by Sameer Lalwani, Shailender Arya and David Brostoff, War on the Rocks, Washington, DC, January 22, 2026
On May 7–10, the two countries fought an 88-hour war after India accused Pakistan of orchestrating a gruesome terrorist attack in April that killed 26 civilians. This was one of the most significant conflicts between the two nuclear-armed rivals in decades. The war involved a series of unprecedented strikes on Pakistani territory, counter-air battles, aerial-drone duels, naval maneuvers, and disinformation campaigns. Fighting intensified sharply late on May 9, before the United States and other observers feared rapid escalation and lobbied for a ceasefire.
In the aftermath of the conflict, analysts noted some basic takeaways. India was willing to cross new lines, take on more risk, and — following lessons from Ukraine and the Middle East — conduct air and missile strikes on targets deep inside its adversary’s territory. New Delhi also seemed to underestimate Islamabad’s capabilities and resolve, which reportedly resulted in some loss of assets even while India asserted it too downed several Pakistani assets. While India may have won the military engagement on points rather than a knock-out, it failed to effectively communicate this to domestic and international audiences, suggesting New Delhi’s need for better strategic communications. Finally, escalation control — while asserted by India — was not self-evident to all parties, leading the United States and others to press for a ceasefire.
As has been argued in these pages, India’s brief but consequential war with Pakistan — known as Operation Sindoor — may turn out to be a crucible for longer-term Indian strategic and operational thinking. In the weeks and months since the war, five distinct lessons have emerged. First, New Delhi believes it can fight a conventional war below the nuclear threshold. Second, it has developed a preference for “non-contact” warfare. Third, the Indian military has identified — and is beginning to remedy — gaps in its capabilities. Fourth, New Delhi has reassessed the nature of the China-Pakistan threat. Finally, India reaffirmed its strategic ties with Russia.
These five lessons are by no means exhaustive, and they may not align with the core takeaways of some observers. Nevertheless, they are relevant for policymakers seeking to understand India’s strategic trajectory in the coming years. As a rising power with one of the largest economies and militaries, India’s lessons from the war and its subsequent actions will shape regional stability and U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific. Moreover, as Washington deepens its partnership with New Delhi, India’s doctrinal shifts, evolving military capabilities, and power-balancing behavior demand closer attention.
War Without Nukes
During Operation Sindoor, India learned that it can carry out “calibrated retaliation” without igniting a nuclear crisis between the two countries. Indian strategists such as Adm. Arun Prakash, have since reflected that the war “further expanded the space for conventional operations below the nuclear threshold.”
In a discernable doctrinal shift, India has been pushing the conventional envelope with Pakistan, particularly over the past several years. In 2016, India conducted “surgical strikes” on terrorist bases and staging areas near the Line of Control, the de facto military border between the two countries. India hit deeper in 2019 when its air force struck Balakot — a territory in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. In the May 2025 war, India targeted Pakistan’s Punjab province, from where most of its political and military leadership are drawn. And while in 2019 India threatened surface-to-surface missile strikes to coerce Pakistan into returning a captured Indian pilot, in 2025, it did not hesitate to launch multiple salvos.
By striking Pakistan, New Delhi asserts that it has called “Pakistan’s nuclear bluff,”demonstrating that there is significant room for conventional war. While India generally signals careful escalation management, it may dangle the prospect of counterforce strikes against Pakistan’s nuclear assets and command and control. Indian political leaders want to project a responsible image, but some former military officials see value in exposing Pakistan’s inability to protect its nuclear arsenal.
India’s approach to Pakistan is shifting from a cautious, defensive stance to an assertiveness, characterized by calibrated but overwhelming military action. This likely has long-term doctrinal and capability-building implications.
Embracing “Non-Contact Warfare”
Even as India has continued to create room for conventional war beneath the nuclear threshold, Indian military leaders have praised the virtues of “non-contact warfare.” This combines standoff strikes using missiles, drones, and loitering munitions with non-kinetic cyber probes and information campaigns. Importantly, non-contact warfare does not include cross-border ground incursions.
Although non-contact warfare can involve intense kinetic action, it drifts toward limited, incremental escalation, which may result in blustery signals rather than meaningful coercion or attrition. Such a form of “cheap aggression” might fall into the category of what Jon R. Lindsay and Erik Gartzke call “forms of negotiation in the shadow of larger war.” Indeed, the approach is more a game of counting coup than capturing the flag.
Indian policymakers have long planned for ground war, but there are good reasons to prefer non-contact tactics. Full-scale conventional war imposes enormous human and economic costs. Non-contact warfare, by contrast, reduces costs, but its efficacy is unclear since it struggles to impose significant pain on the enemy. It also does not convey sufficient costly signals or information about resolve or capability. Though such standoff strikes could generate “cumulative deterrence,” routine “mowing the grass” preemptive or retaliatory strikes may appear more performative than punitive, offering symbolic utility for domestic and international audiences. India’s newfound preference for non-contact warfare may be a continuation of the tradition of routine cross-border firings and artillery duels along the Line of Control. Not without risk or cost, non-contact warfare may not necessarily enhance deterrence or alter the military balance between the two countries.
The inefficacy of non-contact warfare was apparent in the disconnected war aims and outcomes. Indian member of parliament Shashi Tharoor argued that Pakistan had to “pay a price” for enabling the terrorist attack. Similarly, Indian Army chief Gen. Upendra Dwivedi has said the operation was meant to teach Pakistan “how to behave.” Still, Indian officials acknowledge that cross-border incidents are likely to continue, suggesting that the lessons were inadequately learned, the price was not high enough, and the strategy may not deter Pakistan in the future.
The thorny deterrence problem stems from two factors: Pakistan’s reliance on militant proxies as an instrument of state policy and the Pakistan Army’s strong domestic political incentives to fight India.
Non-contact warfare may avoid some of the risks and uncertainty of conventional war, but it is insufficient to coerce a change in the adversary’s behavior or meaningfully deplete its capabilities. Further, India has to be careful not to overlearn the lessons of non-contact warfare or overfit its doctrine, force structure, and industry toward Pakistan, as it could prove ill-suited against China’s greater military capacity and loftier ambitions.
Capability Gaps
The war revealed several Indian capability deficiencies that allowed Pakistan to punch above its weight and fight India to a perceived “draw.” These included air defense and counter-drone systems; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; resilient communications in a contested electromagnetic spectrum; sensor-to-shooter speed; and long-range strike. New Delhi intends to implement organizational reforms to address the gaps.
Air Defense and Counter-Drone Systems
Pakistan’s volleys of drones challenged India’s ability to efficiently task air-defense assets in the air littoral due to training gaps and the sheer volume of drone probes and attacks. One way that India has tried to address the problem is by experimenting with numerous low-cost counter-drone solutions including micro-munitions and electronic jamming as well as higher-end directed energy weapons. Inspired by the Israel’s Iron Dome, India seeks to merge its counter-unmanned systems into a larger air-defense system. In August 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the development of Sudarshan Chakra, an indigenous integrated air-defense system, by 2035.
Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance
India had some intelligence gaps during the 2025 war, including failing to continuously track Pakistani Air Force assets. India therefore concluded it needs more space-based collection assets with higher revisit rates for persistent detection. New Delhi also seeks to remedy Islamabad’s advantage in airborne warning and control systems, which gave Pakistan an edge in data relay, cueing, and jamming during air-to-air missile exchanges in the war. In response to these vulnerabilities, India has begun investment in space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance infrastructure. New Delhi fast-tracked a $3.2 billion program for 52 military satellites for improved border surveillance through multi-sensor payloads. It is also investing in protected satellite communications, high altitude pseudo-satellites, and a wide range of low– to high-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles. Through the Netra MkII project, India is installing six advanced-airborne early warning systems on existing platforms.
Electromagnetic Resilience
While the conflict featured inaugural deployments of electronic warfare systems by both sides, India faced some challenges with the contested electromagnetic environment as many of its drone assets were operating on vulnerable, open frequencies. The Indian military needs more resilient and secure communications and data flows to operate in environments where global navigation satellite systems are denied. During Operation Sindoor, the Indian military faced an unprecedented scale and intensity of electronic warfare, jamming, spoofing, and cyber-attacks. Before the war, the Indian military paid only “lip-service” to electronic warfare, but based on our private discussions and public reporting, Indian army leaders now intend to invest in adaptive algorithms, software defined radios, robust tactical data links, frequency agility, quantum-sensing for navigation, and advanced command-and-control systems.
Tactical Communications and Decision Speed
During the war, India’s military leadership’s decision speed possibly lagged because of tactical communications problems such as unintegrated networks, high latency, and slow manual data fusion. As one Indian colonel wrote, “data delays persisted, hindering threat detection and unified targeting.” Consequently, India has resolved to build a more agile, integrated military with common data and interface standards between its forces; more connected platforms and integrated sensor feeds across air, land, and sea; and AI-enableddata fusion for enhanced battlefield awareness and rapid decision making. India’s AkashTeer (“Sky Arrow”) automated command-and-control system exemplifies such integration efforts, and provides a template for the Indian military to scale.
Long-Range Strike
The BrahMos supersonic cruise missile enabled India to effectively strike military targets across Pakistani territory during the war. Yet, this success exposed two critical shortcomings: cost and range. First, at a cost of $5 million per missile — almost double that a U.S.-made Tomahawk missile — the BrahMos may be unsustainable to produce or employ at scale. India is thus developing alternative, cheaper guided-rocket artillery.
Second, even as Indian policymakers and strategists saw the importance of the BrahMos missile, they also recognized the absence of any conventional long-range strike capability to counter their “primary adversary” in Beijing. The BrahMos’ high cost and relatively lower range (under 500 kilometers) limit India from effectively striking in volume entrenched Chinese military targets on the Tibetan plateau or holding at risk China’s industrial center of gravity deeper within the country. India might try to address this gap through a combination of fifth-generation fighter aircraft, unmanned autonomous combat aircraft, potentially like the X-BAT, and the development of hypersonic missiles.
Organizational Reform
Indian strategic leaders recognize that organizational reform underpins all the capability upgrades. For decades, India’s weapons acquisition process has made military modernization incredibly difficult, slow, and expensive. Nevertheless, New Delhi appears prepared to cut the bureaucratic red tape to expedite its procurement to one-third of the normal timeline. Additionally, the senior military leadership has prioritized the establishment of joint, integrated theater commands to improve coordination, planning, and combat effectiveness. Above all, some former senior military leaders — backed by the senior-most political and military officials — have advocated for a civil-military fusion to dismantle India’s historically rigid firewalls between its industrial base, technologies, and politico-military strategies. This effort seeks to stimulate new thinking and practices by cross-pollinating civil servants and soldiers with technologists, entrepreneurs, and academic experts — thereby enhancing defense acquisitions, training, strategy, and deployment of Indian soft and hard power.
Confronting a Two-Front Challenge
Perhaps the clearest shift in Indian strategic thinking since the May war is that New Delhi is convinced that it faces a two-front “nightmare” of active cooperation between China and Pakistan.
Since the 1950s, Indian officials have contemplated several two-front threat scenarios from China and Pakistan. These took on a range of forms: two distinct threats; peacetime political and material cooperation to pool resources; opportunistic aggression by one country when India was militarily engaged by the other; and even planned, simultaneous Sino-Pakistani offensives. In the past decade, some analysts worried that China was providing Pakistan with cash and arms specifically to keep New Delhi “off balance.” Others assessed that China and Pakistan would open two simultaneous fronts along the Indian border, overstretching New Delhi’s capacity to respond.
After the May war, some serving and retiredIndian officials concluded that China unmasked itself through its active involvement in the conflict. During the war, Pakistan not only deployed Chinese weapons systems — including J-10 fighter jets, PL-15E missiles, CM-401 hypersonic missiles, and HQ-9P air defense systems — but also relied on China’s space-based intelligence collection, targeting inputs, data processing, and cyber activity. In addition, Beijing provided diplomatic and narrative support. Indian Deputy Chief of Army Staff Lieutenant General Singh publicly claimed, “[Pakistan] was getting live inputs from China.”
China also signaled last May that it could apply pressure to stress Indian defenses. After a Chinese spy ship entered the Indian Ocean, for instance, New Delhi feared that Beijing would surveil and feed intelligence to Pakistan’s military. Further, based on our private discussions, India assessed that China used drones to probe the India-China border while India was fighting the Pakistan military last May. Additionally, the Pakistani state led a broad coalition of cyber operators and aligned hacktivists targeting India during the conflict, but multiple cyber-attacks on Indian systems originated from China. India’s defense of civilian-cyber networks proved adequate, but the conflict exposed vulnerabilities to large-scale distributed denial-of-service attacks.
The possibility that the two-front threat has been “fused” together complicates Indian defense planning. With China’s support, Pakistan can go toe-to-toe with India. As one Indian analyst noted, “In terms of missiles, drones, and AWACS [Airborne Warning and Control System], Pakistan is close to equaling India operationally, and especially in the context of a short and swift military contest where attrition does not come into play.” The threat of additional Chinese involvement, however, could overmatch Indian defenses.
With the possibility of the two-front threat evolving into an overwhelming “one front reinforced,” New Delhi needs to develop an offset strategy that involves hard choices and risks. This includes considering massive defense spending increases, more reliance on partners and allies, revised military doctrine(including a new sequencing or prioritization strategy), greater AI and autonomy integration into the force, and even nuclear options.
Russia Makes a Comeback
For decades, India has maintained a strategic partnership with the Soviet Union and Russia. However, since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, scholars have debated whether and how much New Delhi will reduce its dependence on Moscow. The performance of some Russian weapons — including the BrahMos missile and S-400 air defense system — during the May war helped reaffirm New Delhi’s faith in Moscow. This led India to double down on its defense relationship with Russia, symbolized by President Vladimir Putin’s state visit to New Delhi in December 2025.
The BrahMos missile, which New Delhi co-developed with Moscow since the 1990s, enabled India to conduct numerous strikes on military bases inside Pakistan. At present, Pakistan cannot defend itself against this missile. Despite the high price of almost $5 million per missile, the recent opening of a BrahMos integration and testing facility in India indicates that the Ministry of Defense plans to expand production of the missiles, both for domestic consumption as well as export to new destinations like Indonesia and Vietnam.
Following the May 2025 war, some Indian military officials also praised the Russian S-400 air defense system for protecting Indian air space. New Delhi expects Russia to deliveranother S-400 air defense squadron by May 2026 and may be exploring procurement of more S-400 interceptor missiles and squadrons as well as a joint S-400 maintenance, repair, and overhaul facility.
Nevertheless, India has reasons to remain cautious about reliance on new S-400 procurements. Already, the Indian military is trying to better integrate other medium-range air-defense systems. At the same time, Russia has struggled to deliver the S-400 to India, likely due to the supply chain disruptions of critical subcomponents. Russia still owes India two air defense systems from a contract signed in 2018.
A greater challenge to the S-400 comes from China. Over the years, Beijing has probed India’s air defense system’s vulnerabilities and Indian analysts and officials worry the microelectronics that go into future S-400 systems may be sourced from China. India would have reason to fear S-400 underperformance in a conflict with China, or as one official suggested, “the sustainment of India’s S-400 regiments would effectively be dictated by India’s strategic rival, Beijing.”
Although India reaffirmed its faith in some Russian weapons systems — and will continue to induct others, like the lease of a Russian nuclear attack submarine by 2028 — New Delhi is likely to continue diversifying its defense partnerships. In private discussions, some people in the Indian defense industry expressed frustration that Russia never offered the level of support — in battle networks, datalinks, or space-based integration — that China provided to Pakistan during the war. Additionally, in recent years, New Delhi has poured tens of billions of dollars into weapons purchases and joint production deals with Western firms — including American high altitude drones, French carrier fighter aircraft, and Israeli missiles — showing that India is keen to diversify.
Operationalizing Lessons
Operation Sindoor was more than a four-day skirmish with Pakistan. It was a turning point in Indian strategic thinking. The conflict revealed the strengths of India’s military but also some of its weaknesses. In the months following the four contentious days in May, Indian analysts have learned valuable lessons. India affirmed it can fight a conventional war without crossing the nuclear threshold through “non-contact” warfare. India has also identified and begun addressing its capability gaps. Additionally, New Delhi took some bigger geopolitical lessons on board. It reinforced parts of its narrow but enduring defense partnership with Moscow. More importantly, it recognized, and began planning for, a two-front challenge posed by Beijing and Islamabad.
Moving forward, India should carefully calibrate its focus on Pakistan. Despite Islamabad’s threat, Beijing remains New Delhi’s greatest challenge. As the 2025 China Military Power Report points out, China still claims some Indian territory and has frequently used military force to assert these claims. Tensions climaxed in 2020 when Indian and Chinese soldiers fought in the Galwan Valley, killing dozens and triggering a surge of tens of thousands of troops to the border that remains in place. New Delhi should seek to avoid playing into China’s strategy of “diverting” India towards a Chinese proxy or getting “bog[ged] down” on its land borders. Otherwise, India might be unprepared for the more ominous threat posed by growing Chinese military presence in the Indian Oceanand the broader Indo-Pacific.
Indian strategists have thus emerged from the May 2025 war with several lessons to guide operational planning, force development, and grand strategy for the next decade. Clausewitzreminds us, however, that war is “always the collision of two living forces.” And indeed, Pakistan — with China’s help — has also been busy upgrading its tactical, organizational, and geostrategic positions. The next crisis between India-Pakistan — and there will probably be a next crisis — will reveal whether New Delhi has not only learned conceptual lessons but effectively operationalized them at scale better than its adversaries.
Sameer Lalwani is a senior advisor with the Special Competitive Studies Project, a non-resident senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund, and an affiliate of the MIT Security Studies Program.
Shailender Arya is a retired Indian Army Colonel, a former advisor in India’s Ministry of Defence, and currently a senior advisor at The Asia Group.
David Brostoff is a contract researcher with the Stimson Center and was previously a South Asia research analyst at the United States Institute of Peace.
Image: Government of India Prime Minister’s Office via Wikimedia Commons