Me specifically? No. People on the forum? In a matter of speaking, yes. You keep repeating your claims - what other purpose is there other than to convince us by trusting you?
As I argued, it actually matters a lot what the INDIAN public thinks. I think it is obvious to everyone (and often repeated by even ISPR) that the Indian military is hostage to their public. Whether or not S400 is active or not is a debate for when a shooting war starts. Not about deterrence, which is by definition before a war starts. And S400 may play a part for India's deterrence but it is the Pakistan's deterrence that I am arguing about - Pakistan's deterrence needs to affect Indian public perception.
Bunyan un Marsoos
They lie so much it needs to be studied academically. However, we cannot base strategy on moral high ground that they lied. They lied? So what? Their public believed them. Deterrence failed just like that. Please read on on why I argue against your claim that deterrence was established.
Maybe I am not able to communicate this well enough. It doesn't matter what their tactical, strategic goals were and if they achieved them. What matters is what their public believed. Because whether we like it or not, THAT is what determines if India attacks Pakistan.
It is my opinion that it was the threat of escalation to possibly a nuclear level that forced the US to jump in. Nobody saw any evidence of massive conventional damage on the Indian side.
Khalid Kidwai confirmed that there was a missing rung in the escalation ladder giving the reason for the establishment of the rocket force.
View attachment 166636
The first paragraph also confirms my opinion. I believe we can all agree that Khalid Kidwai is a reliable source for these things.
@Panzerkiel, I think JamD has raised a critical point about needing affecters to push Indian public opinion to viewing peace as the only option.
I think this is where the CDF office could really show its value through the establishment of a joint services cognitive warfare operations group targeting decision-making, sense-making, or the “way people think” in India. If I’m not mistaken, I think the Chinese are working on such a cognitive domain to adopt data-driven, algorithmic targeting to change perception/decision processes of an adversary. I think I recall a video from Pravin Sawhney on the matter. Would be good to learn from them.
Judging by how things work in Pakistan however, the above is probably under the responsibility of the ISI.
I think another key affecter are cyber operations. During the May conflict India was subject to a number of focussed and successful cyber attacks according to the below source. These are the cyber attacks I was able to find which happened during the May conflict, though I am not sure of the accuracy, or of the net impact on the Indian public, and whether its forced a rethink:
1) May 10, 2025 At 15:39, the official website of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) (mod.gov.in) was attacked by a DDoS attack lasting 3 hours, 56 minutes and 57 seconds. Monitoring data showed that the attack used NTP reflection amplification.
2) May 10, 2025 At 18:59, the official website of the Press Information Bureau (PIB) of India (pib.gov.in) was attacked by a DDoS attack lasting 1 hour, 2 minutes and 37 seconds. The attack used DNS reflection amplification.
3) May 10, 2025 At 16:55, the Indian Prime Minister’s Office website (pmindia.gov.in) was hit by a DDoS attack lasting 1 hour, 51 minutes and 13 seconds. Monitoring data shows that the attack used DNS reflection amplification.
4) May 9, 2025 At 14:21, the Mirai botnet was detected targeting the government website of Jammu and Kashmir State, India (
www.jkgad.nic.in). The attacker used the ACK Flood attack method.
5) May 7-8, 2025, the Indian Presidential Office website (presidentofindia.gov.in) suffered two consecutive rounds of DDoS attacks. Monitoring data shows that attackers use DNS reflection amplification to launch attacks. The first round of attacks began at 17:38 on May 7 and lasted for 2 hours, 16 minutes and 11 seconds; the second round of attacks was even worse, starting at 00:47 on May 8 and lasting 19 hours, 46 minutes and 29 seconds.
6) From May 7 to 8, 2025, the domain name resolution service (ns2.nic.in) of the Indian National Informatics Center suffered two consecutive rounds of DDoS attacks. Monitoring data shows that the attack used DNS reflection amplification to launch the attack. The first round of attacks began at 22:29:28 on May 7 and lasted 19 minutes and 03 seconds; the second round of attacks was even worse, starting at 00:46:44 on May 8 and lasting 1 hour, 05 minutes and 11 seconds.
Source:
https://nsfocusglobal.com/india-pak...ons-and-ddos-attacks-making-targeted-strikes/