When fighter aircraft roar through the dark sky, all of us can only imagine what is happening several hundred kilometers away. Yet, according to India’s Vice Chief of the Air Staff, Air Marshal Narmdeshwar Tiwari, it took less than 50 judiciously placed weapons for the Indian Air Force to make Pakistan talk and prevent a dangerous military build-up this May.
Looking back at the operation, dubbed Operation Sindoor, at the NDTV Defence Summit, Tiwari gave an unusual amount of detail about the four decisive days that followed the Pahalgam terror attack on April 22. “With fewer than 50 weapons, we attained complete dominance. This has never happened before,” he said, indicating both the precision and the impact of the strikes.
The IAF launched the operation in the pre-dawn hours of May 7, targeting terrorist infrastructure within Pakistan-occupied territory. Tiwari underlined from the beginning that India was not seeking to widen the conflict. “We were expecting a reaction and kept a calibrated response, targeting only military targets,” he clarified.
But when Pakistan undertook a large-scale offensive on the night of May 9–10, the strategy changed. “That was the time we decided that we had to go ahead and send the right message. We targeted them holistically,” Tiwari has reminisced. He added that some of the targets attacked had never been taken out previously—not even in the 1971 war.
To him, the highlight was the behind-the-scenes coordination. Precision airstrikes do look easy, but it takes a lot of preparation. Long-range strikes, he said, are especially risky since the longer the distance, the higher the chances of collateral damage. However, the IAF managed to strike where it intended. “We made sure there was no collateral damage. This is not an easy task,” Tiwari emphasized.
He was also quick to give credit for the group effort. “The effort that goes into making sure a weapon hits its target with accuracy is really a team effort, not just the pilots who fired them,” he said, giving credit to all of those involved.
