One year after the May 2025 conflict with India, Pakistan’s defence establishment is investing heavily in the material capacity to create situational openings – degrading Indian air defences through coordinated one-way effector (OWE) saturation, suppressing air bases with Fatah-II salvos, and disrupting command-and-control (C2) nodes via precision cruise missile strikes. The Army Rocket Force Command (ARFC), the expanding satellite constellation, and the emerging Integrated Battlefield Management System (IBFMS) are all designed to identify, track, and strike the highest-impact nodes available to India – and to do so at speed.
However, a harder question sits beneath the procurement activity: has the policy mindset of Pakistan’s national security leadership caught up to the capacity being built? The material infrastructure increasingly enables Pakistan to create windows of suppressed enemy capability – moments in which the operational balance temporarily shifts in its favour. Yet there is no visible doctrinal framework, disclosed capability, or public articulation of what Pakistan would do once those openings exist. In effect, Rawalpindi is building the tools to force open a door, but it is unclear whether anyone has planned what to do on the other side.
The Schelling Problem
Thomas Schelling, writing in Arms and Influence in 1966, drew a distinction between deterrence (dissuading an adversary from acting) and compellence (persuading an adversary to change its behaviour). Both depend on credibility, and credibility requires more than the possession of military capability – it requires the demonstrated willingness to use it. The intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance (ISTAR) layer, the precision-strike infrastructure, and the OWE saturation capacity under development are all instruments of compellence; they are designed to force India to de-escalate by degrading its warfighting capacity so rapidly that continuing the fight becomes untenable.
The problem is that compellence is inherently harder than deterrence because it demands action, not restraint. A state that possesses the tools of compellence but whose political leadership defaults to measured, calibrated retaliation effectively converts a compellent capability into a deterrent posture – forfeiting the initiative the hardware was designed to seize. Herman Kahn’s escalation ladder framework, developed in On Escalation in 1965, makes a complementary point: escalation dominance requires not only capacity at each rung of conflict intensity but the willingness to climb. A state that builds capacity at a given rung but lacks the institutional disposition to employ it cedes dominance to an adversary who may possess less capability but greater willingness to act. The risk for Pakistan is precisely this: investing in the material prerequisites of escalation dominance while retaining a policy culture calibrated for measured, post-hoc retaliation.
The Masoud Critique
Retired Air Marshal Aamir Masood has given voice to this tension more directly than most. In his assessment, the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) achieved air superiority within the first 30 minutes of the May 6/7 engagement – 42 PAF fighters walling off 72 IAF aircraft, downing multiple Indian jets, and disrupting the Indian Air Force’s (IAF) strike packages. The result, per Masoud, was that India’s fighter fleet was grounded in the days that followed. India’s subsequent reliance on drones and BrahMos cruise missiles was not a choice but a consequence – its aircraft had been its centre of gravity, and the shock of losing them forced a shift to stand-off weapons.
Masoud’s critique is that Pakistan did not exploit this window. In his view, the days during which the IAF was grounded represented an opportunity to impose a heavier cost – to strike Indian air bases and infrastructure while the advantage held, rather than waiting for India to regroup. He draws an explicit parallel to the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel destroyed over 400 Arab aircraft on the ground within the first two days; the lesson, as Masoud frames it, is unambiguous: when you achieve air superiority, you press the advantage immediately, because the deterrence and psychological effect of destroyed aircraft compounds with speed. Instead, Pakistan opted for restraint. India reconstituted, re-planned, and escalated on May 10 with BrahMos strikes against PAF bases. Masoud’s judgment is direct: the escalation control was not Pakistan’s responsibility, and it could and should have struck harder while the opening existed.
Frankly, this critique maps onto the game-theoretic structure of the problem with uncomfortable clarity. In a sequential game, the player who acts first at a given escalation rung sets the terms for the exchange that follows. Pakistan’s air-to-air success represented a transient payoff advantage – a node at which it held both information superiority (it knew the IAF had been blunted, but India had not yet recalibrated) and operational freedom (India’s fighters were grounded). That advantage decayed rapidly, and the window between blunting the first wave and India’s decision to escalate with cruise missiles was precisely the kind of fleeting, high-value node that compellence theory demands be exploited – and that Pakistan’s institutional culture, calibrated for measured response, allowed to close.
The Structural Risk
The risk Masoud identifies reflects a well-documented tension in strategic studies between what a military is technically capable of doing and what a state’s political leadership is willing to authorize. However, the consequence of this gap is more acute for Pakistan than for most states, precisely because Pakistan cannot afford a war of attrition – its fiscal bandwidth, munitions stockpiles, and platform inventory are all structurally limited relative to India’s. Pakistan’s emerging ISTAR-led precision-strike doctrine is, at its core, an optimization strategy built on the premise that every shot must count because the total number of shots is finite. But optimization of the strike itself is only half the equation; the other half is the decision to strike – when, against what, and at what escalation rung.
One can see this tension playing out in the institutional debate over whether Pakistan should consolidate command under a Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) structure or move towards pre-delegation of strike authority to regional commanders. The technical architecture being built – road-mobile launchers, distributed OWE launch sites, persistent satellite surveillance, and networked BMS – rewards speed, disaggregation, and pre-delegated execution. However, Pakistan’s institutional culture historically reserves employment authority for strategic and quasi-strategic weapons at the highest political-military levels, creating a structural bottleneck between the sensor-to-shooter timeline the hardware enables and the decision-to-shoot timeline the command culture permits. A world-class targeting infrastructure paired with a risk-averse decision-making culture produces a system that can identify the right targets in near-real time but cannot act on that intelligence within the window in which it remains valid.
The Exploitation Gap
There is a further dimension to this problem. Even assuming Rawalpindi develops the disposition to act pre-emptively at the right escalation node, the question remains: what does Pakistan do with the opening once it is created? The current program of record is almost entirely focused on creating conditions – suppressing Indian air defences, degrading air base infrastructure, disrupting C2 networks, and depleting surface-to-air missile (SAM) magazines through OWE saturation. These are all means of opening a window, but there is no visible investment in the capacity to exploit it – no expansion of air assault capabilities, no disclosed offensive ground manoeuvre concepts, and no articulation of how a temporary suppression of Indian capability translates into lasting political or strategic advantage.
In game-theoretic terms, Pakistan is investing in the first move of a sequential game but has not articulated what the second move looks like. The danger is that the first move, however successful, becomes self-negating if the adversary can reconstitute during the period in which the striker deliberates over exploitation options. India’s behaviour on May 10, 2025 – regrouping after the initial BVR losses and escalating with BrahMos strikes – illustrated precisely this dynamic.
Outlook
Pakistan’s post-conflict investments in ISTAR, precision strike, and OWE capacity are structurally sound and, in many respects, represent the only viable conventional strategy for a state that cannot compete with India on volume. The ARFC, the satellite constellation, the Taimoor air-launched cruise missile (ALCM), and the Fatah-II standardized platform all reflect a coherent logic: compensate for limited stockpiles by ensuring every weapon employed is guided by layered intelligence and directed at the highest-value target available. However, the hardware alone does not resolve the underlying strategic problem. The capacity to create openings is a necessary condition for compellence, but it is not sufficient – sufficiency requires a policy mindset, and an institutional command culture, willing to act at the moment the opening appears, not after the adversary has closed it.
Whether Pakistan’s national security leadership develops that mindset before the next crisis will likely determine whether the billions invested in ISTAR and precision strike produce genuine conventional deterrence or remain, as Masoud’s critique implies, an impressive arsenal constrained by the very caution it was designed to overcome.
Air Marshal (Retd.) Aamir Masood, “Why Didn’t Pakistan Attack When the Indian Air Force Was Grounded?,” interview, SAMAA TV, 2025, YouTube Short, https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yz6U8SYTCBk.
