system can pass this along or already have done so.
3. A social media/media management cell with a decent budget is definitely needed.
4. Even regular op updates in text w/o pictures can have a calming effect on media/society.
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