India and Pakistan have fought a sharp and short war, called by many a dangerous standoff, which could easily have turned into a nuclear war.
The rumours spread during 96 hours of conflict had shaken nerves on both sides of the Pakistan–India border, as a new kind of warfare shocked both the fighters and the watchers of war with equal force. The casus belli of the war – that is, revenge for the murder of 26 tourists in Indian Occupied Kashmir by unknown terrorists – was first presented as a ‘new normal’ by the anger-filled feelings of the Indian leadership, and was later turned into a never-ending war under Operation Sindoor.
The chance of war between two nuclear enemies has always worried peace activists all over the world. The world still remembers Douglas MacArthur calling for a nuclear strike against Chinese troops in Manchuria, and Khrushchev holding up the threat of nuclear war in 1962, saying that “the violation of international waters and airspace was an act of aggression pushing humanity toward nuclear war”.
The nuclear uncertainty in the India–Pakistan Kargil conflict and US mediation saved both countries from the lemming-like death wish, as both sides cut their losses and pulled back from the edge.
Nuclear strategists, war theorists and practitioners have tried in vain to find the elusive space for conventional conflict within the stultifying confines of nuclear deterrence in the past. The US Airland warfare concept was an attempt to beat the Soviet conventional war machine on European mainland by US war planners but as the Soviets military planners responded with their veiled threats of tactical nukes and chemical weapons, the Macnamara era war planners started toying with the notion of the ‘Theory of Flexible Response’, which was supposed to be operationalised by the help of a graded employment of Airland integrated warfare followed by the backstop of tactical nukes.
The Indian Cold Start Doctrine aimed to deploy integrated battle groups capable of rapid mobilisation, seizing Pakistani territory in vulnerable sectors and achieving destruction objectives while staying below Pakistan’s perceived nuclear threshold. Pakistan countered with its own warfighting concept, backed by tactical nuclear weapons in the combat zone. As Martin van Creveld noted, such attempts to find space under the nuclear overhang “choked on their own absurdities”. Simply put, two nuclear powers could not fight a full-scale war and emerge unscathed.
It was against this backdrop that, on the night of April 6, 2025, Indian dual-use BrahMos cruise missiles hurtled towards Pakistan – a reckless gambit aimed at appeasing Prime Minister Modi’s right-wing Hindutva base ahead of a high-stakes Bihar election. Limiting the strikes to civilian targets for narrow domestic political gain, the Modi administration also sought to challenge Pakistan’s nuclear deterrence. If Pakistan responded in kind, India placed misplaced faith in its S-400 missile defences and costly Rafale fighters.
India, however, failed to grasp that warfare had moved on from traditional fighter-versus-fighter duels to the deadly precision of network-centric operations. Modi’s boast after the 2019 Balakot strikes – that Rafales would have changed the outcome – proved hollow when six Indian aircraft, including three 4.5-generation Rafales, were shot down in the opening hours of the 2025 engagement. The Indian Air Force repeated its 2019 blunders: radar-blind, jammed and caught in Pakistani ambushes.
The plaintive pleas of a female Indian air traffic controller – “Nando, return back” – eerily echoed Abhinandan’s ill-fated 2019 sortie, when he and two accompanying SU-30s were forced into retreat, their datalinks failing at the moment of crisis.
Indians seemingly did not learn any lessons and committed the same mistakes like they did in 2019. Poor training and network integration proved the undoing of the IAF against superior tactics and training of the PAF in 2019. The same lack of training and poor network integration was on display for the IAF when they presented a target-rich environment on the night of May 6 to PAF. There was nothing wrong with the Rafales. The Indians failed because they were relying on the old tactics of fighter forays with individual radar locks and missile fires, leveraging the platforms’ gladiatorial performance.
Pakistan, on the other hand, had trained and evolved into a lethal networked force with the 40 odd J10s, JF 17s and F16s prowling the skies like a pack connected with each other, ground radars and Air Borne Early Warning Systems (AEWs). It was a network wired to kill where every node was talking effectively to each other. The piece de resistance was the PL15 BVR missile.
The IAF leadership has laid the blame at the feet of poor intelligence, shunning their own responsibility to fight as a well trained and networked force that should have privileged doctrine over platforms. So where do the two countries go from here? The bellicose tone and declaration of continuance of Operation Sindoor by the Indian leadership indicates that it is still entertaining thoughts of repeating its folly. The staged encounter killings of Muslim prisoners in Indian jails linking them with the Pahalgam killings is a gory reminder of that.
With Pakistan’s stock risen regionally and internationally, the Indians have redoubled their covert support to terrorist proxies in Balochistan and KP. Pakistan should keep its economic and military sinews well muscled, while pursuing a deft diplomacy to keep all regional and global powers in its corner.
The next war might witness a deeper march of Indian folly in air, land and sea domains for which a multi domain strategy through better tri-service integration is de rigueur.
The writer is a security and defence analyst. He can be reached at: rwjanjhotmail.com