Abhijit Iyer-Mitra
@Iyervval
2h
Just putting this out there - prior to our imminent strikes on Pakistan - specifically our weaknesses
1 India’s great weakness, historically, has been escalation prognostications (how will they respond) & de-escalation pathways (essentially what war termination would entail)
2 the other great weakness in India is that we think debilitating strikes on Pakistani capabilities are enough - they are not. Pakistanis only learn from public humiliation
3 Then we have this thing where every branch of the military wants its share of glory. Therefore if IAF & IN are chosen for the strike, IA will put pressure to get a share of the fighting even if it’s suboptimal messaging. As a rule ground fighting is far messier than naval & air combat
Given all this, our goal is essentially to hit pakistan hard & public, but to minimise Pakistan’s response. That requires preemptive elimination of Pakistan’s offensive capabilities. You see the conundrum here? In order to minimise their response we either have to minimise or maximise our response - nothing in between.
Assume their response is high casualty event, what do we do? Knit sweaters? This is where our traditionally bad escalation prognostications go bad. You’ll have to re-respond & that’s where things spiral.
Obviously we may pull off something highly calibrated, but keep this at the back of your minds when we do hit pakistan in the coming weeks. Personally I see a 60-70 percent chance of spiralling.
Apr 25, 2025 · 7:36 AM UTC