Operation Sindoor underscored India’s dominant air defence system against Pakistan

New Delhi, May 8 (IANS) India’s decisive Operation Sindoor last year, in the aftermath of the heinous Pahalgam terror attack, was followed by 72 hours of operations that underscored a key development — the Indian air defence system had reached a level of maturity decisively defeating Pakistani saturation offensive through indigenous system integration.

According to a report in the European Times, Pakistan’s narrative-makers focused on the night of May 7, 2025 – the 72 hours that followed exposed the collapse of Islamabad’s counter-strike campaign at every operational level.

Citing the findings of the Switzerland-based Centre d’Histoire et de Prospective Militaires on Operation Sindoor, the report noted that three successive waves of Pakistani drone, cruise-missile, rocket, and ballistic-missile attacks between May 7 and 9 failed to penetrate India’s integrated air-defence bubble, map the Indian electronic order of battle, and failed to produce any satellite-verifiable damage to key Indian assets.

“By the time Pakistani military authorities lifted the phone to request a ceasefire on the morning of May 10, the air war was being lost not in Pakistani airspace but over Indian territory, where the Pakistan Air Force’s most ambitious offensive operation in decades had been comprehensively absorbed,” it highlighted.

As Pakistan’s counter-strike campaign failed, the CPHM findings documented that Indian anti-aircraft guns alone shot down more than half of the Pakistani drones during the four days of the conflict, while jamming and spoofing systems handled much of the remaining neutralisation.

“The Bharat Electronics-DRDO Akashteer system, formally inducted into the Indian Army only in 2024, operated in tandem with the Indian Air Force’s Integrated Air Command, Control and Communication System and the Navy’s Trigun, fusing optical, electromagnetic, radar, and civilian-observer inputs into a single recognised air picture. Indian missile-battery radars were activated only for very brief windows and only when targets were already inside their firing envelopes,” the European Times report mentioned.

“The Pakistani assumption underlying the saturation campaign, namely that drones would force Indian radars into sustained emission and thereby reveal SAM positions to electronic intelligence, was thus structurally defeated. However, the Pakistanis failed to accurately map the Indian electronic order of battle following this initial strike,” it added.

By the morning of May 10, the report said, the Indian Air Forces launched a retaliatory cruise missile strike against Pakistani military bases including Nur Khan, Murid, Sargodha, Jacobabad, Bholari, Sukkur, Rafiqui, and Rahim Yar Khan—operating from a defensive posture that had absorbed three Pakistani strike waves “without losing a single S-400 battery, a single major airbase, or a single combat squadron’s operational readiness”.

It was against this strategic backdrop that Pakistani military authorities requested a ceasefire by noon the same day, the report highlighted.

–IANS

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