New Delhi: Chief of Defence Staff Gen Anil Chauhan said on Saturday that India lost some fighter jets during the strikes on nine terror camps in Pakistan and PoK and the subsequent retaliation on May 7, but it changed strategy thereafter to inflict heavy damage on airbases across the border before a ceasefire was called three days later.
The CDS did not give the exact number of fighter jets lost by India but said in separate interviews to Reuters TV and Bloomberg TV on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore that Pakistan’s claim that it had shot down six IAF jets, including three French-origin Rafales, is “absolutely false”.
Gen Chauhan’s admission of India’s initial failures during Operation Sindoor is the most direct after Director General of Air Operations Air Marshal A K Bharti’s statement on May 11, in which he said losses are part of any war situation but “all our pilots are back home”, meaning they had ejected safely after their jets were hit by enemy fire.
“All I can say is that there were losses in the initial stages on May 7,” Gen Chauhan said.
Indo-Pak conflict never came close to nuclear confrontation: CDS
Chief of Defence Staff Gen Anil Chauhan said the conflict with Pakistan from May 7 to May 10, which saw reciprocal air, missile, drone and artillery attacks, never came close to the point of a nuclear explosion as both sides “showed a lot of rationality in their thoughts as well as actions”.
In another interview during the Shangri-La Dialogue, the CDS further said, “The good thing is that we were able to understand our tactical mistake, correct it, rectify it and then implement it two days later and fly all our jets again, which were hitting targets at long ranges.” Gen Chauhan also dismissed the effectiveness of Pakistan’s use of Chinese-origin air defence systems such as the HQ-9 missile batteries and radars as well as the Turkish-origin Bykar Yiha kamikaze drones and Asisgard Songar drones. “They did not work. We were able to carry out precision strikes with an accuracy of one metre, 300 km inside Pakistan’s heavily air-defended airfields,” he said. Pakistan was clearly prepared for the initial strikes by India on May 7, in which the Indian Air Force and Army struck four terror camps in Pakistan and five in PoK. It was a combination of missiles and ‘smart’ bombs fired from fighter jets as well as kamikaze drones and extended range artillery strikes between 1.05 am and 1.30 am.
India immediately made it clear that the aim was only to target terror infrastructure and no military installations were hit. However, Pakistan chose to escalate the situation further, including by launching a barrage of drones and some missiles to target Indian airbases, military assets and civilian areas.
The IAF then attacked nine Pakistani airbases and at least three radar sites, some of which were close to nuclear facilities as well as command and control structures. Sukhoi-30MKI, Rafale and Mirage-2000 fighter jets carried out precision strikes using BrahMos, Crystal Maze-2, Rampage and Scalp missiles as well as other precision weapons. Gen Chauhan declined to comment on President Donald Trump’s claim that the US had brokered the ceasefire to avert a nuclear war but said it was “absurd” to suggest that the two sides were close to using nuclear weapons. Pakistan’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen Sahir Shamshad Mirza had made the same point during the Shangri-La Dialogue a day earlier but had emphasised that “strategic miscalculations” could not be ruled out in the future. However, Gen Chauhan said the “men in uniform” were in fact the “most rational” as they understand the consequences. “In every step taken during Operation Sindoor, I found both sides showed great rationality in their thoughts as well as actions. So, why should we assume that in the nuclear sphere, there will be irrationality on somebody else’s part,” he said. The CDS said there is a “considerable difference” between conventional operations and the nuclear threshold. He said channels of communication with Pakistan were “always open” to control the situation and there were “more sub-ladders” on the de-escalation ladder that “can be exploited to resolve our issues”.