Once more unto the breach, India struck inside Pakistan in response to a terrorist attack. Once more, the two sides escalated — again to unprecedented levels — before agreeing to a ceasefire. It is tempting to consider this latest crisis as a somewhat larger replay of the last Indo-Pakistani crisis in 2019, but in fact it signifies a notable shift in India’s military strategy towards Pakistan, which has potentially grave implications for future crises.
The latest crisis was triggered by a terrorist attack at Pahalgam on April 22, which was especially provocative — and likely calculated to be so — by targeting specifically Hindu men for point-blank execution. Tensions rose immediately, with consistent exchanges of small-arms fire across the Line of Control that separates Indian- and Pakistani-controlled parts of Kashmir. Then, soon after midnight on May 7, India launched its military response, dubbed Operation Sindoor. It used a mix of long-range stand-off weapons, including air-launched missiles and loitering munitions, to target nine sites belonging to terrorist groups Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, groups that have frequently attacked India, including at Pahalgam.
Pakistan made still-debated claims to have shot down Indian aircraft, and launched reprisal drone and missile attacks. The two sides traded tit-for-tat rounds of stand-off weapon attacks against each other’s military installations. The violence intensified on May 9 and 10, with effective Indian strikes against key Pakistan Air Force bases and Pakistan launching its own counter-offensive, Operation Bunyan Marsoos, which was largely thwarted. That uptick drew the concerned diplomatic intervention of the United States before the two belligerents agreed to ceasefire on the afternoon of May 10. Despite some minor violations, the ceasefire seems to be holding, and the crisis seems now to have concluded. For India, this crisis represents an important evolution in its military strategy against Pakistan — shifting from the issuance of threats to change Pakistani behavior, to the direct imposition of costs to degrade terrorists’ capacity. This new cost-imposition strategy has a compelling logic, but will be difficult and risky to execute in future crises.
From Uri to Balakot to Sindoor
Over the past decade, India has progressively transformed its response to Pakistan’s campaign of terrorism. Its actions have grown in scale, using new technologies, triggering larger cycles of violence, and seeking more expansive effects.
For years, despite grave provocations such as the 2001 attack on the Indian parliament, the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai, and even multiple smaller attacks during Prime Minister Modi’s first term in office, India resisted responding militarily to terrorist attacks. That pattern of inaction began to change in 2016, when in response to an attack at Uri, Indian special forces raided terrorist camps just across the Line of Control. At the next crisis, India’s response was notably more aggressive. In 2019, in response to an attack at Pulwama, India launched an air strike targeting a terrorist site at Balakot. As I wrote in these pages, the Balakot air strike sought to deter Pakistan by crossing multiple new thresholds — India used airpower against Pakistan for the first time since 1971, and reached into undisputed Pakistani territory beyond Kashmir — and by deliberately generating risk to intimidate Pakistan. That strike — despite its dubious tactical effects — validated for Indian decision-makers the notion that they could use military force to punish Pakistan without triggering a war or nuclear retaliation.
Operation Sindoor took that evolution further. India struck a larger set of initial targets, with more force, and more types of weapons, including cruise missiles and loitering munitions. Whereas in Balakot the use of air power was a radical departure, in Operation Sindoor, air- and ground-launched stand-off weapons had become India’s primary tool. India already boasted some such capabilities, for example, with its indigenously-produced BrahMos cruise missiles, and Israeli-made Spice bomb kits and Harop loitering munitions. But it made a concerted effort to grow these capabilities since Balakot, most prominently with the procurement of French-made Rafale fighters carrying Scalp air-launched cruise missiles. Its layered, integrated air defenses — including the S-400 surface-to-air missiles that it imported from Russia, to Washington’s great consternation — also proved to be exceptionally effective.
All of these capabilities gave India military options short of starting a war. Over the past decade, India has been able to attack Pakistan repeatedly without mobilizing its large ground formations. The vexed debates over the Army’s erstwhile “Cold Start” doctrine and its perpetually delayed Integrated Battle Groups have now become obsolete. India’s lumbering ground forces, mobilized with great difficulty and cost after the 2001 attack, gave New Delhi an invidious all-or-nothing choice to either remain passive or start a war. And if committed to an offensive, they could not be easily dialed back, making crisis resolution or war termination more difficult. In contrast, missiles and drones are quicker to launch and easier to calibrate — as Operation Sindoor showed, successive waves of sorties can be ratcheted up or down, giving national leaders flexibility to escalate or de-escalate as required. For all these reasons, stand-off weapons, delivered from multiple domains, have emerged as India’s weapons of choice.
Also extending the evolution of recent crises, Operation Sindoor triggered a conspicuously larger cycle of tit-for-tat counterattacks. Consistent with its previous strikes, India had immediately declared that its operation was measured and restrained. Contrary to some of the more inflammatory demands for action, including from Indian parliamentarians, New Delhi was adamant it was only seeking justice against terrorists, and had no intent to attack the Pakistani military. The onus of prolonging or escalating the crisis, it held, would lie squarely with Pakistan. But unlike the previous Uri and Balakot crises, when Pakistan could plausibly deny any losses and suppress the need to retaliate heavily, this time India immediately released video evidence of effective strikes, and Pakistan immediately admitted to casualties. Pakistan had irresistible incentives to hit back, harder than it had after Balakot. It could not allow India to strike its territory with impunity. So, entirely predictably, the crisis quickly crossed the threshold into a military confrontation, lasting four days and involving orders of magnitude more weapons and targets on both sides than previously.
The most strategically significant evolution of India’s actions, from Uri to Balakot to Sindoor, is the nature of the effects that India attempted to create at each iteration. In each case, it tested and pushed the boundaries of what it could do without triggering a war, and what it could achieve. The post-Uri raid was designed only as a symbol of India’s new willingness to introduce military action after years of inaction. The Balakot air strike was designed to demonstrate Indian capabilities to strike deep into Pakistan, and its willingness to cross previously sacrosanct thresholds. As an Indian journalist presciently observed at the time, “If it is Balakot today, it could be Bahawalpur or Muridke tomorrow,” referring to terrorist groups’ headquarters. And, indeed, with Operation Sindoor, India did strike exactly those sites, among others, in a larger retaliation designed to inflict real material damage to the groups.
The evolution of India’s military responses was crystallized by Modi in a victory speech he delivered on May 12. He pronounced that henceforth India would by default respond militarily to terrorism, that Pakistan’s nuclear threats would not deter India, and that India would consider both terrorists and their military backers to be equivalent. All of these positions are a stark departure from Indian practice a decade ago. After successive evolutionary iterations, India implemented this doctrine in Operation Sindoor, and Modi proclaimed that this would be “a new benchmark in [India’s] fight against terrorism” and a “new normal.”
From Symbols to Threats to Costs
India’s new military strategy against Pakistan is therefore no longer satisfied with the symbolism of an aggressive posture, as in Uri, or threatening future punishment, as in Balakot. Its new strategy centers on exacting a direct cost on the Pakistani military-terrorist complex. The central logic of this strategy — its theory of victory — is subtly but importantly different from India’s prior approach. India no longer expects that threatening a major punitive response can dissuade the Pakistani establishment from its campaign of terrorism. Instead, it accepts that Pakistani intent is practically immovable, and seeks to materially degrade the adversary, keep it on the defensive, and thereby thwart its offensive power against India.
Our common theoretical understanding of deterrence is heavily conditioned by the theories’ original roots in the Cold War nuclear rivalry. In that specific context, the goal of deterrence was to avoid a mutually-destructive nuclear holocaust by convincing the other side that direct conflict would in fact be mutually destructive. It relied on making credible threats that aggression by the other side would lead to an uncontrollable gallop to world-ending war. Credible threats of punishment, therefore, were the best pathway to peace. That traditional conception of deterrence was also applied to preventing conventional conflict, and was the underlying concept of India’s approach to Pakistan-based terrorism, from the 2001 mobilization to Balakot.
The execution of Operation Sindoor and the explanation by Modi, however, suggest that Indian thinking has now evolved. Threats of future punishment offer no guarantee of peace because the Pakistani military-terrorist complex cannot be dissuaded. For the Pakistan Army and its terrorist partners, violence against India is not a rational instrument of policy, but a core organizing principle, foundational to their identity and political legitimacy. They will persist with the campaign of sub-conventional provocations regardless of — or in some cases, even enticed by — the prospect of Indian retaliation. New Delhi appears to have now concluded that the best approach for such an adversary is attrition. The adversary’s intent cannot be changed, but the regular imposition of meaningful material costs could at least degrade its capacity to act.
Such a concept accepts that India cannot realistically hope for peace — the absence of terrorist attacks — but should instead accept that the simmering, violent rivalry is protracted and intractable. Future attacks are inevitable. But if India can effectively degrade the enemy — meaning both the terrorist networks and their Army backers — then future attacks may at least be less destructive and less frequent. This strategic concept depends on India retaliating swiftly and heavily to every attack. In traditional deterrence, it is “the threat and not its fulfillment” that maintains the peace — if the adversary has attacked, then deterrence has already failed and all that is left is to unleash mutually-destructive violence. In this alternative concept of coercion that India seems now to be embracing, the retaliation, rather than its threat, is the instrument of coercion — levying tangible costs that force the adversary’s future attacks to be smaller or rarer. This form of coercion, sometimes called “cumulative deterrence,” is especially suited to enduring rivalries, where the two sides expect a continuous cycle of violence.
There are, of course, precedents for this strategy against rivals. The clearest is Israel’s pattern of periodic conflicts against its terrorist adversaries, especially Hizballah and — prior to the current destruction of Gaza — Hamas. Israel decades ago acknowledged it could not alter its adversaries’ hostility toward Israel, but it could “mow the grass” to degrade their capabilities. India’s growing strategic partnership with Israel has manifested not only in highly visible arms transfers, but also apparently in the transmission of these strategic concepts.
In Operation Sindoor, India appears to have trialed this concept. Its initial attack on May 7 struck nine terrorist sites, in which it claims to have killed over 100 terrorists, including a handful of senior leaders. The facilities and personnel can both be reconstituted handily, but the terrorist groups will also have to react strategically. For the first time in a crisis, India struck across the length and breadth of Pakistan, and groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed will now have to spend energy and resources to reconstitute their ranks and develop new hidden facilities. As Modi proclaimed at an Indian Air Force base on May 13, “there is no such place in Pakistan where terrorists can sit and breathe in peace. We will enter their homes and kill them.”
Henceforth vulnerable to direct military action, Pakistan-based terrorists will have to devote a share of their work to defensive preparations, possibly taking resources away from planning operations in India. The United States applied exactly this logic in its years of drone attacks against al-Qaeda’s senior leadership in Pakistan — not only killing valuable leaders, but forcing their successors to expend energy on survival instead of attack planning. Over time and multiple iterations, such operations by India may even sow doubt and distrust in terrorist leaders’ minds about the reliability of their Pakistan Army partners.
India may have — allegedly — already begun implementing this form of action in peacetime. A spate of assassinations, at the hands of “unknown gunmen” have killed several senior terrorist leaders in recent years. And the militant separatist group, the Balochistan Liberation Army, has ratcheted up attacks on the Pakistan Army and Chinese targets in Pakistan. India may provide various forms of support to these actions. To this baseline level of disruption, it may now add occasional large-scale direct military action to impose costs on the adversary.
A Difficult and Risky Path
If India sticks to this apparent new strategic approach, it will face a new set of challenges. First, Modi probably already suffered a commitment trap after Balakot — where India’s credibility depended on a military response to terrorism — and that is now an explicit pledge, a matter of policy. That commitment may be necessary for this concept to work, as I showed above, but it comes at a cost: It reduces New Delhi’s policy freedom and ties its hands in a crisis. Modi has been careful to note that India’s response will come at a time and manner of its choosing — thereby retaining tactical agency — but India has nevertheless ceded the initiative to the terrorists. If groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Muhammad, or the Pakistan Army calculate that a conflict is in their interests in the future, India is now openly committed to indulging their wishes.
Second, in the next crisis, India’s declaration that it will no longer respect the threshold between terrorist and Pakistan Army targets will very likely escalate a future crisis to reciprocal military conflict almost immediately. India still resisted crossing some important thresholds in Operation Sindoor, and crossing them would accelerate the escalation. India did not, for example, cause mass civilian casualties; it has denied striking any nuclear-related facilities, despite some still-unsettled claims to that effect; and it did not target nationally important dual-use infrastructure, such as Karachi port, despite some spurious reporting to that effect. These thresholds exist and will be important markers for how limited or escalatory the next crisis becomes, but they are less clear than the claim India made on May 7 that it did not target the Pakistani military. In a future crisis, claims and counter-claims fueled by misinformation and incomplete information will further complicate India’s task of escalation control.
Third, executing this concept of degrading adversary capacity will, in the future, demand a level of tactical acumen that India has yet to demonstrate. Terrorist group headquarters at Muridke and Bahawalpur were well-known sites, and Indian intelligence agencies certainly have extensive coverage across Pakistan — but they will have to work harder now. In each one of these crises, the terrorists are well known to vacate their “launchpads” in anticipation of possible Indian action. But Operation Sindoor has now kicked off a cat and mouse game where the terrorists, previously enjoying safe haven in Pakistan, will take greater measures to hide in peacetime and go to ground in crisis. They also have a very deep bench of cadres and recruits, so in the absence of very large attrition, Indian intelligence services will have to improve their targeteering skills, just as Israel and the United States have recently done, to identify and strike meaningfully important personnel and facilities.
Finally, Indian decision-makers will have to resist the temptation to consider this cost-imposition strategy as their primary counter-terrorism tool. The security threat is large and entrenched enough that it requires a broad suite of national policy tools, including not only peacetime intelligence operations but also coercive leverage such as the Indus Water Treaty, deft regional diplomacy to isolate Pakistan, and international coordination against terrorist financing. Military operations are only a supporting effort to manage crises. In the face of dazzling military operations, managing public expectations may be an even bigger challenge. Operation Sindoor intoxicated the Indian populace with bloodlust — some quarters greeted the conflict as “pure bliss” and decried the ceasefire. Unless these public passions are managed, they will redound on the government with unrealistic expectations in the next crisis. Ultimately, the Indian government and people should recognize that such a cost-imposition concept is fundamentally astrategic. It does not advance the country to a lasting resolution of any of its security challenges. Only an implausible surrender or some type of political process can do that. Absent a political solution, this strategy anticipates that India’s challenge can at best be contained — only if India can summon the necessary tactical skill and manage the rising risks — but it will never end.
Arzan Tarapore is a research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, and a visiting research professor at the China Landpower Studies Center at the U.S. Army War College.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or any other entity of the U.S. government.
Image: Indian Prime Minister’s Office via Wikimedia Commons.
