May 2025 became a season of reckoning for India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had set out to establish himself as a regional strongman and project India as a net-security provider. To materialise these goals, New Delhi tried to roar on the crutches of militarism and hyper-nationalism through the engineering of the Pahalgam attack. However, India’s war cries soon turned to mewling after it received a historic pummelling at the hands of the Pakistan Air Force (PAF). In the wake of what has been dubbed India’s biggest strategic error in decades, and the PAF’s pivotal achievement and strategic triumph, the world has been left with innumerable critical takeaways from Marka-e-Haq.

Fundamentally shifting the understanding of the South Asian region, the Pakistan-India May 2025 war validated the PAF’s doctrinal and organisational overhaul undertaken by Air Chief Marshal Zaheer Ahmed Baber Sidhu. While giving a bloody nose to the Indian Air Force (IAF), Marka-e-Haq also became a masterclass in the use of multidomain operations (MDOs). Emerging as an enduring aspect of modern warfare, MDOs translated into the integration of electronic, cyber, space and kinetic assets into the PAF’s indigenously crafted kill chain. Marka-e-Haq made it amply clear that success in war hinges upon leveraging both kinetic and non-kinetic domains, with the latter used to disrupt the IAF’s communications and........

© The Nation