‘Recent aggressive-defense employment of air power in Operation Sindoor paves the way for a more fine understanding of the importance of military air power in national security calculus’. Photo Credit: Hindu
Whenever the nations are ready to re -organize their security strategies, they should review the use of various forces that are available for exploitation. The visit to India has been evolutionary instead of transformative under that road. Immediately after independence, with a different power, which in the last five decades considered the means of force for more vocal expressions of national power as a ‘avoidable requirement’, which began with the 1971 war with Pakistan, the Indian Statescraft stands at the intersection of a new era.
‘New normal’
Operation SinduR (7-10 May) may have well recreated the figure of India’s unwritten national security strategy. Here, at its center, there is a more vocal and active strategy that is now ready to detect ‘prevention, prevention and punishment’ against Pakistan, should he continue to support terrorism against India as a Pakistani state tool. However, what is expected as the inseparable properties of this strategy will be a continuity of ‘responsibility and restraint’ (the identification of any response that the Indian state has offered to face the national security crisis).
In the past, a highly continental mentality, a bias with war -fought borders, and the relationship between traditional operations and regions, as a currency of military effectiveness, ensured that the land forces, both military and paramilitary, captured the position of the pole in India’s national security Calus. The broad proliferation of internal armed conflict added unavoidable requirement to this orientation.
The re-evaluation of the domain and its attraction for double-bank as a tool of force and diplomacy picked up Blinker for centuries of sea-blind and offered options other than a continental mentality for the national security planners of India. However, this was not all right when it came to understand the competitive advantage that Air Power offered APEX policy makers, when Pakistan and China faced dilemmas to climb unexpectedly unpredictable opponents matching the abilities of Pakistan and China (which now widely widened traditional interval in all areas of military power.
The use of air power and what has changed
It is in this context that the recent aggressive-defense employment of air power in Operation Sindoor has paved the way for a more fine understanding of the importance of military air power in national security stones. Now for more than a decade, the Indian Air Force (IAF )’s non-cultic capacity has matched the best in the world in areas such as strategic and strategic airlifts, and humanitarian support and disaster relief (HADR) operations. It is in an aggressive scope that the IAF, in the last decade, is trying to influence at the strategic establishment that it has the ability to act as capacity and will first to act as a respondent and is the cause of a significant attraction for an opponent in many new configurations of war that are prolaphetured worldwide.
Until Operation Sindoor, aggressive air power was considered as an escalatery instrument by a conservative and separate strategic establishment in India, which was only fit in calculating traditional military operations. Even though the IAF Siddhant of 2012 clarified the mission requirements of the sub-traditional conflict, including anti-terrorism operations, it was mainly under the scope of discussion in war colleges until the Narendra Modi government decided to use aggressive air power in Balakot (in 2019). However, the IAF remained consistently continuously, when it proceeded for greater participation in limited struggle and more in its latest principle in no-wise-no-pse positions.
In the era of a serious budgetary squeeze, a fierce competition has been observed between three services (Indian Army, Indian Navy and IAF) for a part of the defense budget over the years, a situation resulting in preparation of opponents against the opponents of confrontation with available equipment. In this milestone, IAF has lagged one backward in educating and assuring the policy makers that aggressive air power provides immense potential in teasing non-contact war and can cost severe costs in many contingencies without booting on the ground.
What should be discourse
Despite the success of aggressive air power and integrated air defense operations during Operation Sindor, the four -day struggle cannot serve as a standard template to cost cost on Pakistan, or incite unacceptable attraction on other opponents in limited conflict scenarios.
However, this is certainly to provide IAF a similar role in multi-domain operations. The discourse air power should not be about displacing land or marine power, which is a pre-eminent means in the prevailing complex security environment that India finds itself. This should be more about what the air power can bring to the integrated fight to force decisive strategic results.
Based on the recent articulation of the Prime Minister on the low threshold of India to accept the pain, and if its response mechanisms grow more towards prevention, pre-furore and decorating strategies, it is a no-barner who produces aggressive air operations that produce strategic results that produce strategic results, which produce strategic results. Concurrently, a strong and integrated air defense ecosystem that can absorb the natural retaliatory response of a colleague opponent will be a significant force multiplier.
The biggest challenge for IAF, with its current capital budgetary allocation to build strong air power capacity at very minor levels, is to build the ability to focus on hazard threats in neighborhoods such as adjacent delivery of the fifth generation fighter fighter aircraft (J -35 by China).
IAF has caught a lot with government support if this operation is to meet the ability to be displayed during vermilion.
Arjun Subramaniam is a retired aerial vice marshal from the Indian Air Force and an air power strategist
Published – May 26, 2025 12:16 AM IST