In April 2025, soon after the attack in Pahalgam that took 26 lives - tragic as that was - my brother shared an older article with me from a relatively obscure website that briefly described how Pakistan was in the process of building a fully networked defence system. I should clarify that at this point the Indian government was on the warpath and it was clear that at some point, either public pressure or a political calculus would drive them to take some form of military or other kinetic action against Pakistan, perhaps in the way that they had in 2019, when Wing Commander Abhinandan had a cup of tea.

I read the article and nodded, because much of what was in it was already known to me. Yes, the PAF had acquired some Saab Eyrie command and control aircraft. Yes, the JF-17 block 3 is equipped with an advanced network avionics suite that provides a significant upgrade to the block 2 and 1, and yes, Pakistan would in all likelihood of a conflict have access to Chinese radar satellite tracking data, because the Chinese have quietly put in orbit an excellent, sophisticated and efficient 84 constellation military satellite network. They had to because their peer competitor is the US, which through its wars of the last two decades developed the idea of networked and interlinked defensive and offensive operational assets, such as the F-35, which was one of the most expensive development projects in military history (which is saying something), but is not really a fighter jet - technically it’s a networked, uplinked, airborne operational integration platform with defence capabilities, which is supposed to be able to detect and transmit real time data to other land, air and sea assets that can engage the enemy beyond visual range.

If nothing else good emerged from the last twenty years of the futile war of terror that the US prosecuted in Afghanistan, one thing that did was that the Pakistani military had a front row seat to the development of this strategic doctrine and gained some experience at an operational level with its workings. The US has, of course, almost from the beginning, been Pakistan’s main supplier of weapons, and with those weapons the training and tactics to use them optimally. In the early years it was about combined arms warfare, and now it’s about networked operations and dominating the electromagnetic spectrum. The idea was there for some time but only became feasible with rapid advances in digital technology. The problem of course is that the US only supplies weapons for its own reasons and can often use deliveries as a tool to force political or diplomatic outcomes (see monopoly power and Pressler amendment). This required a change in thinking here.

Pakistan began developing, as we all know, a semi indigenous aerospace and weapons programme alongside China, which had its own reasons for wanting to advance its defence and strategic industries and had the financial and industrial power to go for it. What Pakistan brought that was different was the operational and strategic awareness of how these weapons could be used and a system designed to create a twenty first century military structure - essentially synthesising Chinese weapons with US methods to create an efficient and cost effective fighting force, recognising that in modern war, the electromagnetic spectrum is the next operational domain.

What emerged in May of 2025 was the success of this synthesis, when six cutting edge and extremely expensive Rafale fighter jets were cut to shreds and the rest ran back to base, not because they were bad jets or pilots - as AVM Aurungzeb noted later, the jets and pilots are perfectly capable - but because they were committed to a doctrine of war that no longer applies: PL-15 BVR missiles guided mid flight via satellite after radar detection by Saab AWACS allowed weapons lock by J-10 C’S proved that - to the delight of the US (who found operational proof of concept) and the Chinese (who it turns out make really good missiles).

After the ceasefire I called my brother and asked him how, if I knew that we had this capability, and he knew that we had this capability, and the guy who wrote the article also knew, how did the Indian’s not know? I don’t really have the answer to that question - it’s probably something to do with a sense of entitlement and unearned superiority - but in that one shining moment when I heard the Indians had come crawling for a ceasefire, after a long time I knew I felt good about being Pakistani.