The endless India-Pakistan conflict is not at all a proxy war for anyone else’s larger conflict, as the hodgepodge arsenals of both combatants bear witness. During the Second Kashmir War in1965, Pakistani pilots in American F-86 Sabres tangled with Indians flying British Folland Gnats, while both the Pakistani Air Force (PAF) and Indian Air Force (IAF) used Canberra bombers, though they were made in two different countries.
Both air forces continue to operate a medley of old and new aircraft types drawn from a global arms market, though priorities have changed. When fighting broke out in May, the IAF was prepared to lead the national military response to Pahalgam. The Army did not undertake a land war. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has pursued this policy for more than a decade since he took office, and purchases such as the French Rafale fighter were key modernization steps.
The PAF, on the other hand, has been increasingly defensive-minded. Chinese-made Chengdu J-10C ‘Vigorous Dragon’ fighters were supposed to answer the Rafales. For war planners outside the subcontinent, this confrontation has been the key source of drama in the whole affair. But it was an entirely new experience for both sides. The two countries had never squared off at this scale in the sky. Nobody really knew what to expect. To borrow a phrase used in both countries, nobody knew what was ‘cricket’ and what was not, this time.
India was effectively on offense, trying to inflict sufficient damage to avenge the terrorist slaughter in Kashmir. Pakistan was effectively on defense, trying to inflict sufficient damage on the IAF to deter future action. Both sides pursued a limited war aim and a limited war.
According to Reuters, “interviews with two Indian officials and three of their Pakistani counterparts found that the performance of the Rafale wasn’t the key problem.”
“Central to its downing was an Indian intelligence failure concerning the range of the China-made PL-15 missile fired by the J-10 fighter.” IAF pilots flew into Operation Sindoor with “faulty intelligence” that “gave the Rafale pilots a false sense of confidence they were out of Pakistani firing distance, which they believed was only around 150 km, the Indian officials said, referring to the widely cited range of PL-15's export variant.”
“The PL-15 that hit the Rafale was fired from around 200km (124.27 mi) away, according to Pakistani officials, and even farther according to Indian officials. That would make it among the longest-range air-to-air strikes recorded.” In fact the entire air battle was the longest-range air-to-air engagement ever recorded.
Adding further complexity, the war took place between ground and air elements, too. “India’s Ministry of Information & Broadcasting later announced that the IAF had bypassed and jammed Pakistan’s Chinese-supplied air defense systems, completing the mission on May 7 in just 23 minutes,” Atul Chandra notes in a recent article for the Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance.1
Answering India’s air force buildup, Pakistan started purchasing HQ-9 and HQ-16 surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems from China in 2021. The “underwhelming performance” of these weapons against IAF electronic warfare has reportedly led Pakistan to consider buying Siper air defense systems from Turkey. The Chinese systems proved largely ineffective against the French-made SCALP-EG cruise missiles or the indigenously-produced drones and loitering munitions that India used to strike ground targets deep inside Pakistan.
Indian-made BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles sliced effortlessly through Pakistani airspace as well. Now at least fifteen countries are reportedly interested in buying the BrahMos, including neighbors of China. Contrarily, India’s Akash-1S air defense system performed well, and now the Philippines are interested in buying it to defend against Chinese aggression.
“We ambushed them,” one PAF official told Reuters of the air battle. He also described “an electronic warfare assault on Delhi's systems in an attempt to confuse Indian pilots.” Pakistan claimed to have shot down a Russian-built Su-30MKI during the air battle along with three Rafales and one MIG-29.
Contrarily, “two Indian officials said the Rafales were not blinded during the skirmishes and that Indian satellites were not jammed. But they acknowledged that Pakistan appeared to have disrupted the Sukhoi, whose systems Delhi is now upgrading.”
The true success of the PAF in the 7 May air battle remains unacknowledged, though Indian defense and IAF officials admit they did suffer losses. “India's defense attaché in Jakarta told a university seminar that Delhi had lost some aircraft ‘only because of the constraint given by the political leadership to not attack (Pakistan’s) military establishments and their air defenses’,” Reuters reports.
“India’s chief of defense staff Gen. Anil Chauhan previously told Reuters that Delhi quickly ‘rectified tactics’ after the initial losses.” More to the point, those initial losses — incurred by a tactical surprise which cannot be replicated — only inspired a more intense strike response in the ensuing days.
On the last day of the war, 10 May, “India said it struck at least nine air bases and radar sites in Pakistan. It also hit a surveillance plane parked in a hangar in southern Pakistan” prior to the ceasefire implemented that day. Shooting down Rafales on the first night proved to be a Pyrrhic kind of victory.
Chandra writes that both sides used “critical combat enablers, such as Airborne Early Warning, aircraft, in-flight refueling aircraft and electronic intelligence (ELINT) and surveillance platforms” at scale for the first time.
Until recently, Pakistan held a quantitative and qualitative edge over the IAF in terms of airborne early warning and control (AWACS) systems. Their fleet reportedly consists of nine Saab Erieye planes equipped with active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars and four Chinese ZDK03 Karakoram Eagle aircraft “thought to have transitioned into an EW role,” according to Chandra.
“These assets appear to have been used to great effect by the PAF in its recent skirmishes with the IAF, helping to deter the latter from entering into Pakistan’s airspace.” Except that the IAF never seems to have planned to penetrate Pakistani airspace, preferring to strike across the border with long-range missiles throughout the four-day war.
Notably, Russian SAM systems including SA-3, SA-8, and S-400 seem to have worked very well with Indian operators. Since Russian air defense equipment seems to work fine when Ukrainians and Indians use it, the problem with Russian air defense these days is clearly not the systems themselves, but the human system that operates them.
Just a few years ago, the IAF was lagging far behind the PAF in EW capabilities. Now, retired Air Marshal M. Matheswaran tells the Journal of Electromagnetic Defense that India has “at least the minimum required available to us for our operational requirements.” Ambitious plans for new airborne jammers, AWACS systems, “several other types of radars,” and three SIGINT and communications jamming aircraft by 2026 will bring the IAF to at least parity.
India started their AWACS fleet with the purchase of three Beriev A-50 aircraft from Russia for $1.1 billion. Consisting of Israeli Phalcon radars on Ilyushin IL-76 or IL-78 platforms, they “have been plagued by low serviceability,” with “serviceability rates of approximately 66% in its first five years of operational service.”
In the meantime, the IAF procured the Netra, which flies higher and faster than the A-50, as well as the AESA radar on the plane, “the first of its kind to be developed indigenously in India.” The first plane was delivered in 2017, two are in service, and the IAF plans to add four more, all MK-II upgrades. Two Airbus A321 aircraft are also being modified into AWACS planes.
Combined with indigenously-produced EW systems for existing Indian jets, the big takeaways from the brief Indo-Pak dust-up of 2025 are the quantitative improvement of India’s air force and air defense forces relative to Pakistan’s and the new export potential of India relative to China.
While the PAF was able to dump hundreds of Chinese missiles into a crowded sky and score a few hits, the IAF was able to adjust and strike at will inside Pakistan. And while the war left India’s defense industries in a much better position to snap up market share from Chinese and Russian state enterprises, Pakistan remains a basket case dependent on international aid to exist.
Previously, when India wanted to punish Pakistan, the Army would march into battle and take thousands of casualties while the air force fought its own war, tactically and operationally separated from the Army. In the 21st century, India has prioritized air power that can punish Pakistani misbehavior at long range, at low cost. A lost jet fighter is expensive, a lost pilot tragic, but lost battalions are far worse.
One side is clearly better-off after the war than before it. India will have the upper hand in the skies of the subcontinent for the foreseeable future, while Pakistan’s few advantages seem spent or neutralized. Both sides will now prepare for the next war by training to win this last one. By this measurement of victory, there is little to celebrate in Islamabad.
Battle Damage Assessment: How Many AWACS Planes Are Left In Russia?
Ukraine claimed that more that 40 aircraft were damaged or destroyed in their historic drone attack on Russian aviation this Sunday, including one-third of Russian cruise missile carriers. As public source imagery became available, only 13 cruise missile bombers were confirmed as destroyed in Operation Spiderweb. Today, Ukrainian Military Intelligence (SBU) released a video compliation of FPV drone video feeds that includes at least 19 successful hits on Tu-95 and Tu-22M3 long-range bombers used to attack Ukrainian cities.
Chandra, Atul. “Airborne Insight — New Radars and EW systems for the Indian Air Force.” The Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance. Vol. 48, No. 7 (July 2025), pp. 30-34.