On the night of May 6 and 7, 2025, the Indian Air Force (IAF) faced an unprecedented setback: The Pakistan Air Force (PAF) downed seven Indian aircraft during a high-intensity aerial engagement. This included the state-of-the-art Rafale fighters, regarded as the linchpin of India’s air power modernization, which was a game-changing event.

The outcome represented the breakdown of an assumption that had shaped Indian strategic thought in the period following the 2019 India-Pakistan crisis: the belief that advanced fighter aircraft platforms could decisively determine future battlefield outcomes in India’s favor.

In 2019, the PAF downed two IAF planes (a Sukhoi-30MKI and a MiG-21 Bison) in a retaliatory air operation following the Indian Balakot strike, with the MiG-21 crashing in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK). This resulted in the capture of its pilot, Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman. Pakistan stated that a Sukhoi-30MKI crashed in Indian-occupied territory across the Line of Control (LoC), a claim that India denied but was echoed in eyewitness accounts. While Abhinandan was released 60 hours after his capture as a “peace gesture,” the episode marked the first major shock for the IAF, which had been outmaneuvered by a rival force despite possessing advantages in terms of fleet size, budgetary resources and force depth.

The lesson was unmistakable: Conventional military superiority alone cannot guarantee battlefield success.

India’s assessments

Rather than internalizing this implication, the IAF, aligning with the government’s position, downplayed the losses while perpetuating the narrative that acquiring more advanced platforms can shape future battlefield outcomes in India’s favor. In April 2019, the then Chief of Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal BS Dhanoa, categorically stated that the results would have been skewed in India’s favor had it inducted Rafale aircraft in time. He also said that their induction would shift the technological balance in India’s favor, mirroring Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s earlier assertion that India would have achieved much more if the country had the Rafale aircraft.

While electoral dynamics and the need to boost the population’s morale explain the timing of the messaging, there also appeared to be an actual sense of strategic overconfidence within decision-making circles.

Messages along similar themes were echoed in subsequent years, as New Delhi received the first batch of Rafale fighters in 2020, with deliveries completed by late 2022. Notably, following the arrival of the first batch of Rafale fighters, Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh famously stated, “If it is anyone who should be worried about or critical about this new capability of the IAF, it should be those who want to threaten our territorial integrity.” Research has corroborated that leaders and decision-makers can easily succumb to mutually reinforced positive illusions, especially if other domestic actors do not meaningfully challenge those assumptions. 

What has been learned

Within the aviation community, the Dassault Rafale is rightly considered a platform of stature for its range, strength, agility and highly potent weapons suite. But as Stephen Biddle, the author of the book Military Power, puts it, “many nations failed to master complicated modern-system force employment and variations in such behavior have been more important than technology per se for observed outcomes.”

The 2025 India-Pakistan air battle served as a practical demonstration of this dynamic. Indian strategists not only misjudged the PL-15 missile’s engagement range but also the PAF’s resolve, professionalism and strategic acumen. This allowed the PAF to achieve tactical surprise and a first-shot advantage. At the same time, the PAF used a networked “kill chain,” by linking radars, airborne warning systems and fighters through a data link. This allowed the fighters to receive targeting data from airborne early warning and control aircraft and engage targets without using their own radar, while electronic warfare (EW) disrupted Indian sensors and communication, reducing the IAF’s situational awareness. The challenges were further compounded by limitations in cross-platform data integration within the IAF, which constrained coordination during the engagement.

The result was a seven-nil outcome. The claim was not random; Pakistan later disclosed the specific tail numbers of the four Rafale fighters, while statements from some members of the Indian military leadership also served as indirect acknowledgments of multiple jet losses. Notably, in one of his interviews, the Indian Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), General Anil Chauhan, on being inquired about the jet losses, remarked that “what is important is not the jets being downed but why the jets were downed,” and that the IAF rectified the tactical mistakes and implemented the improved strategy two days later. The latter suggested that the IAF likely withheld its air operations for two days to reassess its strategy — an indication of operational shock. To regain lost pride, it resorted to launching stand-off weapons from within its own territory against targets inside Pakistan — an implicit acknowledgment that it could not match PAF in the air.

The episode thus served as yet another sobering reminder that battlefield outcomes rarely unfold the way the initiating states may have anticipated. From the Vietnam War of 1955–1975 to the US-Israel-Iran War of 2026, war literature is replete with examples of conflicts that were started on assumptions about the ability to achieve rapid military victory, which proved untenable over time. For India, it is all the more important to internalize this lesson, as every successive crisis in nuclear South Asia has shown increasing intensity, and the region cannot afford such a trajectory.

[Patrick Bodovitz edited this piece]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.