This reads more like a rant with some aimless personal jibe at another member than a serious analysis of why each incident occurred and what actually happened on the ground.
If we look at the actual political and military constraints across 2019 and 2025, it becomes obvious why these two events played out the way they did. You cannot analyze them purely in a vacuum of "competence."
2019 was overriding diplomatic constraint to escalation control. Militarily, India was able to strike not because the PAF was incompetent, but because the IAF exploited peacetime readiness levels.
But this isn’t exactly true though? We knew the Indians were cooking something up. We even had CAPs running, heck, I even remember us taking Babur launchers out of their sheds and parking them just outside so they could be caught on sat as a message. None of this to me sounded like peacetime readiness if we had begun the usual nuclear sabre rattling + the constant caps.
They used decoy packages to sway CAPS which was misread by PAF controllers. This created a narrow, temporary window for Mirage 2000s to launch SPICE glide bombs from near the Line of Control. It was a shallow, highly choreographed insertion designed to get in and out before PAF interceptors could reach the sector. Kudos to them, yes but the radar and sensor coverage along the western and northern approach corridors had known gaps.
Sure, so that’s why I suggested that 2019 was the ‘we need to fix these known issues’ moment.
Now ask yourself honestly. Even if you replaced every controller, every pilot, and every commander on that night with the most elite professionals on the planet and gave them perfect situational awareness, what changes? The IAF came in the dead of night, used electronic warfare and decoy packages to suppress and confuse ground radars, and launched SPICE glide bombs from near the Line of Control so the actual penetration was extremely shallow and brief. The engagement window was measured in minutes. Even the best air defense system in the world struggles with a sub-fifteen minute decision cycle when the attacker is outside your territory before you have fully confirmed the picture. This is not a PAF specific problem. This is a physics and doctrine problem that affects every air force defending against a well planned and politically constrained surprise raid.
The framing assumes that between 2019 and 2025 Pakistan was sitting on some kind of diamond mine bounty, flush with resources, time, and political stability to comprehensively rebuild its air defense architecture.
Absolutely not. But I don’t think either of us can deny that the PAF had pissed a lot of money into questionable procurements (of course, this is an opinion) in the last 6 years.
So while they weren’t sitting on a diamond mines, they were however able to spend their limited forex on attempting to rebuilt its air defense architecture with once again, solutions I would deem questionable (once again, an opinion). Seriously, which genius at the PAF came up with the idea to attempt to replace the sky guard missiles with SkyDragon series, while retaining the original radars for example. I would have deemed that exercise a waste of valuable money. Or nastp is another great joke of money being pissed into the wind. Or you had the padding of the PAF’s upper tier air defence setup, ignoring completely the middle and lower tier’s. Procurement of systems like the FD-2000 AND HQ-9B- for what? Surely you wouldn’t see this as a logical/sensible procurement choice?
While we know the reality is quite the opposite - and you're assuming some 100% competence which btw not even elite air forces of the world have - do you want to compare the issues plaguing the USAF or RAF despite budgets?
I’m not making any assumptions of competence. What I am doing however is questioning this idea of our all knowing, unquestionable overlords who are at the helm of the ship. You could swap this out for anyone or any force to be fair. That’s not particularly relevant to the underlying point, the underlying issue I have here is this idea that the armed forces should be free of criticism, that only those who are in the decision making circle should be able to comment on matters because nobody else knows as much as them. I can’t recall whether it was this thread or another where my comment was modified by raider (not an issue), but I believe I had touched on that aspect there too. While my comment above was flippant, it was more a jibe at the idea that we should not be free to discuss, because we’re not in the circles.
Now in 2025, IAF leveraged Rafales with SCALP cruise missiles firing from well outside Pakistani airspace, BrahMos equipped Su-30MKIs doing the same, and critically large numbers of Harop loitering munitions designed specifically to saturate and overwhelm layered air defenses.
Now apply the same honest question to 2025. Even if the PAF had 100 percent elite pilots, perfect radar coverage, and flawless kill chain execution, what does contesting look like against a simultaneous multi axis saturation attack of cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and autonomous loitering munitions? The answer is that no air force in the world, including those of the United States, Russia, or China, can guarantee zero penetration against that threat mix at scale.
Absolutely. I said it above too, zero penetration is delusion. Dare I say, they may have fared OK, during 2025 attacks. Perhaps things would have been better if we had invested in other tiers of AD and other means of interceptions, but we live and learn. I think anyone expecting 100% interceptions is silly.
What I think we will start to see, and perhaps this already does exist but some more emphasis on the way assets will be stored during wartime, where aircraft will be parked, proximity to fuel tankers or other aircraft, certain hangars etc, what I expect is wartime SOPs to be adjusted. I think that’ll be the biggest takeaway from 2025, with now the padding of our lower/mid tier
Ad layer for the bulk of interception work.
The PAF was not defending against dogfights. It was defending against a volume and variety of standoff threats specifically chosen to exploit the physical and doctrinal limits of any integrated air defense system regardless of who is manning it unless off course you are seeing something different with Israel and Iran.
Sure, and that’s something the PAF is going to really need to invest in looking after, particularly as the scale of drones and production capacity on the east ramps up.
Kinetic air defense assets, meaning the surface to air missile systems, the interceptor rounds, the advanced SHORAD layers needed to address the loitering munition and cruise missile threat that India brought in 2025, are extraordinarily expensive and Pakistan simply did not have the fiscal headroom to procure them at the scale the threat demanded.
Absolutely, I believe I might have touched on this in this thread or another, I don’t remember. But not only the procurement of shorads would be difficult, but the sustainment of them too. The only systems available to the PAF were more obscure or export oriented systems, so any large scale procurement of munitions would come with stupid lead times and costs, not to mention logistics nightmares. Probably high time the PAF abandons silly adventures like PFX etc and focuses funds on actually bringing missile production capacity in house, which I guess it’s doing to an extent via PL-12AE/ground launched versions etc.
The PAF filled radar gaps to a meaningful extent and improved its sensor fusion and kill chain architecture but kinetic depth is a different and far more expensive problem. You cannot patch a shortage of HQ-9 batteries or SPADA equivalent systems with determination and training budgets that are themselves being squeezed.
Indeed, we don’t disagree. My entire gripe with the PAF in its recent years is the pissing away of money into stupid projects like the above, which squeezes an already tight budget.
To say the PAF had six years to prepare and still failed ignores the reality of modern air warfare, the tactical constraints India was actively working around, and the brutal economic context Pakistan was operating in throughout that entire period. Pakistan faces an impossible situation to completely prevent strikes on itself for a host of technical, fiscal, and structural reasons that are not about competence or "god knows what."
Reducing six years of evolving doctrine, an economy in crisis, a global pandemic, rapid procurement constraints, complex geopolitics, and force mix decisions into a one line "either they are incompetent or god knows what" is analytically shallow and adds little value to the conversation.
I believe the conversation was already of no value, considering most of it just came down to “well, I know better than you and those above me know better than you, so you should just be quiet because you don’t know”. It is a discussion board after all, but discussions can’t be had when it’s always just whining about stuff that happened months ago or just the usual, you don’t know, the paf knows so just be quiet and lick their boots.
