How South Asian military calculus has changed after May 2025

• Air power increasingly central to modern battlefield planning; lessons from Ukraine, Middle East wars show primacy of drones, satellites and jamming capabilities on modern battlefield
• Both sides realise conventional escalation still possible without breaching nuclear threshold
• China now figures more prominently in New Delhi’s military calculations about Pakistan

ONE YEAR on, the four-day India-Pakistan conflict of May 2025 has increasingly come to be seen by military circles on both sides as not simply another skirmish between two nuclear rivals, but rather the beginning of a new phase in their military rivalry.

The conflict reinforced some long-held assumptions, overturned others, and convinced policymakers in New Delhi and Rawalpindi that future confrontations are likely to unfold faster, strike deeper and depend far more heavily on technology, precision and integration than any previous wars or conflicts between the two.

“Lessons would have been learnt by both sides because operational readiness is the top priority for any military. In any case Pakistan will remain a step ahead of India, whose air force was mauled in last year’s conflict,” a former army chief told Dawn, while discussing the broader post-May 2025 strategic environment.

What emerged from those four days was not the usual pattern of mobilisation and coercive signalling, but a far more compressed and dangerous strategic environment, in which both sides appear to believe they can sustain limited conventional operations while still avoiding full-scale war.

That is the assumption now shaping military doctrine, force restructuring and weapons acquisition in the two countries.

A new set of tools

For nearly three decades after the 1998 nuclear tests, the India-Pakistan military balance rested on the uneasy understanding that crises would erupt, military pressure would build and political rhetoric would intensify, but the fear of uncontrolled escalation (a rebrand of the Cold War doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction) would eventually impose restraint before either side crossed certain operational boundaries.

The events of May 2025, however, suggest that those boundaries have shifted, as both sides have demonstrated a greater willingness to target operationally significant military infrastructure, while still containing escalation.

Precision strikes, drones, stand-off weapons and air-defence systems were employed in the last episode not merely for symbolism, but to impose concrete operational and political costs.

The side able to deliver the first blow is likely to gain the decisive advantage in any future conflict.

This matters, because it changes how future crises are likely to unfold, as both countries are adapting to a wider technological transformation of warfare itself.

The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East had already altered military thinking globally. The May 2025 conflict accelerated the localisation of those lessons within South Asia and drones, in particular, are now central to military planning on both sides.

Rather than lowering the nuclear threshold, Pakistan now seems focused on strengthening its ability to absorb, contest and retaliate conventionally while maintaining escalation control. This is producing greater emphasis on survivability, distributed force employment, long-range fires and stronger coordination between air and ground forces.

The growing importance of the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) within broa­der operational planning also reflects this evolution.

Former Air Chief Marshal Abbas Khattak, who is veteran of four wars while speaking to Dawn, noted that the “battlefield has changed” with the introduction of newer systems. He, however, emphasised the continued primacy of air force in any conflict, and underscored its autonomy in deciding its strategy and dealing with operational matters.

Examples from modern-day battlefields

Future conflicts are, meanwhile, increasingly being viewed through the lens of networked warfare in which sensors, electronic warfare, precision targeting and command integration matter as much as numerical force strength.

Pakistan’s recent institutional changes also appear connected to this evolving threat perception. The creation of dedicated rocket formations and expansion of guided rocket capability point towards effort to build survivable stand-off strike options capable of threatening operationally relevant targets at depth. The objective is not conventional parity with India, but the creation of enough uncertainty and retaliatory capability to complicate Indian assumptions about escalation dominance.

At sea, similar thinking is beginning to emerge. The conflict, combined with lessons drawn from the wars involving Iran, Israel and US, has sharpened focus within Pakistan regarding maritime vulnerability and possible economic coercion. Greater attention is therefore being paid to anti access capability, long range maritime strike systems and survivable naval assets.

The growing use of drones is likely to produce an accelerating competition not only in offensive drone capability, but also in electronic warfare and counter-drone systems. The next India, Pakistan conflict may, therefore, depend as much on the ability to blind, jam or disrupt an adversary’s networks as on the destruction of physical targets themselves.

The electromagnetic spectrum has now become a battlefield in its own right.

Persistent surveillance through satellites, drones and networked sensors is also steadily reducing the ability of militaries to conceal force movements or strategic infrastructure in ways once possible. The response increasingly lies in mobility, dispersion, deception and redundancy.

This has particular implications for Pakistan because many of its critical military, industrial sites and population centres lie relatively close to the Indian border. This means that in a future high-intensity conflict, infrastructure connected to deterrence itself could potentially fall within the envelope of conventional strikes far earlier than in previous crises.

Paradoxically, South Asia may now be entering a period where stability at the nuclear level coexists with greater instability below it.

‘One border, two adversaries’

India, meanwhile, appears to have drawn different, but equally important lessons from the 2025 conflict.

Indian strategic thinking after Operation Sindoor seems to have moved beyond the earlier framework of limited punitive strikes, designed largely for signalling. The emphasis now seems to be on deeper aerial strikes that stay below the nuclear threshold, supported by integrated surveillance, precision-strike capabilities and targeting at longer distances.

Multi-domain warfare, where cyber operations, drones, missiles, electronic warfare and air power operate simultaneously rather than sequentially, is coming to prominence.

Meanwhile, air power in particular now sits much closer to the centre of India’s operational planning against Pakistan than at any previous point in the rivalry.

New Delhi is likely to increase reliance on systems such as the BrahMos cruise missile, S-400 Triumf air defence batteries, besides AI-assisted targeting, satellite-enabled battlefield awareness and shortening the sensor-to-shooter cycle.

This shift is seemingly dictated by a larger structural concern within Indian strategic circles, where Pakistan is increasingly being, not viewed in isolation, but as part of a wider China-Pakistan military ecosystem.

For New Delhi, the notion of “one border, two adversaries” has become central to military assessments.

The concern in Delhi is that Chinese support can rapidly compensate for Pakistan’s vulnerabilities through intelligence sharing, electronic warfare assistance, space-based surveillance, weapons transfers and networked operational support.

These anxieties have accelerated India’s push towards theatre style integration and deeper jointness between services. For years, Indian proposals for theatre commands remained trapped by bureaucratic competition and inter-service resistance.

But the experience of May 2025 has strengthened the argument that future wars and conflicts will be decided in their opening hours, and therefore require unified command structures capable of coordinating multi-domain operations in real time.

“There has been quite a push towards the integration for better utilisation of assets and faster mobilisation. Lessons from last year’s Operation Sindoor validated this concept,” an Indian military analyst said.

However, nuclear deterrence still appears to discourage full-scale war, as neither India nor Pakistan seems interested in prolonged territorial conflict on the scale of earlier wars and conflicts.

While the four-day conflict may not have produced a new balance of power, but it has yielded something far more consequential: a strategic re-imagining of how the next war will be fought.

Published in Dawn, May 8th, 2026