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As India’s defence chief attended an international security conference in Singapore in May, soon after India and Pakistan fought what many in South Asia now dub “the four-day war”, he had a simple message: Both sides expect to do it all again.
It was a stark and perhaps counterintuitive conclusion: the four-day military exchange, primarily through missiles and drones, appears to have been among the most serious in history between nuclear-armed nations.
Speaking to Reuters in Singapore, however, Indian Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan denied either nation had come close to the “nuclear threshold”, describing a “lot of messaging” from both sides.
“A new space for conventional operations has been created and I think that is the new norm,” he said, vowing that New Delhi would continue to respond militarily to any militant attacks on India suspected to have originated from Pakistan.
How stable that “space” might be and how great the risk of escalation for now remains unclear. However, there have been several dramatic examples of escalation in several already volatile global stand-offs over the past two months.
As well as the “four-day” war between India and Pakistan last month, recent weeks have witnessed what is now referred to in Israel and Iran as their “12-day war”. It ended this week with a U.S.-brokered ceasefire after Washington joined the fray with massive air strikes on Tehran’s underground nuclear sites.
Despite years of confrontation, Israel and Iran had not struck each other’s territory directly until last year, while successive U.S. administrations have held back from similar steps.
More concerning still, such conflicts appear to have become more serious throughout the current decade, with plenty of room for further escalation.
All of that is a far cry from the original Cold War, in which it was often assumed that any serious military clash – particularly involving nuclear forces or the nations that possessed them – might rapidly escalate beyond the point of no return. But it does bring with it new risks of escalation.
Simmering in the background, meanwhile, is the largest and most dangerous confrontation of them all – that between the U.S. and China, with U.S. officials saying Beijing has instructed its military to be prepared to move against Taiwan from 2027, potentially sparking a hugely wider conflict.
As U.S. President Donald Trump headed to Europe this week for the annual NATO summit, just after bombing Iran, it was clear his administration hopes such a potent show of force might be enough to deter Beijing in particular from pushing its luck.
“American deterrence is back,” U.S. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told a Pentagon press briefing the morning after the air strikes took place.
Addressing senators at their confirmation hearing on Tuesday, America’s next top commanders in Europe and the Middle East were unanimous in their comments that the U.S. strikes against Iran would strengthen Washington’s hand when it came to handling Moscow and Beijing.
Chinese media commentary was more mixed. Han Peng, head of state-run China Media Group’s North American operations, said the U.S. had shown weakness to the world by not wanting to get dragged into the Iran conflict due to its “strategic contraction”.
On that front, the spectacle of multiple U.S. B-2 bombers battering Iran’s deepest-buried nuclear bunkers – having flown all the way from the U.S. mainland apparently undetected – will not have gone unnoticed in Moscow or Beijing.
Nor will Trump’s not so subtle implications that unless Iran backed down, similar weapons might be used to kill its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or other senior figures, wherever they might hide.
None of America’s adversaries have the ability to strike without warning in that way against hardened, deepened targets, and the B-2 – now being replaced by the more advanced B-21 – has no foreign equal.
Both are designed to penetrate highly sophisticated air defences, although how well they would perform against cutting-edge Russian or Chinese systems would only be revealed in an actual conflict.
Both China and Russia have fifth-generation fighters with some stealth abilities, but none have the range or carrying capacity to target the deepest Western leadership or weapons bunkers with conventional munitions.
As a result, any Chinese or Russian long-range strikes – whether conventional or nuclear – would have to be launched with missiles that could be detected in advance.
An analysis of the India-Pakistan “four-day war” in May done by the Stimson Center suggested that as Indian strikes became more serious on the third day of the war, Pakistan might have taken similar, deliberately visible steps to ready its nuclear arsenal to grab U.S. attention and help conclude the conflict.
Indian newspapers have reported that a desperate Pakistan did indeed put pressure on the U.S. to encourage India to stop, as damage to its forces was becoming increasingly serious, and threatening the government.
Pakistan denies that – but one of its most senior officers was keen to stress that any repeat of India’s strikes would bring atomic risk.
For now, both sides have pulled back troops from the border – while India appears determined to use longer term strategies to undermine its neighbor, including withdrawing from a treaty controlling the water supplies of the Indus River, which Indian Prime Minister Modi said he now intends to dam. Pakistani officials have warned that could be another act of war.
Vice Admiral Bradley Cooper, selected as the new head of U.S. Central Command, told senators the U.S. military had bombed the Houthis for 50 days before a deal was struck in which the Houthis agreed to stop attacking U.S. and other international shipping in the Red Sea.
But Cooper also noted that like other militant groups in the Middle East, the Houthis were becoming increasingly successful in building underground bases out of the reach of smaller U.S. weapons, as well as using unmanned systems to sometimes overwhelm their enemies.
“The nature and character of warfare is changing before our very eyes,” he said.
Behind the scenes and sometimes in public, U.S. and allied officials say they are still assessing the implications of the success of Ukraine and Israel in infiltrating large numbers of short-range drones into Russia and Iran respectively for two spectacular attacks in recent weeks.
According to Ukrainian officials, the drones were smuggled into Russia hidden inside prefabricated buildings on the back of trucks, with the Russian drivers unaware of what they were carrying until the drones were launched.
Israel’s use of drones on the first day of its campaign against Iran is even more unsettling for Western nations wondering what such an attack might look like.
Its drones were smuggled into Iran and in some cases assembled in secret there to strike multiple senior Iranian leaders and officials in their homes as they slept in the small hours of the morning on the first day of the campaign.
Judging by reports in the Chinese press, military officials there are now working on the same.
Team BharatShakti
(With Inputs from Reuters)
