Meanwhile till that happens in the next 20 years, we wait for the enemy to strike us with their stealth squadrons without posing any deterrent offensive threat ourselves.
All that tech is great, but one of our enemies is already operating hundreds of 5th gen fighters and the other is getting a few squadrons in the next couple of years if not earlier.
So we basically place all our bets on hypothetical future capabilities while our enemies strengthen NOW.
You bet Pakistan will take their chances against our AD once they have a few squadrons of J35s operating. And simultaneously, they will also strengthen their air defences, having learned their lessons from sindoor.
And we will have nothing to deter them from doing so as we will lose our own threat perception.
That's not a solution, it's basically suicidal.
Is BrahMos hypothetical? Is IACCS hypothetical? Is a distributed fire control system — where a low-level radar like Flycatcher can cue an S-400 without its primary radar even lighting up — some sci-fi fantasy?
It’s astonishing how easily people slip into “5th-gen or die” hysteria without understanding how deterrence actually works. You want to talk about near-term capability? Let’s do that.
What Operation Sindoor demonstrated wasn’t just kinetic superiority — it showcased the system of systems that the IAF has quietly built. Pakistan’s radars were destroyed not because we had stealth fighters — we don’t — but because they had to light them up. And the moment they did, they were hit by loitering munitions. That’s what happens when you don’t have distributed ISR, sensor-to-shooter handoff, or C4I fusion.
But here’s the thing: it takes money, time, and indigenous capability development to build that kind of network. These aren’t off-the-shelf systems you can import from some friendly superpower. Nobody is handing you a ready-made C4ISR lattice tailored to your terrain, threats, and doctrine. India invested years into building IACCS, integrating AWACS, networking fire control systems, developing passive and VHF radar nodes, and scripting doctrine around them. That’s not “sexy” like buying a shiny stealth jet, but that’s what creates real deterrence — a kill web, not a photo op.
And even if Pakistan tried to build something similar, it wouldn’t change the fact that there is no operational defense vector against weapons like BrahMos or hypersonic glide vehicles. Zero. None. The HQ-16, LY-80, or whatever else they field cannot — repeat, cannot — reliably intercept these fast, low-flying, terminal-phase maneuvering munitions. This isn’t a failure of Pakistani doctrine; it’s just the brutal math of physics and engineering. Nobody has an answer to this yet — not even China, not even the US. That’s the whole reason HGVs are strategic shock weapons in the first place.
I
India didn’t need stealth to strike deep. It needed coordination — between IACCS, its AWACS fleet, passive and active sensors, EW systems, and standoff weapons. That infrastructure is real. It exists now. The enemy’s boutique J-35 squadrons will be as vulnerable as any other platform if you can see them and cue your weapons accordingly — and we are actively investing in VHF radars, passive detection, and multi-static arrays to do exactly that.
Meanwhile, Pakistan is blowing its limited funds on a high-maintenance, twin-engine boutique platform with questionable stealth, unproven Chinese engines, and zero doctrine for dispersed operations. Instead of learning that their air bases are vulnerable and building survivable distributed lethality, they’re doubling down on hangar queens.
China? Let’s talk China.
They may have 200+ stealth fighters, but they also have at most ~250 aircraft deployable in the Western Theater. Their air bases are few, vulnerable, and concentrated. BrahMos and, increasingly, air-launched ballistic missiles and hypersonic vectors will wreck them in the opening days. You want to bet they’ll fly in reinforcements from the east while Indian fires are slamming their logistics chokepoints like the Xinjiang–Tibet Highway or the Lhasa-Golmud corridor?
They know this too. That’s why they’re building three-engine long-range cruisers and drone swarms — because even they understand that platform alone doesn’t cut it in high-altitude, high-risk environments.
You want near-term deterrence?
It’s not stealth-on-stealth duels that provide it. It’s a combination of:
– BrahMos
– SAAW
– Harop
- Rampage
- Rudram
– IACCS
– Passive radar
– S-400 in networked mode, not vanity mode
– And a doctrine that knows how to use them all together.
So stop with this defeatist “we have nothing” talk. If Pakistan had an S-400, they wouldn’t have been able to use it like we did. They don’t have IACCS. They don’t have distributed fire control. They don’t have depth, redundancy, or resources to build something like this.
We do. And if the enemy decides to test that? We’ll show them again. In HD. With telemetry.
, do you think they can stop the HGVs you recently tested.
