New Delhi: India lost fighter jets on the first day of the recent military conflict with Pakistan due to tactical mistakes. However, these mistakes were quickly addressed, and the Indian Air Force returned in force and carried out precision strikes deep within the neighbouring country, said chief of defence staff (CDS) General Anil Chauhan in media interviews in Singapore on Saturday.
“What is important is not the jet being down, but why they were being downed. What mistakes were made — those are important. Numbers are not important. The good part is that we were able to understand the tactical mistake which we made, remedy it, rectify it, and then implement it again after two days and flew our jets again, targeting at long range,” he was quoted as saying in a Bloomberg report.
His remarks came after he was asked whether Pakistan downed Indian jets during the May 7-10 military confrontation in an interview with Bloomberg TV while attending the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on Saturday. He called Pakistan’s claims that it shot down six Indian warplanes “absolutely incorrect”, even though he refused to specify how many.
Chauhan also confirmed in an interview with Reuters that India incurred early losses in the air. Speaking to Reuters, he said: “What was important was why did these losses occur, and what we would do after that. So, we rectified tactics and then went back on the 7th, 8th and 10th in large numbers to hit air bases deep inside Pakistan, penetrated all their air defences with impunity, and carried out precision strikes.”
‘Rationality in their actions’
Earlier in May, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had claimed that his country shot down six Indian fighter jets. Previously, the Indian government had avoided commenting on whether any of its aircraft were lost during the confrontation.
During Operation Sindoor, the Indian Air Force shot down several advanced fighter jets of the Pakistan Air Force. The IAF is analysing the technical details to confirm the hits, Air Marshal AK Bharti, director general air operations, pointed out at a media briefing on May 11 — a day after the India-Pakistan ceasefire.
He had said that there were combat losses on the Indian side too. “We are in a combat scenario; losses are a part of combat. The question you must ask is whether we have achieved our objective of decimating the terrorist camps. The answer is a thumping yes. As for the details… what could have been, how many numbers… which platform did we lose… I would not like to comment on that because we are still in a combat situation. If I do, it will only be — advantage adversary,” Bharti said at the briefing then.
On Saturday, Chauhan told Reuters that the IAF “flew all types of aircraft with all types of ordnance on the 10th”. He added: “Most of the strikes were delivered with pinpoint accuracy, some even to a metre, to whatever was our selected mean point of impact.”
Chauhan also said both Indian and Pakistani forces showed “rationality in their actions” during the confrontation. “There’s a lot of space for conventional operations which has been created, and this will be the new norm. It’s my personal view that the most rational people are people in uniform when conflict takes place. During this operation, I found both sides displaying a lot of rationality in their thoughts as well as actions. So why should we assume that in the nuclear domain there will be irrationality on someone else’s part?,” he said.
