Importance of air power in crossing the Rubicon

India’s armed forces have upped the ante against Pakistan a day after Operation Sindoor was launched. An air defence system in Lahore has been neutralised. India has targeted air defence radars and systems at a number of locations in Pakistan.

It is clear that there will be no let-up in India’s measured but strong military response to the Pahalgam massacre.

The Pakistani media are conceding that Indian drones fell on Lahore, Attock, Gujranwala, Chakwal, Rawalpindi and Bahawalpur in Punjab province, as well as on Sukkur’s Miano, Umerkot’s Chhor and near Karachi in Sindh.

Peace in India has never been easy, having to live with Pakistan, a neighbour born out of bitterness and an unfulfilled Kashmir aspiration. It is these very aspects which continue to be fostered and leveraged by Pakistan’s duplicitous, self-serving military leadership to remain in power.

Having lost all its wars and failed to wrest Kashmir, the use of terror as a strategic instrument of statecraft has been a deliberate choice employed against India for years. Pakistan’s cultivated terror groups have taken many innocent Indian civilian lives in the past attacks, but a line was crossed in the targeted Pahalgam killings that uncannily echoed the vitriolic words of its Islamist military chief.

India’s enormous patience has been bitterly tested periodically, forcing punitive responses in Uri and Balakot, to drive home the lesson that terror will come at a cost.

The strong, well-deliberated, multi-pronged military response, which has been initiated in concert with all elements of comprehensive national power, underscores India’s rise towards great power and the acceptance that it will often come at a cost. Its integrated and escalated controlled kinetic action has for the first time struck deep into the heartland of Pakistan, the home of its power brokers.

The deliberate, selective and simultaneous targeting of nine terror hubs at depths ranging up to 100 km, once again displayed the enormous maturity and restraint in India’s response strategy — we believe that civilian lives matter.

This controlled punitive escalation sends three clear signals — that India will continue to punish acts of terror; that punishment will encompass all instruments of India’s growing comprehensive national power and the scale of the punishment will keep increasing in a calibrated manner.

Whether the punishment will spill over into Pakistan’s military and the nation as a whole, lies entirely in the hands of its elitist dysfunctional military and political leadership, as India has no intention of making Pakistan’s deprived citizens pay the price. But this time around, the messaging is loud and clear: no more terror, period. The large coordinated strike is just the beginning of what is evidently a strategy reset with a long-term approach in India’s response matrix.

India’s scale of the calm and collected military response has certainly created panic and disarray in Pakistan, triggering a predictable litany of rhetoric and false narratives in a desperate effort to save face.

Predictable also will be the follow-on deliberate show of outrage, riding on threats of being forced into raising the nuclear ante, orchestrated to garner international pressure to get a “belligerent India" to back down from decimating an “innocent Pakistan". Even as the Pakistani establishment plays on international concerns of a potential “nuclear flashpoint.”

Unfortunately for Pakistan, having continued to pursue the use of terror, it is no longer able to generate sympathy and support for being an unwitting victim.

The world has changed and moved on as India’s true friends are showing firm support and the rest, concerned with a nuclear escalation and not wanting to pick sides, urge restraint from both sides. Even China, interestingly, has simply expressed concern and urged the return to peace in the neighborhood. For the moment it hasn’t come out in open support of Pakistan, its all-weather ally.

India’s strategy reset has several unique facets. After having crossed the Rubicon in 2019 when it used offensive air power in conditions of no-war-no-peace to strike the Jaish-e-Mohammed training camp in Balakot, air strikes against terror have evidently become a significant part of the operational repertoire of the Indian Air Force as well as a kinetic response option of the nation.

Equally encouraging is the fresh approach of an integrated military action of this scale, jointly conceived, planned and executed, for the first time since the 1971 war.

The Prime Minister, in his meeting with the Raksha Mantri, the Chief of Defence Staff and the three Service Chiefs, not only provided clear political directions and freedom of action. His message was also a loud strategic signal of things to come.

What followed was a classic multi-domain, multi-mode kinetic action with the core competencies of each Service, that opened page one of the Indian military’s new play book.

This is just the beginning. As the kinetic pressure against terror targets continues, Pakistan, with no quid pro quo targets, is left with the only option of continued artillery attacks along the border and indiscriminate firing on forward Indian military and civilian positions.

That raising the ante will definitely trigger an escalated response is no longer in doubt; it has been made very clear in India’s response to Pakistan and a message to the world.

However, we must also be clear that all military action when pursued as a deliberate national policy will come with a price. Loss of civilian lives and military setbacks will be inevitable as the scale and duration of the deliberate use of force increases.

The primacy of minimising civilian collateral is evident in the widespread revival of civil defence and passive air defence drills, which India has already initiated.

Military losses, on the other hand, are an acceptable professional hazard, which all warriors accept in their sacred covenant to defend the state and its citizens. This must not deter the nation from continuing on its much-needed chosen path of employing force in its statecraft, having exhausted its strategic patience against a recalcitrant and hostile neighbour.

Militaries are meant to fight and they will until all political objectives are met. After all, they have the strength of the entire nation behind them and the moral ascendancy of just and righteous action. Vengeance is best served cold.

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