Opinion Articles

Visualise a modern-day Air Force commander sitting in the operations room, miles away from the combat zone, overseeing every friendly and enemy aircraft and all assets involved in the campaign. In a split second, he can task a fighter, reposition a drone, and authorise a strike. In today’s promising technological era, he does not even need an operations room; a laptop on his desktop will suffice. The situation looks promising as it offers efficiency, precision, and control. The term used for such operational control is ‘centralisation’, which has been made possible with advanced networking, integrating space, cyber, surveillance, artificial intelligence, and seamless communication, enabling a single commander to manage an entire campaign from a single node. Centralised command and control, championed by the Western air forces and then adopted by many others, has thus been seen as a pinnacle of modern military power.
The concept of centralisation, enabled by state-of-the-art networking, may seem promising, but it is nothing more than a myth.

The Air Force is an inherently technology-sensitive force, and without adopting emerging technologies, concepts, and doctrines, it risks falling behind in effectiveness and relevance. Aware of this eventuality, the leadership of Pakistan Air Force (PAF) has always remained open to change and ready to embrace the evolving character of warfare. The PAF’s success in the “4 Day War of May 25” lies in its transformation during the period from Operation Swift Retort in 2019 to the May 25 war.
Prior to ‘Operation Swift Retort’ in 2019, the air power balance between the PAF and the Indian Air Force (IAF) was defined by distinct yet comparable capabilities. The IAF operated a technologically diverse fleet that included SU-30 MKI, while the remaining fleet comprised older legacy fighters, such as Mirage-2000, MiG-29, MiG-21, and Jaguars. The PAF, meanwhile, had in its inventory the F-16 Fighting Falcon

The Treaty of Westphalia is considered to be the foundation and a reference point for the conceptual establishment of the idea of a “Nation State”. It solidified the notions of territorial sovereignty, state autonomy, and the structure of the international system. Signed in 1648, the treaty stabilised patterns of interstate conduct it reinforced. Since 1648, various other treaties, pacts and arrangements have been signed at international, regional, and bilateral levels. These were aimed at streamlining state-to-state relations and the movement of people and goods across geographical borders. Under “Schengen States” arrangement, for example, citizens of member states can cross over to other member states without visa or border checks. Today, the Schengen area covers over 4 million square kilometres with a population of over 450 million people and includes 29 countries. Even with this relaxed arrangement, state sovereignty and state laws are held inviolable and military activities

The May 2025 Air War between the PAF and the IAF will go down in history as the largest Beyond Visual Range (BVR) battle between two nuclear-armed neighbours. So too would the consequences of a 7-nil loss for the IAF, which resulted in a ‘strategic paralysis’ of the Indian political and military leadership. This consequential event can be analysed in light of leading air power application theories in conflicts to see how these have been affected by the advent of emerging technologies and concepts.