My understanding , as you know, the PAF played this one very smart. Our fighters deliberately kept their radars cold — no emissions, no radar lock — which meant Indian RWRs weren’t picking up any spikes. That kept their situational picture degraded from the start.
They had about 70 aircraft up — a lot of noise, a big formation, but also a lot of clutter and risk of fratricide on their side. We leveraged that chaos.
The key move was this: we fired PL-15s without active radar guidance — essentially using an off-board firing doctrine. The AirEye (AEW&C) platforms were providing the track data, and the mid-course updates were controlled through datalink. The missiles only went active on terminal phase — around 50 km out — which gave the Indians very little reaction time.
On top of that, SIGINT teams were monitoring Indian comms — we had a pretty good read on what their pilots were seeing and feeling. Once we heard the panic and the loss of SA (situational awareness) on their side, we adjusted the engagement picture accordingly.
Now here’s where it got interesting — when they couldn’t get a bead on either our fighters or the PL-15 tracks, and couldn’t build a coherent air picture, they resorted to launching S-400s in a reactionary way. They mistakenly thought some of our platforms had already penetrated their airspace — which was not the case. It was a textbook example of forcing the enemy into a degraded cognitive state and provoking premature defensive fires.
Bottom line this engagement validated the combined use of passive fighter tactics, off-board missile guidance, and real-time SIGINT exploitation. They were simply outplayed at every level.
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