For people demanding retaliation, with what? The Indian army and air force are the weakest they have been since 1962, relative to Pakistan. Combine that with a senior office cadre that is dangerously incomptent at modern warfare, and this is an army that is barely positioned to defend, let alone go on an offense.
Anyone who studied IAFs airstrikes on Balakot and the subsquent third rate counter air campaign- know this is a fighting force that doesnt know or understand how to build operational strategies or conduct combat ops at all - These are basic air ops missions - conducted every day by US, NATO, Russia, Israel, Ukraine, that too successfully, day in and day out. Heck, Syrian air forces conducted better strike missions for heavens' sake. How on earth can you screw the one thing you trained for, for a damned generation no less. How on earth will any government trust this force after that wholesale disaster of an operation.
The less said about army fighting units the better - save for few specialist units, whose combat capability is being degraded every day - most of Indian fighting units are at 1990s Iraq army standards (excluding signals maybe) - Training standards - perhaps worse. There is no strategy or master plan - its basically somehow plug the holes with enough bodies till opponents run out of ammo, or get bored.
Just praise whoever you believe in that the other side is even more incompetent in a conventional sense - and that takes some doing - or else we are very very well positioned to for some deep humiliations this decade as combat capability further erodes.
If i am going to take a critical 'devils adovate' side to this balakot airstrike and counter air campaign,
i will have to give a C+ to balakot and B+ to counter air campaign.
I am not sure how this is not clear-cut to any analyst based off of barebone facts:
1. IN balakot, we successfully managed enemy air penetration and returned with zero losses. THAT is indisputable. If we believe PAF and not IAF, we hit trees - ok. So we took shit bombs or dropped it at wrong place. but we did deliver payload. our strike packages DID come home empty and even PAF said 'look muh dead trees'.
Thats a C+ effort at worst.
The main hurdle OF bombing campaign, is successful penetration & extraction of assets from enemy air space. We achieved that.
2. Counter air campaign - Pakistan made a directed air attack against a specific installation - that is pakistan saying 'we must fight' and we going 'okay'. We prevented directed air strike on said target AND we took down a F16 at cost of a Mig21.
Thats like having a team run full speed at your fence with their cars, you manage to stop them all, you lose one of your cars - maruti and take out one of theirs - a jaguar.
how the hell is that NOT an A- performance at the worst ?!
ok,lets say IAF lied about shooting down F16 ( i have no reason to doubt IAF word as they are most trustworthy airforces in the world) - this means we lost 1 plane, prevented bombing run of target attacked by PAF.
meaning we stopped THEIR balakot tit for tat and lost a plane in turn.
Imagine if we went to balakot, didnt even get to drop bombs and came back but they just lost a plane in defence. PAF failed in delivering payload and fucked off. took down a plane in return, so failed strike mission FOR THEM.
Thats at worst a C+.
So i am interested in your analysis of why are you willing to give IAF what seems like a F or D- in both counts.