NFU to cold start to preemption

Let's be clear: Operation Sindoor was a preemptive strike that had become part of India’s war doctrine at the time of the Balakot action. Unfortunately, Pakistan at that time did not see this as a major doctrinal shift by India, a complete shift from a stable nuclear deterrence to inherent instability that had entered the nuclear deterrence calculations due to India’s declaration of the ‘new normal’ of preemption.

Within a nuclear domain, because there has never been nuclear war between nuclear adversaries, doctrines are critical and shifts within them even more as they signal qualitative changes. Signalling includes developing and acquiring weapons systems, deployments including around bases beyond one’s territories.

While Pakistan noted India’s weapons acquisitions, it failed to take note of other signalling including the Indian acquisition of bases in the Arabian Sea area of the Indian Ocean near Pakistan – such as allocation in the Port of Duqm in Oman as well as access to the Muscat naval base and a listening post at Ras al Hadd. Other signalling was also ignored as India began shifting its doctrines as it acquired multi-domain war-fighting capabilities.

After the overt nuclearisation of South Asia in May 1998, both Pakistan and India have been giving out certain notions of their nuclear doctrines and their accompanying strategies. The Kargil conflict of 1999 was interesting because it was the first to occur in the aftermath of the overt nuclearisation of both countries. Both sides kept the conflict deliberately limited, with Pakistan keeping its air force out of the conflict, even though India chose to bring in the IAF. Post-Kargil, India set up a commission to examine the conflict and one of the crucial conclusions it reached was that it could prevail in the conflict at a level of its choosing.

India also realised that the prevailing nuclear deterrence had created a certain level of military stalemate. Since then, India had been seeking ways around deterrence to war fighting. At the same time, Pakistan simply continued to focus on the notion of ‘credible minimum’, but not moving beyond the notion of strategic deterrence and thereby focusing primarily on strategic medium-range missile systems. At the same time, like Nato, it kept its position on No First Use (NFU) ambivalent.

India made much of an NFU claim but then modified it drastically until it became a First Use doctrine. In 2003, in its enunciation of its National Command Authority (NCA), India expanded the operational parameters for its nuclear doctrine. According to a GoI Press Release of 4 Jan 2003, India would not only use nuclear weapons against a nuclear strike against its own territory but would also use nuclear weapons against a nuclear strike on Indian forces ‘anywhere’. Also, it would use nuclear weapons even against a chemical or biological attack “against India or Indian forces anywhere” – effectively a First Use doctrine and applicable against a non-nuclear state. Beyond a few of us writing about this shift, Pakistan appeared to have no concern.

In April 2004, India’s then army chief, General N C Vij announced India’s Cold Start doctrine, which basically focused on a rapid mobile and limited conventional attack against Pakistan, within 48 hours of the orders being issued, without needing to cross the nuclear threshold as that would bring deterrence into play. The plan was to capture territory as a bargaining lever once the nuclear deterrence came into play. An underlying assumption was that in response to such a limited strike, Pakistan would not go for strategic nuclear targeting and, in any case, the international community would step in.

In case Pakistan missed this critical signalling at the time, in 2017, General Rawat, upon becoming Indian army chief, reiterated the centrality of this war-fighting doctrine.

As the nature of war kept altering India realised the conventional Cold Start doctrine was becoming obsolete. Already, on August 22, 2006, in a speech at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, the then Indian air chief declared that India would have to “forget geographical boundaries to protect its interests outside its boundaries”. This development was in line with the post-9/11 US preemptive doctrine and the US Nuclear Posture Review whereby the US began to rationalise the military viability of nuclear weapons, even against certain non-nuclear states that may possess other weapons of mass destruction.

Pakistan continued officially to maintain its declaratory strategic deterrence doctrine of credible minimum deterrence but by April 2011 it had made public that it had tested its surface-to-surface (SSBM) Nasr. The need for developing a short-range missile was required if Pakistan was to maintain a credible strategic stability paradigm and Nasr provided that. Following this development, in September 2013, Pakistan made a major doctrinal shift in its deterrence posture, also from credible minimum to full-spectrum deterrence. In other words, we would be able to meet the Indian threat at any level and prevail.

India continued to move forward on its new doctrinal parameters and perhaps most significant was the strategic message sent through the statement of the Indian Defence Minister Parrikar, on November 11, 2016, when he gave out that India did not have a ‘no first use’ nuclear doctrine. Parrikar’s statement is significant because of the timing. It is an assertion of a First Use doctrine. The firing along the LoC and WB, the deliberate intrusion by an Indian submarine into Pakistani waters, the spy drones – all these actions together showed a new Indian war fighting strategy in the making.

By 2016, India had clearly established First-Use and preemptive strike strategies to move away from the conventional Cold Start doctrine. What it began doing was testing our reaction times with a mixture of signalling and pinpricks, which we kept ignoring or attributing to mere ‘errors’.

By September 2019 it was clear that the Modi government was conducting a large-scale exploratory exercise designed to test out new military strategies taking into count the needs of modern warfare where there was a need to prepare to fight war simultaneously on multiple fronts – that is, multi domain warfare coordinating use of land, air, sea, cyberspace and eventually space too. Before Pulwama and the Balakot attack by India, I had maintained that the consistent Indian attacks along the LOC and the Working Boundary were part of a longer-term plan – to test a new doctrine.

Our limited defensive responses were definitely factored into the Pulwama episode, which increasingly looked like a false flag operation. Post-Pulwama, India played a dangerous game of brinkmanship with the Balakot preemptive strike –the first direct translation of its preemptive doctrine that had been enunciated some years earlier. The strike failed and Pakistan’s limited but effective counter-offensive was able to show that now Pakistan could prevail at any level of conflict. This was a major shift post-Kargil when India had concluded it could prevail at any level of conflict and also had the option of choosing the level of conflict.

Balakot also showed that a major factor of instability had entered the Pakistan-India military equation below strategic level engagement. As long as this prevailed, there could be no stability at the strategic level. Pakistan, in my view, tended to ignore this.

In March 2022, an Indian supersonic cruise missile landed in Pakistan’s Mian Chunoo area. India claimed it was an ‘error’, and our military leadership at the time agreed, but I pointed out then that this was a deliberate testing of our response time and defences. Missiles don’t simply get fired accidentally, as there is a whole process from priming to targeting and so on, unless the command-and-control system is chaotic.

The wreckage was of the supersonic Brahmos missile that would play a central role in any preemptive strike. This is a supersonic missile, so it is highly destabilising given Pakistan's lack of spatial depth and the lack of real-time lag for a quick response unless Pakistan places its missiles on alert in advance.

We misread India’s signalling and because no attention was placed on the possibility of India testing our defences and response times on that occasion, India readied another pre-emptive strike against Pakistan. The pattern was the same as Pulwama – another false flag operation and then the May 7 multiple attacks through Operation Sindoor, but this time without intruding into Pakistan. This was multi-domain warfare against Pakistan. The counter-offensive by Pakistan showed our full-spectrum deterrence holding effectively as we once again met the threat at a level of our choosing and prevailed.

However, the inherent instability created by India’s preemptive strikes has created a very real ongoing threat for Pakistan. This is especially so in the wake of India saying this would be the ‘new normal’ in relation to Pakistan – that is, India would attack inside Pakistan any time there is any act of terrorism in India or IIOJK. So, preemption is the new Indian war-fighting doctrine encompassing multi-domain warfare. For Pakistan, this requires a complete reassessment of its deterrence and war-fighting postures, signalling and force allocations and structures.

The writer is an academic turned journalist turned politician.

Twitter: @ShireenMazari1