by

Vice Admiral (retired) Vijay Shankar

Busting the canard that, between India and Pakistan the nuclear overhang is so fragile that a terrorist provocation by Pakistan cannot be met by a conventional response, for fear of triggering a nuclear exchange.

Wargaming

The roots of wargaming trace back to ancient India and China. The former refined the art to the classic board game of Chaturanga which in time evolved to the modern game of Chess, where a campaign was waged between two opponents through manoeuvres by the two arrays alternately; each piece had intrinsic abilities limited in their facility to engage the adversary. Much like the dynamics that drive a nation state whose comprehensive power is the aggregate of its individual strengths as defined by indices that take into account military, political, economic, cultural and leadership factors. So the game was played between two equivalent forces pitted against each other. The skills of a player was determined by his dexterity to manoeuvre, thrust, balance and out-think his adversary through deception and by attaining a stronger strategic posture within the rules of the game. Loss of the king led to what, in geopolitical terms, is referred to as the end of a regime.  

Both China and India also gave to the world the classic texts “The Arthashastra” by Chanakya and “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu emphasizing the importance of strategic thought as a critical feature of statecraft. The two texts form a compilation of aphorisms and principles that outlined the framework for wielding power and, indeed, waging armed conflict. They also prescribed the determinants of good national politics and defined the groundwork for use of modelling and wargaming as a training and decision-making tool. As history progressed, various cultures, including the Greeks and Romans, developed their own wargames, demonstrating their utility in honing military strategy.

The 19th century marked a significant transformation in the field of wargaming, particularly with the Prussian Army. Theorists such as Carl von Clausewitz translated their experience in the field to formalizing the concept, recognizing that military decision-making could benefit from structured simulations of battle scenarios. This in turn led to the development of Kriegsspiel, a table top wargame that allowed officers to practice operational and tactical decision-making.

The essence of the wargame is in discerning the thought processes of a Planner in arriving at a strategic, operational or even tactical decision; and analyse how best to arrive at an optimal outcome that could serve the purpose of enriching the art of state craft, developing war fighting doctrines or even honing skills of a tactical Commander. The intention was not to steer the wargame in a direction that served to fulfil or satisfy a preconceived argument.

The South Asian Stability Wargame

In March 2013, the Centre on Contemporary Conflict at the US Naval Postgraduate School conducted a strategic wargame, euphemistically called the ‘South Asian Stability Workshop’. The event was scheduled in Colombo Sri Lanka.  

The Wargame was politico-military in nature; its stated objective was to “examine crisis escalation dynamics in South Asia”. It involved the creation of a setting that was steered through events and three sequential response moves for which the country teams developed political and military directives. The directives for each move were analysed and adjudicated by Control setting-up specific situations for the next move. The third move was to lead to a possible decision to use nuclear weapons. Events were triggered by a planned Pakistan sponsored terrorist attack in a crowded sports stadium in India that resulted in the indiscriminate killing of a very large number of spectators including several VIPs. The entire process that shaped and drove the wargame was controlled within the rigid parameters of the following structure:

• A scenario design that put in place the geographical setting, forces involved and the objectives of each side. This left little planning elbow room.
• Country teams were assigned, however the participants neither had exhaustive domain expertise nor the behavioural bent of extant leadership. 
• Game mechanics which included rules, parameters, and decision-making processes were established to govern how players could interact with the scenario.
• Gameplay followed a rather inflexible path of decision making, issue of orders to forces, and engagement in strategic and operational discussions. The game in effect yo-yoed from the tactical to the Strategic levels with unreal rapidity.
• The use of conventional forces in response to the terrorist provocation at once saw the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons by Pakistan in the tactical battle area where Indian Independent Combat Groups (ICG) launched rapid retributive thrusts to strike at terror infra-structure and their supporters.    
• Analysis: Observers or analysts monitored the game, collecting data on the decisions made, outcomes, and the impact of those decisions on the scenario with only one purpose; to initiate a nuclear exchange.

As the game proceeded, the intention of Control became more than apparent; it was to compress the existing nuclear overhang to an extent where it provided the space for acts of State sponsored terror but none for a conventional kinetic response. The Game turned out to be a not so convincing argument for the tendentious notion that, between nuclear armed nations, there was no space for retaliatory action by conventional forces to terror attacks planned, armed, trained and sponsored by one of the States that had adopted the use of terror as an instrument of foreign policy.  

Launch of a Nuclear Canard that Persuaded a Strategy of Restraint

After the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989, there was a surge in tensions along the Indo-Pak Line of Control in Kashmir which constituted, as interpreted by US ‘experts’, an imminent nuclear flash point. Two contributory factors provoked this ‘narrative’ said the American interlocutors; firstly, the antagonists involved were undeclared nuclear armed states and secondly, events of 1989 that led to the withdrawal of Russia from Afghanistan had released the victorious Mujahidin for deployment elsewhere and in Kashmir; it also set in motion a hubris in the Pakistan ‘deep-state’ that translated to a brutal insurgency in the Indian state of Kashmir. The latter resulted in genocide and mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits out of the State leading to the shoring-up of Indian security forces in the State. To substantiate the American narrative a dubious report was released by the US State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research titled “India-Pakistan Relations: A Delicate Balance” that suggested (rather contrarily) that in the unlikely event of  “hostilities, India may escalate the conventional war by triggering events to take out all of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons (ironically, as recent as end 1989, the Bush Sr administration had signed off the fact that Pakistan did not possess nuclear weapons) facilities in coordinated surgical strikes.” This document was further addled in May of 1990, when the then Deputy NSA Robert Gates, came scurrying to the sub-continent on a covert Quixotic mission to defuse a mythical nuclear war.     

And thus began a long saga of misinformation and half-truths that emphasised the canard that between India and Pakistan the nuclear overhang was so fragile that a terrorist provocation by Pakistan must not bring about a conventional response by India for fear of triggering a nuclear exchange. Unfortunately, from the 1993 Mumbai bombings, hi-jacking of IC 184 in 1999, through the Kargil ‘invasion; to the assault on the Indian Parliament in 2001, the 2008 three day carnage in the financial capital of Mumbai and a host of other terrorist onslaughts by Pakistan based terror outfits (Jaish-e-Mohammed, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Hizbul Mujahedin) the self-shackling mantra of denying conventional response to terrorist attacks took root in India as the inane ‘Strategy-of-Restraint’ which contributed in large measure to paralysis of military policy when confronted with incidents of cross border terror attacks.

To Bleed India by Inflicting a Thousand Cuts: Instrumentation of Terror Groups

Carl von Clausewitz’s unerringly wise counsel ought to have fallen on Indian ears, that even the “simplest” strategic decision making can be bewilderingly difficult. And so it must be with Pakistan’s threat of nuclear weapons usage in protraction of a terrorist attack sponsored by them in the first instance; despite there being no precedence of such action, nor incentive of benefit or even inclination to escalate to a nuclear exchange. The Pakistan Establishment’s doctrine has remained committed to two cardinal dogmas, firstly the instrumentalisation of Islam using jihadi proxies as tools of a policy (Fair Christine, Fighting to the End, Pg. 80-89) to “bleed India by inflicting a thousand cuts”; and secondly, to support the discredited ideology of the “Two Nation” theory in order to sustain popular appetite for unending conflict with India. In this frame of reference, the question of intensifying the conflict to the level when nuclear self-destruction is assured appears aberrant.

The link between sub-conventional warfare and nuclear war fighting is at best a tenuous one. Conceptually, no amount of tinkering or reconstitution of nuclear policy can deter a conventional response to terror attacks. Such a notion would appear far-fetched because of the very nature of the weapon involved. Pakistan has in its arsenal tactical nuclear weapons (TNWs) with the stated purpose of countering an Indian conventional strike. Almost as if to suggest that they control the levers of nuclear escalation. This is an odd proposition since India does not differentiate between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons, (the bed rock of its “No First Use” policy).   

In the end analysis, the use of nuclear weapons introduces a new and uncontrollable dimension. Logically, if a Pakistan sponsored terror attack is the triggering event of a sequence of reactions, then it must equally be clear that their nuclear red lines give space for a conventional response. After all, the premise that a terror attack is seamlessly backed by nuclear weapons is not only ludicrous but is not even the Pakistan case. For, when dealing with the threat of use of nuclear weapons, to suggest that ambiguity and First Use provide options, is to suggest that nuclear war fighting, almost in conventional terms, is an option. This is denial of the nature of nuclear weapons and statements that have emanated from Pakistan’s leadership support the idea that only a threat that jeopardises the very existence of that State can provoke the First Use of nuclear weapons, by which is implied;

• Loss of vast territories
• Substantial destruction of the military
• Economic strangulation
• Destabilising of the nation can provoke the first use of nuclear weapons.

Against the reality of conventional war with its limited goals, moderated ends and the unlikelihood of it being outlawed in the foreseeable future, the separation of the conventional from the nuclear is a logical severance. Nuclear weapons are to deter and not for use; intent is the key; transparency and an abhorrence of ambiguity are the basis of its credibility. These remain the foundational principles that a nuclear weapon state must adhere to. Given the politics of the region, historical animosities and the influence of jihadi principles on the military in Pakistan, the dangers of adding military perfidy is more than just a possibility; however, to link nuclear malfeasance appears fanciful.

And yet the bizarre hypothesis still persists that relations between the two nuclear armed neighbours are plagued by a nuclear nightmare; of Pakistan in possession of a hair-trigger, opaque, nuclear arsenal that has embraced tactical use under decentralised military control, steered by a doctrine seeped in ambiguity and guided by a military strategy that carouses and finds unity with jihadists, not forgetting that the effect of an enfeebled civilian leadership in Pakistan that is incapable of action to remove the military finger from the nuclear trigger only adds to this premise. But, it does not take a great deal of intellectual exertion to declare that this nightmare in the wake of Operation Sindoor stands busted.

The catch is, as Cohen so succinctly put it (The idea of Pakistan, Cohen Stephen, Pgs. 97-130) “Pakistan will continue to be a state in possession of a uniformed bureaucracy even when civilian governments are perched on the seat of power. Regardless of what may be desirable, the army will continue to set the limits on what is possible in Pakistan.” At the core of this outlook is the rather obsessive “utilisation of Islamist militant groups as tools of foreign policy” (Fighting to the end, Fair, Christine Pg. 85) and the fatal contradiction of neutralising some inconvenient jihadi groups while instrumentalising others to further their revisionist policies.

Operation Sindoor; Larger Impact of the 88 Hour War

From a long term war fighting perspective ‘Operation Sindoor’ signals a strategic metamorphosis in the nature and manner in which a nation’s military must reform in order to fight and win a modern conflict that is limited both in time and objectives.

On 22 April 2025, Pakistan sponsored terrorists killed, in a most barbaric manner, 26 tourists in the idyllic meadows of Baisaran near the hill station of Pahalgam in the Indian Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir. What was singularly heinous about the massacre was the identification by religion of the victims and selection of men only shot at point blank range in front of wives, women and children with instructions to carry their message of religious odium to the rest of India. This assault was not a random incident of terrorist violence but carried with it a diabolical urge to arouse large scale sectarian passions within the country. The Resistance Front (TRF) was quick to claim responsibility for the carnage. The Front is an offshoot of the UN proscribed terror organisation, Lashker-e-Taiyba. It claimed control and responsibility not once on 22April but again the very next day. However, TRF denial on 26 April came after the Pakistani security establishment pressured the LeT-linked terrorist group to distance itself from the mass slaughter; for the purpose of the terror attack had failed on three counts. Firstly, the objective of undermining normalcy returning to Jammu & Kashmir, particularly, to impact the mainstay of the economy, tourism (a record 23 million tourists visiting the valley in 2024) had come a cropper as the flow of vacationers was quickly restored. Secondly, anticipated sectarian passions were never aroused as massive protests by Kashmiris erupted across the Valley against the attack. And lastly, the international community’s widespread and unconditional condemnation of the attack along with expressions of sympathy towards the victims. The immediate Indian reaction to the massacre came on 23 April with the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) being held in abeyance followed by a promise of a kinetic response at a time and place of choice.  

Operation Sindoor was more than a swift and precise military response to another cross-border terrorist attack. It marked a strategic inflection point. In just 88 hours, India used indigenous systems to strike hardened targets across the border with precision, speed, and overwhelming effect. No US systems. No foreign supply lines. Just BrahMos missiles, Akashteer air defence units, Rudram anti-radiation missiles, the Netra Airborne Early Warning & Control System (AEW&CS) and loitering munitions designed or assembled at home. The Operation was conducted in three distinct phases.

• Phase I (Night 06/07 May), Operation Sindoor launched in retaliation for the Pahalgam massacre; targeted nine terrorist centres from Bahwalpur in the south, Muridke and Sialkot in the Lahore sector and Muzaffarabad along with 4 other sites in POK.
• Phase II (08-09 May), Pakistan military response to the Indian attacks on terror sites with missiles, drones and UAVs, as it took ownership of the terror infrastructure.
• Phase III (10 May), Indian suppression and counter-air operations aimed at destruction of select Pakistan air defence networks followed by crippling attacks on strategic Pak air assets, infrastructure and Command & Control networks. Pak DGMO calls for a ceasefire. India agrees for cessation of fire.

During Phase I, India targeted nine terrorist strongholds. Five in Pak occupied Jammu and Kashmir which included Sawai Nala camp in Muzaffarabad- a training centre for Lashkar-e-Taiba. Syedna Bilal Camp in Muzaffarabad- This was a staging area of Jaish-e-Mohammed. Gulpur camp in Kotli – This was a base camp of LeT that was active in Rajouri and Poonch areas of Jammu. Barnala camp in Bhimber.  And Abbas camps in Kotli- Fidayeen of the LeT were prepared here. Targets within Pakistan included Sarjal Camp and Mehmoona Joya camp, both in Sialkot. Markaz Taiba Centre in Muridke – Terrorists who participated in the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks were trained here. Markaz Subhanallah in Bahawalpur; the HQ of Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) where recruitment, training, and indoctrination of terrorists targeting India was undertaken. Significantly the last two were major centres of terror activities and housed the headquarters of the LeT and the JeM. Battle damage Assessment revealed that all these targets were hit with uncanny accuracy and minimal collateral damage. Phase II and III emphasised, with telling impact, the inviolability of Indian air defences and the effectiveness of Indian counter air and offensive air operations.

Neutral analysts have determined that India’s Operation Sindoor was a decisive triumph for India, because Pakistan could neither penetrate Indian air defences nor could they cause any disruption to the offensive action taken by the Indian military. Indian airspace was free of any Pakistan aggressive action, while Indian counter air operations had rendered Pakistan open to bombardment by Brahmos, UAVs, hovering munitions and other missiles.

Eleven Pak air bases had been struck to the extent of annulling their operational capabilities. Also, five air-defence systems of Chinese origin had been destroyed opening vast gaps in their air defence environment. While at least two of their AWACS had been destroyed along with several fighter aircrafts either in the air or on ground; the strikes were accompanied by large scale spoofing and deception manoeuvres. More importantly their command centres including the vital one at the Nur Khan air base that houses its nuclear command facilities along with strategic mobility control and communication networks was rendered dysfunctional.

Meanwhile, Pakistani air-defences—built largely around older Chinese systems like the LY-80, HQ-9/P, and FM-90—were powerless to detect, deter, or respond to the strikes. In the skies over Pakistan, India didn’t just dominate, but its counter-air operations redefined and placed awkward questions for regional deterrence.  

Perspectives for Arm-Chair Strategists

The ‘88-hour’ engagement came as a breath of fresh air to strategists long entrenched in the belief that limited armed engagements could only be decided by the occupation of territories, weight of destruction and casualties rather than the impact of demoralisation, exposing vulnerabilities of defences and out manoeuvring of the adversary. In a reverse analogy, just as the machine gun and trench warfare provided the negative and bizarre logic for the clash of mass against mass resulting in a meat-grinder military doctrine; swift and complete counter air operations followed by targeted offensive air operations are the key to success in limited modern operations. Remember in Operation Sindoor counter air and offensive air operations followed in rapid succession of minutes rather than hours which had a paralysing and unbalancing effect on the adversarythat quickly resulted in the first calls for a ceasefire.

For the arm-chair strategist, some of who bewailed the fact that, cessation of operations came at a time when the Pakistan air space was wide open to an extent when a joint air-land thrust ought to have expanded their objectives to the occupation of territory and salients in POK. This is symptomatic of a lack of understanding of the nature of modern power, its application and its deterrent impact; that is, to prevent certain threats from materializing by posing an even greater threat. There is no inevitable symmetry between offensive and defensive power as both are influenced as much by resolve as by magnitude of power and immeasurable considerations such as surprise, geography, limitations on purpose and indeed the degree to which objectives are pursued. These characteristics of power will also determine the risks that the state is willing to take. Perils are heightened as offensive power gains the edge over the defense and penetrates to an extent when friction clutches-in. In operation Sindoor, objectives were limited, risks of getting embroiled in a drawn out slugging match of attrition particularly on land was to be avoided, remember the higher political directive “Samay seemit hai aur laksh bade” (Time is limited and our aims are large) almost as if to suggest that the engagement must be brought quickly to a decisive conclusion without jeopardizing our long term developmental agenda. Assessment of risks had to account for possible escalation and how far the adversary’s nuclear bluff could be called. Importantly, deterrence provided incentive for innovation, both political and operational to India that ran consistent with rapidly changing technology, as long as it was brisk in time and limited in space. The key consideration was that Sindoor was retaliation to an act of terror; so-much-so that had Pakistan chosen not to respond militarily, the operation would have concluded after Phase I.  

As for the “narrative-war” which some severe critics of Operation Sindoor believe ‘India lost the plot’; is there really any such thing that has a lasting impact in this age of transparency? In the American lexicon ‘narrative’ implies “a story or account of events, or the like, whether true or fictitious”. Surely the final arbiter was the stark photo evidence of the demolition of the JeM headquarters in Bahwalpur, devastation of the LeT headquarters at Muridke and other terror camps and critically the suppression of the Pakistan air-defences and the neutralisation of their strategic air stations including the Nur Khan air base. After all it was the Pakistan Director General of Military Operations that sued for a cease-fire.     

Legacy of Op Sindoor

A flawed strategic anti-terrorist doctrine will lead to not just advancing enticement for similar acts of terrorism but also absorb great energies and resources of the State in attempting to reconcile the act with advocacy of restraint; besides projecting an underlying softness of the State. In the absence of a doctrine, the case reduces to responding by determining the absolute rights and wrongs as determined without considering that the very sovereignty of the nation (by which is implied the ultimate authority of the State for the maintenance of order) is on trial. This makes for a recipe of inaction; unfortunately it was, to a great measure, the ill-conceived policy followed by India in the past.    

Perhaps the compelling legacy of Operation Sindoor is the new norm it has set for the Indian government, the use of force against terrorist-linked targets in Pakistan proper has now moved from “anomaly” to the “rule”. Whereas past crises of similar nature would elicit symbolic action, future attacks on Indian soil – especially those traced to organizations and infrastructure across the border, will invite a response of equal or greater intensity to target and degrade entities enabling terrorist action; which includes support and financing elements.      

Technology and Survivability of Nuclear Forces

There can be no absolute cure for war; yet in the absence of a total remedy for conventional war, there had to be hope to prevent catastrophe; from this developed the idea of deterrence, the instrument to enable deterrence was the nuclear weapon. And therefore the first and most vital condition from a nation’s security standpoint is to institute measures that provide a guarantee to the state (as well as the adversary) that a response to a nuclear attack will be a devastating retaliation in kind. As Churchill, in 1955, put it “…by a process of sublime irony, the world was facing a situation where safety will be the sturdy child of terror (balance of terror), and survival the twin brother of annihilation (MAD)”.  

The question then arises; will emerging technologies raise expectations to enable the employment of forces that will significantly reduce the survivability of an adversary’s nuclear forces in a conflict? If not, then is the perspective that Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) remains a powerful reason for a deterrent relationship to hold valid? Also, if missiles today can perform all of the technical functions of the strategic nuclear bomber with greater speed and more precision, then are we witnessing the phasing-out of the manned air vector? But at the same time has adequate thought been given to the change in character and vulnerability of a nuclear second strike policy based entirely on the missile (ballistic or cruise) launched from mobile carriers and driven by Artificial Intelligence? Operation Sindoor, within a matter of hours had exposed the vulnerability of the Pakistan air-defences and their National Command Authority. Did this in turn expose their nuclear arsenal to counterforce action? Also, will not the reliability of a counterforce strategy decline with time, technology and transparency? These are complex questions for the political leadership for whom nuclear strategy may be but one of his concerns, excessive complexity may itself lead to paralysis as Clausewitz had noted.

Conclusion

We began with the propagation of an intricately fabricated canard that “between nuclear armed nations, there was no space for retaliatory action by conventional forces to terror attacks planned and sponsored by one of the States that had adopted the use of terror as an instrument of foreign policy.” Despite the fact of the disingenuousness of the sham; its plausibility lay in the proposition that linkage between Pakistan’s use of terror organizations as a tool of state policy to wage war on India has perverse consequences that link it to nuclear escalation. This bizarre correlation, Pakistan will have the world believe, comes to play if and when India chooses to respond with conventional forces to a terror strike puppeteered by their “Deep State.” Fatefully this policy has led to a self-destructive urge that has decomposed the diversity of Pakistan society. Not only are some terror clients at war against the state but some have led the persistent call to violence against Shias, Ahmedias, Barelvis, Agha Khanis, Borees, Baluchis and not forgetting Hindus and Christians. The Army has shown absolutely no predilection to eliminate these outfits; only because they serve their purpose in India and for fear that any act against their terror clients is acceptance that the ‘two-nation’ is misbegotten and indeed spurious. 

At the heart of the matter is Pakistan’s, or at least its army’s, rejection of any separation of the Maulvi from the state. There are two critical reasons for this; firstly Muslims are seen to constitute a separate nation despite the fact of the creation of Bangla-Desh and the Muslim demography of India almost equalling that of Pakistan.  Secondly, the army’s self-appointed role to defend the “two-nation” ideology. Six days before the carnage of Pahalgam, the Pakistan Army Chief, on 16 April 2025, ranted on this ludicrous theme at a public convention of overseas Pakistanis, notwithstanding the successive military defeats it has suffered at India’s hands or the political and diplomatic setbacks it has faced has convinced it to revise its defunct ideological dogma. Operation Sindoor is yet another case of having suffered crippling strikes to its terror infrastructure as well as its vital air assets and air defence networks in just 88 hours. Yet, defeat for Pakistan is only with the death of its ideology and this can only occur if the army wills it. No amount of economic hardships (the state has been to the IMF for a bail out on 25 occasions in its short existence) nor has the failure of its many dictatorships that ruled it for 34 of its 78 years of existence in any way prodded the army to surrender its power or even allow a political system to take root in that country. The improbable paradox is that Pakistan is a case of an army that depends on an interminable conflict with India, a failing economy, splintering society, rapacious politicians and geopolitics of international opportunism for its very existence.

So the question that begs to be asked is why the leading democracy in the West is so disinclined to bring about a revision in the politics of Pakistan. And why, indeed, has it so vigorously supported the nuclear canard even though terrorism is a common universal scourge? And does the US Government need to be reminded that during the twenty-year “War on terror” in Afghanistan the Pakistan state and its army played a treacherous and duplicitous role that milked the US administration of over $32 billion while all the time providing safe havens and logistics to the very groups that they were fighting the war against. And who can forget where Osama-bin-Laden had gone into hiding, before he was found and killed. The White House, historically, works with and through the Pakistani army to manipulate that state’s foreign policy; it served a strategic “Pentagon-led” purpose up to the break-up of the Soviet Union. Is there a reason why the US is unlikely to lose interest in the failing Pakistan and is that because of the rooted relationship that their deep states have nurtured and benefited from over the years? Or does the sustenance of the nuclear canard form a part of, a yet unseen, strategic scheme?