How India pulled off the stand-off strike mission

There is an old saying among soldiers―that every army prepares for the last war. That is, they rectify the mistakes they had made in the previous conflict, and plug the loopholes found in its planning and execution. Pakistan has been doing exactly that for the past several months, once they began planning Pahalgam and viewed at the ‘jugular vein’ again with a military eye.

India, on the other hand, prepared for the next conflict. Once Pahalgam happened, or perhaps even before that, India decided that the next strike should not be in a manner and style as the ones it had delivered earlier. Neither Kargil style in which the armed forces were mobilised like in a limited conventional war, nor the commando-style post-Uri, nor the surgical Balakot style.

Ever since the mullah-generals of Pakistan planned Pahalgam, their boys on the line of control had been fortifying their side. Landmines were laid, new sensors installed, bunkers fortified, posts re-manned and more. The idea was to deter a commando operation of the kind the Indian Army undertook after the Uri attack in 2016.

Then they fortified the airspace. Days prior to Pahalgam, Pakistani airbases were put on alert, and defences mounted. The idea was to deter a Balakot-style strike in which Indian fighters burst into the Pak-controlled airspace before dawn, bombed out the terror camp, and the boys landed back home for breakfast.

While Pakistan thus prepared for the last ‘wars’, India’s generals and air marshals prepared for the next. So, after Pahalgam,

*They planned and worked a series of strikes on the enemy without their boys actually having to cross the line of control, the international border or into the enemy airspace―the first ever such.

*They planned and executed a series of strikes into the undisputed territory of Punjab―the first since the 1971 war.

*They planned and executed strikes on a whole clutch of terror targets without touching a single enemy military asset―a unique feat.

*They promoted their drones from mere surveillance gadgets into weapon delivery platforms―the first time in India.

*To cap it all, they worked out a purely stand-off strike mission doctrine, the first baby step towards what military thinkers say how wars will go in future.

There are more things unique and new about the 24 strikes delivered by the Indian armed forces in the 25 minutes from 1.05am on May 7―the first employment of the Rafales in combat in India, the first-time employment of armaments like Scalp, Hammar and Kamikaze drones in combat, and so on.

The mission aims, one can only surmise, were clear. Strike and destroy only the terror targets in the enemy territory. Any damage to any Pakistani military or civilian infrastructure would have given Pakistan some justification to escalate the conflict. India denied them that, though Pakistan did seek to militarise the conflict with attacks on Indian air force stations. Those were effectively neutralised and replied to with counter-strikes.

Indeed, the surprise element was the strikes at targets in Punjab. All the stand-offs with Pakistan in which the armed forces were called upon to move after 1971, except the mobilisation after the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001, were in or around the so-called ‘disputed’ territory of Kashmir. And that includes even the continuing frozen war over Siachen. Pakistan had always insisted that terror in India was a byproduct of the dispute over Kashmir. The strikes into Punjab shot holes in Pakistan’s argument. Neither are Pakistan’s terror spots confined to Kashmir, nor is terror a byproduct of the Kashmir issue. On the contrary, India has been arguing, the practice of terror is part of a strategic policy of the state of Pakistan which is harbouring terrorists not only in its part of Kashmir but even its otherwise civilised metropolises, too.

If one stretches one’s tactical imagination to strategic, India’s strikes into Punjab terror hubs could be likened to what happened in 1965. Finding that his forces in Kashmir were being overwhelmed by Ayub Khan’s infantry and tanks, Lal Bahadur Shastri let the Indian Army make bold armoured forays into Pak Punjab. The Pakistanis were taken aback, and were forced to defend Punjab rather than ‘offend’ Kashmir. The Pakistani offensive lost its balance, and that brought them to agree to a ceasefire.

Shrink the strategic picture of 1965 to a tactical miniature in 2025, and we get an idea of what happened last week. All the terror that Pakistan has been unleashing on India had been in the name of Kashmir. Whether the terrorist bombs burst in Kupwara, Uri, Srinagar, Mumbai or the Parliament House in Delhi, all of them had Kashmir written on them.

In one stroke, India ended all that. With the strikes at the terror dens in Muridke and Bahawalkot in Punjab, India has told Pakistan, and the world, that terror is separate from the issue of Kashmir, and that―to paraphrase Churchill, “we shall fight on the LoC, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the Punjab fields and on the Lahore streets, we shall fight in the Himalayan hills; we shall never surrender” to terror.

There were more. As the ongoing conflicts in West Asia and Ukraine are proving, drones are the current currencies of war, and stand-off strikes will be the way to go in future. Both were displayed in a dazzling manner in the strikes―drone-borne bombs delivered on targets behind the hills in PoK, and missiles shot from fighters flying within the safety of own airspace at targets even a 100km away. As they say―the way to go to war in the future.