How May 2025 Made Pakistan’s Strike Doctrine ISTAR-Led Pro

One year after the May 2025 conflict with India, Pakistan’s defence posture has evolved along two parallel, but mutually reinforcing, tracks. The first is the direct response to the lessons drawn from the conflict itself, and the second being the continuation of longer-standing structural changes in doctrine that were already underway prior to May 2025.¹ The latter was principally driven from observing the Russia-Ukraine War, which has been taking place since early 2022. Furthermore, Pakistan can now source technologically advanced defence solutions at relatively accessible upfront costs, thereby removing the supply-side bottlenecks that have traditionally throttled Pakistan’s defence planning. China’s advancements and, as importantly, the industrial efficiencies driving them are feeding into every domain of Pakistan’s warfighting capacity, from satellites to guided munitions.²

Pre-war, the Pakistan Army (PA) began building its own precision-strike capability through the Fatah-I guided multiple-launch rocket system (GMLRS) and Fatah-II surface-to-surface missiles (SSMs), enabling it to conduct stand-off range strikes independently of the Pakistan Air Force (PAF), which was the sole service arm in earlier years capable of carrying out conventional attacks at long range.³ The PAF, drawing on its 2019 experience with Operation Swift Retort, was also focused on revitalizing its offensive air capabilities, with the Shenyang J-35AE stealth fighter earmarked as the focal point of those efforts. Finally, the Pakistan Navy (PN) had already understood that a large submarine fleet would be key to its anti-access and area-denial (A2/AD) posture, with plans to procure the eight Hangor-class boats in motion since 2015-2016. In fact, while Pakistan has activated new imaging satellites since May 2025, these solutions were all in the pipeline prior to the conflict.

Thus, Pakistan’s underlying modernization cadence was already steering it towards building effective targeting and precision-strike capacity. However, the conflict likely altered the direction or purpose of the procurement pipeline. Prior to May 2025, the Pakistani military was likely operating with the perspective that the next conflict with India would be similar to 2019, i.e., an exchange confined to an isolated theatre like Kashmir.⁴ Thus, the goal for Pakistan’s war planners was two-fold: First, to ensure that the capacity to undertake (or expand upon) Swift Retort-like counter-offensive strikes existed (with expansion coming through land-based capacity – i.e., Fatah). Second, to see if it was possible to deter the initial Indian ingression, hence the investment in the HQ-9/P and HQ-9BE surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems. The HQ-9BE in particular, with its 260-km range, could theoretically reach across the border, thereby creating a meaningful level of friction for the Indian Air Force (IAF) should it opt to carry out even stand-off range weapon (SOW) strikes from within India.

Overall, Pakistan’s planning from 2019 to 2025 had assumed a relatively slow conflict scenario with clear back-and-forth exchanges. Defensively, there needed to be enough to deter the initial action and, should that fail, the offensive side should initiate so as to create a strategic impact. That strategic impact may comprise degrading some Indian warfighting capacity, extensively damaging facilities, or achieving a limited level of air superiority across the Line of Control (LoC) – i.e., objectives that built on what the PAF perceived as its successes following Operation Swift Retort.

However, the May 2025 conflict bore out completely differently from the 2019 skirmish.⁵ Right from the onset, Pakistan and India collided with the employment of large-scale air power (i.e., 42 PAF fighters walling off 72 IAF aircraft), India struck urban targets within the heartland (i.e., Punjab), and, as crucially, the loss of fighters or assets did not stop India from continuing to escalate. Basically, the conflict was this fast-shifting, dynamic situation that would not stop with ‘perceptual’ damage (e.g., a loss of face from fighter attrition), but rather with the decapitation of the physical warfighting capacity. Indeed, in its later strikes on PAF bases, the IAF was likely aiming to achieve those outcomes.

Thus, the challenge has shifted from 2019 to 2025; now Pakistan’s goal is to, basically, degrade India’s warfighting capabilities as rapidly as possible. For Rawalpindi, there is likely no other way to credibly shorten a conflict (especially in light of a declining US- or international community-led de-escalation/intervention capacity) than to essentially cut the capacity India needs to escalate the fight. There is no other pathway to ending any conflict with India moving forward; India either fights or it does not, and Pakistan would have to force the latter through some means of its own. This is non-negotiable.