For the past few decades, India has cultivated the belief that there exists a space for a limited, conventional war with Pakistan below the nuclear threshold – a space which it can exploit under the pretext of surgical strikes or calibrated retaliation. In the May 2025 war, India attempted to translate this idea into practice by attacking targets within Pakistan using SCALP and Brahmos missiles, leading to a doctrinal shift towards missile warfare. Pakistan Air Force’s (PAF) successful flight test of Taimoor Air Launched Cruise Missile (ALCM) on 3 January 2026 is a manifestation of this shift through which it aims to undermine India’s assumptions regarding the conventional war window, expand missile capabilities, and reinforce deterrence.
Reported by Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), “Taimoor ALCM is capable of engaging enemy land and sea targets with high precision at a range of 600 kilometres, carrying a conventional warhead.” The precision-strike capability of Taimoor ALCM significantly adds to the PAF’s operational flexibility.
“Equipped with an advanced navigation and guidance system, Taimoor can fly at remarkably low altitude to evade enemy air defences,” the ISPR noted. The PAF Chief Air Marshal Zaheer Ahmed Babar Sidhu also applauded the success, remarking that these developments highlight Pakistan’s commitment to expand home-grown technological capabilities and strengthen its credible conventional deterrence posture in an evolving regional security environment.
Taimoor’s 600 km range allows Pakistan to strike targets deep inside Indian territory, including its critical military and civilian infrastructure. The stand-off, coupled with high CEP (Circular Error Probable), enables Pakistan to hold targets at risk without exposing its aircraft to enemy air defences or directly entering into contested airspace. This directly challenges India’s operational planning as limited war strategies often require depending on protected rear areas like bases, supply depots, and command centres for sustained frontline operations. With its longer range and low altitude trajectory, Taimoor can easily place these assets within reach.
Moreover, Taimoor renders India’s air defence redundant as its S-400 air defence system of Russian origin, designed for high altitude aircraft and ballistic missiles, is incapable of detecting terrain-hugging cruise missiles. Taimoor’s low altitude flight profile exposes limitations of Indian air defences, and reduced interception rate compresses the reaction window. This shows that even high-profile air defence systems cannot neutralise cruise missiles or protect against stand-off precision strikes.
Strategically, it represents an evolution in Pakistan’s conventional deterrence approach. Taimoor would allow Pakistan to undermine India’s belief in its perceived asymmetry which sets the foundation for its limited-war logic. Indian policymakers believe that this perceived asymmetry gives them coercive leverage for punitive strikes and a rapid ceasefire.
Before the May 2025 war, India’s logic was rooted in the flawed assumption that Pakistan lacks the capabilities to impose comparable costs without resorting to the nuclear option. Now that India has witnessed Pakistan’s capabilities, Taimoor further erodes India’s limited-war logic given its ability to hold rear targets highly vulnerable in case of escalation. No escalation dominance simply translates into higher costs, miscalculation risks, and a credible threat of comparable retaliation.
Doctrinally, Taimoor reinforces Pakistan’s full-spectrum deterrence, albeit with a notable shift. Instead of relying on nuclear signalling, Pakistan is expanding its conventional precision capabilities, that too indigenously, in order to offset India’s conventional war objectives. These capabilities allow Pakistan not just to raise the nuclear threshold but the threshold for conflict in the first place by forcing Indian decision makers to think that even limited actions could trigger wider conventional responses.
As missile warfare becomes the preferred mode of combat, India is also actively working towards extending the range of Brahmos (up to 800 km) and procuring Israel’s Icebreaker cruise missile with a range of 300 km in its continued pursuit of escalation dominance. India needs to take into account that in a nuclearised environment, the limited war doctrine revolves around assumptions of rationality, signalling, and restraint. As restraint rarely holds under crisis pressure, in an environment as complicated as South Asia, these capabilities would only widen the crisis, making it increasingly difficult to control and threatening broader regional stability.
Paradoxically, Taimoor contributes to South Asian deterrence by making a crisis harder to imagine as controllable. The policymakers and analysts hope that it brings a shift in India’s limited-war narrative. However, how India perceives this development remains to be seen, especially given Pakistan’s indigenous development of such a sophisticated ALCM, while India is still seeking to purchase from its external partners.
Overall, the PAF’s successful flight test of Taimoor ALCM broadens Pakistan’s conventional inventory and reinforces the idea that nuclear deterrence does not translate into open space for conventional adventurism. By narrowing that space, Taimoor pushes for a reconsideration of strategies revolving around the illusion of escalation dominance.
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