Pakistan’s Strategic Countermeasures in South Asia

The Pakistan-India border is one of the most militarily dense borders in the world. It is believed that a substantial portion of India’s ground forces remains oriented toward Pakistan. Moreover, India’s conventional firepower is also mainly focused on Pakistan. The Indian military has undergone several doctrinal evolutions since at least the early 1980s, starting with the Sundarji Doctrine, to the Cold Start of the early 2000s, and then to the latest version of the doctrine that focuses on limited warfighting capabilities and objectives, such as the Air Warfare Doctrine 2012, Joint Forces Doctrine 2017, and Land Warfare Doctrine 2018.

The Sundarji Doctrine emphasized deep armoured incursions into Pakistani territory using multiple strike corps to achieve decisive conventional outcomes, including the seizure of territory for post-war bargaining. The Cold Start, aiming for more efficient use of manpower and firepower and to maintain the element of surprise, focused on small Integrated Battle Groups to be employed for swift, limited incursions. Thereon, in the late 2010s, India once again shifted its military doctrine by aspiring for limited surgical strikes under the nuclear overhang.

Sundarji Doctrine failed because it lacked the element of surprise – a key component of military success. Cold Start went cold when Pakistan reiterated that an invasion was tantamount to crossing a nuclear red line. In 2019 and 2025, India’s limited warfighting strategies also backfired due to Pakistan’s effective use of conventional capabilities, especially in the air domain. India’s frustration stems from its inability to pursue its rather aggressive military policy vis-à-vis South Asia in general, and Pakistan in particular. This incapacity only intensified after the overt nuclearization of the sub-continent, as well as due to Pakistan’s policy of Quid-Pro-Quo Plus in the conventional and nuclear domains. The Indian military doctrines have not achieved their desired objectives against Pakistan, irrespective of the revision that was implemented. One wonders whether the perpetual cycle of doctrinal revisions by India will ever end.

Notwithstanding past Indian deficiencies, there are certain developments that still pose a threat to Pakistan’s security and, by extension, to the strategic stability in South Asia. First, India’s growing ISR capabilities are hostile towards Pakistan. These ISR capabilities bolster India’s denial strategy by supposedly improving Indian targeting of Pakistan’s strategic assets. Second, India’s layered Air Defence Systems that can pose a direct threat to PAF assets deep inside Pakistani territory. Finally, India’s aspiration for an assured second-strike capability may indirectly bolster its first strike temptations against Pakistan.

In addition to the possession of reliable, credible, and robust nuclear deterrence against its potential adversary India, Pakistan needs to strengthen its multi-pronged conventional capabilities and pursue relevant technologies that will offset India’s continued conventional and nuclear modernization.

Adhering to Quid Pro Quo Plus, acquiring advanced, preferably indigenous, ISR capabilities is crucial for tracking adversary military activities, especially those directed against Pakistan. Thus, advanced ISR capabilities can be employed to reduce the element of surprise and render the adversary’s rapid mobilization largely ineffective. During the May 2025 conflict, Pakistan allegedly relied on Chinese satellites, but for effective ISR, nothing beats indigenous assets in terms of operational effectiveness and strategic autonomy. Pakistan should not rely perpetually on allied assets.

Second, India’s pursuit of a layered air defence, including the Advanced Air Defence (AAD), the Prithvi Air Defence (PAD), and the S-400 TRIUMF, may pose a challenge to the PAF as far as the notion of air-superiority is concerned. Particularly, the S-400’s range covers key Pakistani airbases and can track Pakistani air assets deep inside Pakistan. Detection, however, does not translate to targeting. Targeting is complicated by several factors, including the Earth’s curvature, which makes targeting low-flying assets quite impossible and long ranges. In addition, credible Electronic Warfare Capabilities can complicate the radar’s efficacy, as was aptly demonstrated by the PAF in May 2025. A step further in countermeasures would lead to the destruction of the air-defence apparatus. Here, hypersonic weapons enter our discussion. Their immense speed, manoeuvrability, and low-altitude flight path make them potent “air-defence killers”. Pakistan was able to partially destroy an S-400 battery in the May 2025 conflict using a hypersonic munition, the CM 400 AKG. Thus, indigenous R&D on the procurement of a credible hypersonic weapon tailored for the specific purpose of degrading Indian air-defence deserves top priority.

Finally, India’s assured second-strike capability reinforces its aggressive military posture against Pakistan. The notion of survivability strengthens India’s confidence in damage-limitation. Escalation risk may appear manageable and not existential. This misplaced confidence may increase Indian conviction that it can disarm Pakistan in a first strike, absorb the residual retaliation through a layered air-defence, and in the worst case of a successful Pakistani counterstrike on Indian land-based assets, it could still preserve a small number of its nuclear weapons in its sea-leg of the triad. Preventing this scenario would require Pakistan to cater to credible anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capabilities. Currently, Pakistan operates some of the advanced diesel-electric submarines (SSK) with air-independent propulsion (AIP) technology, such as the Agosta 90 and the Type 039 (Hangar Class) submarines. However, due to the conventional power units in these submarines, their patrols are limited to very short time frames and ranges (less than a month before refuelling). On the other hand, a nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) would be able to perform continued anti-submarine patrols for months at a time. Pakistan must begin working on nuclear naval propulsion technology to establish credible denial postures at sea in order to offset any benefits that India may accrue through its SSBN fleets.

In conclusion, it is clear that Pakistan’s graduated countermeasures have checked India’s aggressive designs. Overt nuclearization dismissed Indian aspirations to launch a full-scale attack. As India moves towards limited-warfare doctrines, the three aforementioned domains require focus by Pakistan’s civil-military leadership to maintain strategic balance and offset future Indian war-fighting strategies against Pakistan, aimed at exhausting Indian options as they arise.