India lost fighter jets on the opening day of the recent military confrontation with Pakistan due to tactical mistakes that were swiftly rectified before the Indian Air Force returned in big numbers and carried out precision strikes deep inside the neighbouring country, chief of defence staff General Anil Chauhan said in media interviews in Singapore on Saturday.
“What is important is not the jet being down, but why they were being downed. What mistakes were made — those are important. Numbers are not important. The good part is that we were able to understand the tactical mistake which we made, remedy it, rectify it, and then implement it again after two days and flew our jets again, targeting at long range,” a Bloomberg report quoted the CDS as saying.
He made the comments in response to a question on whether Pakistan downed Indian jets during the May 7-10 military clash in an interview with Bloomberg TV while attending the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. He called Pakistan’s claims of shooting down six Indian fighters “absolutely incorrect.”
Chauhan said India suffered initial losses in the air in an interview with Reuters too.
“What was important was why did these losses occur, and what we would do after that. So, we rectified tactics and then went back on the 7th, 8th and 10th in large numbers to hit air bases deep inside Pakistan, penetrated all their air defences with impunity, and carried out precision strikes,” he told Reuters.
He did not specify how many jets India lost.
An IAF spokesperson declined to comment on Chauhan’s remarks or the tactical mistakes he referred to. The CDS also said both Indian and Pakistani forces displayed “rationality in their actions” during the clash.
The IAF shot down a few high-tech fighter jets of the Pakistan Air Force during Operation Sindoor — India’s direct military response to the April 22 Pahalgam terror strike in which 26 people were killed.
The IAF is poring over the technical details to establish the hits, Air Marshal AK Bharti, director general air operations, said at a media briefing on May 11, a day after the two sides reached an understanding on stopping all military action. He indicated there were combat losses on the Indian side too but the fighter pilots were back home.
“We are in a combat scenario; losses are a part of combat. The question you must ask is whether we have achieved our objective of decimating the terrorist camps. The answer is a thumping yes. As for the details… what could have been, how many numbers… which platform did we lose… I would not like to comment on that because we are still in a combat situation. If I do, it will only be — advantage adversary,” Bharti said at the time.
Operation Sindoor triggered four days of strikes and counterstrikes with fighter jets, missiles, drones, long-range weapons and heavy artillery. Between the launch of the operation in the early hours of May 7 and the ceasefire on the evening of May 10, Indian forces bombed nine terror camps in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), killing at least 100 terrorists, and the IAF struck targets at 13 Pakistani airbases and military installations.
The IAF “flew all types of aircraft with all types of ordnance on the 10th”, Chauhan said in the Reuters interview. “Most of the strikes were delivered with pinpoint accuracy, some even to a metre, to whatever was our selected mean point of impact.”
The CDS said, in the same interview, that there was enough room for conventional operations below the nuclear threshold, adding that both sides showed “rationality” during the confrontation.
“There’s a lot of space for conventional operations which has been created, and this will be the new norm. It’s my personal view that the most rational people are people in uniform when conflict takes place. During this operation, I found both sides displaying a lot of rationality in their thoughts as well as actions. So why should we assume that in the nuclear domain there will be irrationality on someone else’s part?”
The IAF struck two terror sites at Markaz Subhanallah in Bahawalpur and Markaz Taiba near Muridke, while the army hit targets at seven places including Mehmoona Joya in Sialkot, Sawai Nala and Syed Na Bilal in Muzaffarabad, Gulpur and Abbas in Kotli, Barnala in Bhimber, and Sarjal.
The IAF also struck military targets in Rafiqui, Murid, Chaklala, Rahim Yar Khan, Sukkur, Chunian, Pasrur, Sialkot, Skardu, Sargodha, Jacobabad, Bholari and Malir Cantt in Karachi.
On May 29, the chief of the air staff Air Chief Marshal AP Singh said Operation Sindoor reflected the changing character of warfare. “Every day we see new technologies coming in… Operation Sindoor has again given us a clear idea of where we are headed and what we need in the future. A lot of work needs to be done in realigning our own thought processes, which is already underway.”
