A year has passed since Pakistan and India last exchanged blows, and it is worth asking what each side has taken from the experience. Military anniversaries are usually occasions for patriotic commemoration. However, for states that think seriously about strategy, they ought to be something else: a moment to step back, to reckon with what happened, and to consider what it means for the road ahead. The war was triggered by India’s cross-border strikes under Operation Sindoor and met with Pakistan’s decisive counter-operation, Marka-e-Haq. The significance of that episode, however, lies less in the tactical exchanges themselves than in the very different reflections each side appears to have drawn from them.

New Delhi packaged Operation Sindoor for its internal audience as a punitive, restricted attack meant to signal resolve. The operation, however, did not remain confined for long. The resolute response of Pakistan unfolded across several domains, namely air power, unmanned systems, electronic warfare and cyber capabilities. What India presumably saw as a symbolic move soon became much more complicated, revealing the disconnect between Indian ambitions and its military capability. The Indian leadership had profoundly misjudged the flexibility of Pakistan’s operational capability and its ability to integrate resources across different forms of warfare. The war served to........

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