The ongoing US-Iran war holds crucial lessons for India to sharpen its war-fighting capabilities, both in the short and long term. A few years ago, the Russia-Ukraine war gave the first glimpse of long wars and asymmetrical tactics. But it was only a preliminary heads-up in the war matrix, and many limited themselves to two things. First, technological integration on the battlefield. Second, the relevance of wars in the modern-day global order. It was all in theoretical settings where discussions happened, and less reading between the lines, until the real bell rang – the US-Iran War. The ongoing war holds real lessons for India, as it touches upon the realities of asymmetrical warfare and the limitations of escalation strategy.
Three Lessons
The three lessons that India needs to learn are: First, asymmetric warfare poses a real challenge to superior power – a growing survival mindset and strategic sustainment during war, while maintaining the capacity to counterstrike and deliver offensive deterrence. Second, the myth of unleashing Blitzkrieg and the escalation strategy. Third, the increasing value of strategic autonomy and the dwindling value of collective response and multilateralism.
In India’s strategic profile, these three crucial lessons help in drawing realistic threat and war scenarios in the South Asian region, especially with Pakistan. The lessons are highly relevant to India’s strategic response to Pakistan.
During Operation Sindoor, India carried out massive, in-depth strikes, exercising multi-deterrence and going beyond traditional deterrence theory, i.e., punishment. India, through Operation Sindoor, challenged Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine, demonstrating that India can deliver a lethal, swift, and overwhelming response without fear of nuclear overhang.
Most importantly, India sent this strategic message to Pakistan that any terror attack will amount to an act of war, not a simple show of retaliatory strike. India will escalate and push Pakistan to an existential crisis, and then successfully exit on its own terms, deterring Pakistan from escalation and achieving all its objectives during conflict through escalatory deterrence, ensuring peace through strength.
While the strategic message and India’s strategic response towards Pakistan were evident, the reality is that Pakistan has a terror obsession, especially with J&K, and both are Pakistan’s long-standing weapons against India, relying on unconventional strength to counter and strike India. Therefore, Pakistan will not easily roll over after Operation Sindoor, as history has shown us, and in recent times, the blatant attempt to stage a terror strike in the heart of Delhi last year. If Operation Sindoor 2.0 happens, then it must pass three tests. First test, do not let Pakistan sustain the war and build its asymmetrical capabilities. India should have the upper hand in the conflict, successfully destroying Pakistan’s will to strike back and escalate, and giving India a clear way out of the conflict after meeting its objectives.
Any prolongation of the conflict and letting Pakistan build asymmetrical capabilities can complicate conflict scenarios at the battlefield and in the domain of narrative or psychological warfare, as it is doing to the US in the ongoing war with Iran.
Second test – Ability to deliver short, rapid, lightning strikes that achieve surprise and shock value without depleting many of its resources, so that even if conflict continues, India must have short, rapid responses ready to counter Pakistan’s asymmetrical strike response – drone swarm attack and mortar shelling quickly destroying Pakistan’s artillery and key tactical positions. This requires India to build an anti-drone response system and to improve its battlefield awareness through the effective use of AI, as the US is currently doing with its Maven AI.
In short, do not let strategic or tactical exhaustion undermine the capacity to dominate conflict. Unlike the US, which is battling tactical-strategic exhaustion at one end and, at the other, struggling to dominate Iran effectively, as Iran is successful in inflicting exhaustion and entangling the US in multiple fronts of conflict.
The third test is the diplomatic test, where India must rely more on strategic autonomy than on regional blocs or superpowers. The conflict shows that the regional response is weak, and even the multilateral response collapses if the conflict is prolonged. The conflict realism at the diplomatic front, as seen in the present ongoing war, can be decoded in two ways as follows: First, there is a strong shift from multilateralism to plurilateralism, where like-minded decisions and units or individuals with vested interests are given preference over consensus building and regional interests – NATO’s backtrack and the UAE’s exit from OPEC are stark examples of this. India must ensure that there is no third-party intervention in the name of regional interests, because it is actually plurilateralism dubbed as multilateralism.
Second, secure negotiating capacity from a position of strength. Diplomacy fails if Pakistan survives a conflict, especially a prolonged one. India must maintain strength in negotiations through deft diplomacy, or by all means if the conflict between the two countries prolongs and Pakistan builds its asymmetrical warfare capabilities. A similar case is reflected in the ongoing war, where Iran is maintaining a position of strength because of its asymmetrical warfare capabilities.
The answers to all three tests or lessons lie in how well India learns from the US-Iran war, where India must not let Pakistan build asymmetrical warfare capabilities or gain significant diplomatic depth. If Pakistan is denied prolonged survival space during the conflict, or in the event of Operation Sindoor 2.0, India can clearly unleash lethality and decisiveness. But if Pakistan manages to survive the conflict, it would inflict pain on the battlefield and off the battlefield at the diplomatic level by complicating negotiations, as Iran is doing for the US. India must be prepared for all scenarios to successfully steer Operation Sindoor 2.0 and to manage any future conflict with Pakistan. India must shift towards a more effective strategy.
The Strategy Shift: India’s Maximum Pressure Campaign
As M.J. Akbhar famously described Pakistan as a “toxic jelly state” in his 2012 book Tinderbox, Pakistan is a jelly state that is always unstable, unlike butter, which melts or solidifies; it just wobbles and stays in place. Therefore, India must not only showcase its credible deterrence and the overwhelming consequences of escalation but also continuously work to break Pakistan’s will to recalibrate by drawing up a credible, high-impact maximum-pressure strategy against Pakistan that will also keep Pakistan’s asymmetric warfare capabilities at check.
India must pursue a maximum-pressure strategy that is sustained not only during conflict or wartime but also in peacetime. While keeping the Indus Water Treaty in abeyance and intensifying scrutiny of sanctions are among the measures to apply pressure, they have shown limited results and have not disrupted Pakistan’s internal or external stability, especially its will to recalibrate. India must adopt a two-fold strategy, working across the overt and covert spectrum, from diplomatic to military, even at the covert level.
First is a pre-emptive strategy, where India must engage through overt or covert means to eliminate and disrupt any imminent threat to carrying out strikes on imminent threats, such as covert border strikes through drones. Second is the preventive strategy, where India prevents a non-imminent threat from developing into a greater threat in the future. This differs from the notion of a pre-emptive strike, where the threat is imminent. In this case, India can target any strategic behaviour that could put Pakistan in an advantageous position or help it to recalibrate and readjust, from short-circuiting its economic and political stability to diplomatic manoeuvring through multiple diplomatic outreaches and preventive and clandestine diplomacy, especially in regions that are the centre of attention of Pakistan’s influence, like Bangladesh. Further, some overt preventive strikes through military options could be exercised by targeting more high-value targets in Pakistan rather than only those that pose immediate threats.
The core idea of disrupting or breaking Pakistan’s will to recalibrate works only when India can sustain a multi-domain destabilisation of Pakistan through pre-emptive and preventive strategies. Only then will Pakistan’s will to reorganise and recalibrate begin to erode. The US strategy of building maximum pressure against Iran was primarily focused on targeting Iran’s will to recalibrate its strategic rise and its nuclear programme, which was heavily disrupted by US efforts that went beyond diplomacy. Perhaps those efforts now give the US a small window to trigger massive destabilisation in Iran by short-circuiting its brewing internal socio-economic faultlines – the 2026 Iran protests. Similarly, India can pursue its own maximum pressure strategy to disrupt and destabilise Pakistan’s resolve, giving India the right window to push Pakistan to the margins of the region. Because Pakistan is waiting to execute an Iran-like strategy on India and sustain its unconventional terror capabilities, India must learn the right lessons to open the door to achieving complete deterrence against Pakistan.
