Long post warning.
I Disagree with your second post. And I think I might have an answer to your questions in the first post. But before that, some background.
How many of you are familiar with Vipin Narang's work here? He is a west based (Primarily American) Political Science Professor with a specialization in Nuclear Policy. He has authored a consistent series of papers, serially for over a decade about how India's nuclear policy is not as innocuous as it looked and that all of that seemingly inconsistent and haphazard development of technology and testing of missiles, ABM systems etc is not from Strategic Confusion but a well planned and thought out Conventional Counter force strategy against Pakistan while retaining a Counter Value targeting strategy against China.
Most recently, he authored a paper jointly with Christopher Clary ( Yes of the ISI Begum fame) titled
" India's Counterforce temptations " which I recommend everyone to read.
The crux of the paper is as I stated above. That India's strategic planners have made a conscious strategy to target Pakistan's nukes with conventional counterforce elements while simultaneously developing ABM systems in order to intercept the stray nuke missile thrown our way. India’s way of dealing with the Pakistani nuclear threat is to de nuclearize Pakistan while using only conventional counterforce elements. That this is causing instability in South Asian Strategic balance as Pakistan cannot keep up with Indian military spending, hence its paranoia about India’s new counterforce strategy will cause it to launch its nukes at every provocation and put their nuke arsenal at ever more hair trigger alerts.
That this is not just one academic being paranoid but a well thought out deliberately underplayed strategy by India is borne out by some more examples. In one of his very early talks at an Israeli forum Abhijit Iyer-mitra has mentioned that Indian Air Force has a very clear cut policy to deal with Pakistani nuclear weapons. That they would destroy any TEL they can see and track via Satellite based ISR, Aerial reconnaissance and HUMINT. If their were to be a sympathetic detonation, it would not be considered a first strike by India. Add to this the “accidental “ slips of tongue by Indian strategic planners on the level of NSA Menon in the UPA govt and DM Parrikar in the NDA govt, this appears more and more to be a credible hypothesis especially considering the military technologies India was developing indigenously and acquiring from Israel and France. Israel especially, considering the Israeli strike element arsenal has the targeting of Iran’s nuclear facilities or finished nuclear delivery and deployment mechanisms as one of its primary taskings. I mean missiles Like Rocks ALBM, LORA etc. here.
So far this was just a strategy, but an untested one. But all the elements required for this strategy have been carefully designed, developed, acquired and tested. Like ABM systems, Air launched Precision strike munitions with very low intercept probability, Integrated Air Defense Grid, multiple options for missile interceptions etc. They have also consistently and iteratively improved procedures, planning and execution with exercises like Vayu Shakti to replicate a high tempo of operations and constant bombardment that would be necessary to denuclearise Pakistan.
So, with this in mind, my reading of what has happened during Operation Sindoor is as follows.
We could not start Operation Sindoor with SEAD/DEAD against the Pakistan Armed Forces while saying that we are responding to terror. Why? Because believe it or not we have a lot of baggage that acts as a precedent that prevents us from directly striking Pakistani military first. Like it or not, everybody and I mean absolutely EVERYBODY would love to have an excuse to blame us for being aggressive and rogue if we break that precedent. We needed to demonstrate that we are only targeting terrorists and that we will only respond against the Pakistani military when forced to. It was for this reason that we were working under such restrictive RoEs on May 6-7 during the opening hours of Operation Sindoor.
But Pakis being Pakis made it easier for us by having Uniformed Generals taking part in the Funerals of dead terrorists, and under the lead of a wanted terrorist no less, especially in front of Cameras. Hence, Modis declaration that we will no longer differentiate between terrorists and the Pakistani state and military is important.
It means when Operation Sindoor resumes again, Pakistani military assets/ AD would be targeted and neutralized first before any anti terrorist action and we don’t need to provide any justification for targeting another country’s armed forces. I think this is also the reason why MP delegations with diverse selection of MPs have been sent to various countries in order to drive home this point, especially emphasizing that “India has the right to Defend itself against Pakistani terrorist attacks”
It is to shift the narrative from, “ India is needlessly escalating by targeting another Sovereign country’s Armed forces “ to “ India is defending itself against Pakistani military strategy of terrorism and it is Self defense” and coming from a democratically elected MP representing the will of millions of Indian Voters, it becomes very difficult for either the Foreign Press or Bad faith actors to counter them.
About why India started targeting Pakistani nuclear storage sites and launch sites along with SPD Command and Control, I have the following explanation based on what I postulated before.
Till the time Pakistanis kept themselves in the domain of drones against military installations and Firing in Border areas, we would, as mentioned in the statement on May 8th “respond in the same domain”.
Hence, in response to Pakistani night time drone attacks, we responded with Drone attacks targeting Pakistani military assets. No escalation.
However, the moment the Pakistanis launched a Ballistic Missile towards NCR with ambiguity of whether it was a nuclear payload or conventional the situation graduated from Conventional sallies across the border with drones to “Possible nuclear first strike”
The Pakistanis I suspect wanted to demonstrate the following.
They are willing to escalate rapidly into the grey domain of nuclear ambiguity. Meaning, India could never be sure if the next attack with another BM or Cruise missile would not be equipped with a nuclear warhead, which they thought would terrify the Hindu banias and paralyse our command chain with sheer panic.
What actually happened was that India’s Politico-military planners had just upgraded this situation from “Anti Terror Operation and its consequent military duels “ to “ Its very possible that the Pakistanis would launch a nuclear first strike next”
This was what I suspect has actually caused the entire effort to shift gears. Because immediately post the interception of a Ballistic Missile over Sirsa, The IAF’s counterforce targeting campaign was in full force. If you notice, the Indian posture and military attacks shifted dramatically in intensity and range of targets during May 9-10th , but still well within the domain of how Pakistan responded. Meaning we wanted demonstrate our counterforce intent, and remove any ambiguity from Pakistani minds that escalating this would result in anything other than their denuclearization. (Please read Modiji’s statement that India would no longer bend to Pakistani nuclear Blackmail in this light.)
Another thing this explains is why did US get involved and what was the “ Alarming intelligence” that they had received?
Some say that it was the targeting of Nur Khan air base, but just targeting an airbase doesn’t explain the “alarming“ part. I think what possibly happened was this. As soon as India shifted gears to Counterforce targeting, any reasonably well read nuclear strategist or policy maker would immediately recognize it for what it means and sound the alarm, but because Trump fired everybody of consequence who could recognize it, it took the Americans the better part of a day to realize what was happening.
That was the “alarming intelligence “ that the US received and why it was involved immediately. Because the situation just graduated from “Just browns killing each other, none of my business” the day before, to “ NUCLEAR WAR !!! MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WOULD HAVE DIED !! “
The difference can be gauged from just the difference in the kind of statements made by Vance the DAY BEFORE, to what Trump has constantly crowed since about saving millions of people. Because, the end game of a counterforce conventional targeting of Pakistani nuclear arsenal is that some WOULD be launched against us, and despite us being confident of being able to intercept these stray shots, the Burgericans have no way of knowing that we are just signalling our change of strategy and that this was a demonstration of our intent. As far as they knew, we were going to denuclearize their munna and roll it over like a bitch.
(As an aside, holy shit this American administration is dumb as shit. )
This is my understanding of what happened during May 6-10th and I hope this helps put some possible context on the inexplicable happenings during those 4 days.
Those tariffs will be withdrawn anyway.
