Pak aimed to bring India to its knees, but folded in 8 hours, says Chief of Defence Staff Gen Chauhan

Pune: Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan on Tuesday said "on May 10 around 1am, Pakistan aimed to bring India to its knees in 48 hours" but "their operation, which they thought would continue for 48 hours, folded up in about eight hours".

"Then they picked up the telephone and said they wanted to talk," Gen Chauhan said.

He said Op Sindoor was the first time India had engaged in non-contact warfare. "We didn't see each other. We saw it either through radar or at different ranges, except for what was happening on the LoC. It was a mixture of kinetic and non-kinetic war. When I say non-kinetic, that happened in the information domain and cyber domain. And, of course, there were kinetic operations where destruction was being caused to each other. It was also nonlinear in nature. So there's something happening on the LoC and something happening as far back as Sargodha."

Gen Chauhan spoke about how India networked all its air defence architecture and was using AI for predictive analysis to give a comprehensive picture and negate the threat. "So better and faster information was available to our side. We also tried to kind of network our counter UAS system, which was countering drones. And in the 7-15 days, we were able to do that," Gen Chauhan said.

The CDS, delivering a special lecture organised by Savitribai Phule Pune University's Department of Defence and Strategic Studies on the "Future of War and Warfare", also touched upon data-centric warfare, which will be based on data analysis deciding cognitive or decision superiority. "Similar green shoots of that were visible in Op Sindoor," he said.

He also explained how, through Operation Sindoor, India raised the bar and redrew new lines for military operations in response to terror.

Referring to his previous media statements about India suffering losses, Chauhan said, "You should be able to understand what went wrong, rectify your mistakes, and go out again despite the initial setbacks. That is a hallmark of a professional force. And that's the kind of thing we displayed. What I said in a couple of my interviews — that losses are not important, it's the outcome which is important." Chauhan likened it to Test cricket, where, when one side wins by an innings, there are no questions about how many balls or players played.

Gen Chauhan said they would share data on the result of Indian strikes based on technical parameters like electronic intelligence and signal intelligence at some point. Stating that it was Pakistan's strategy to bleed India by a thousand cuts, Chauhan said Gen Asim Munir (now field marshal) had spewed similar venom against India and Hindus a few weeks before Pahalgam. "But these decisions can be retracted as Pakistan is faced with a different kind of prospect, that it faces military action in case we find terror happening against us. So we have kind of raised the bar. We have connected terror to water and we have drawn out new lines for military operations against terror."

When Pakistan did ask for talks and de-escalation, Gen Chauhan said India accepted, but not immediately. According to the CDS, Pakistan's decision to talk stemmed from two facts: "They must have assumed that if they continued in this mode, they were likely to lose much more. And the second, since they struck us on multiple fronts, they still did not have the benefit of understanding what they struck and they wanted to talk. It is only after one or two days that they realised that all their attacks against us had failed."

Revealing details of the night of the first airstrikes on May 7, the CDS said, "We did it from 11.05pm to around 1.30am, and five minutes later we rang the director-general of military operations to say that we've done this, we hit only terror targets, that military establishments are out of the purview of the strikes, and we ensured that there was no collateral damage to civilians. We need to talk to each other."

The CDS said war has expanded into space, cyberspace, the electromagnetic domain, etc. "A lot of activities took place between both of us for four days in the electromagnetic domain. Interactivity also took place in the cyber domain. We also had a lot of activity in the domain of perception management, information, or maybe you can call it cognitive warfare, in which shaping the mind of the people is more important than the landscape."