‘Nothing threatened Delhi’: A new book recalls the tense nights of Operation Sindoor

The events of May 7, 2025, from the late morning going into the night, however disruptive, were for the most part contained. But from the morning of May 8, the Indian skies began to thunder.

The unmanned armada was a nightmarish mix: small commercial quadcopters that anyone could buy online possibly deployed to draw fire and deplete India’s stocks of ammunition, militarygrade reconnaissance drones meant to detect radar emissions and send back electronic intelligence about Indian sensors and imagery of defensive formations in real-time, loiter munitions such as the Turkish-manufactured YIHA-III and KaGeM suicide drones, designed to strike ground targets, and TB-2 Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles – heavily armed drones that had proven their lethality in conflicts from Libya to Nagorno-Karabakh. In the mix were also Fatah I and II rockets fired from multiple launch rocket systems and a handful of air-launched weapons.

Hundreds of drones crossed the LoC and the international border, penetrating Indian airspace. Small, cheap and expendable, their use in large numbers could have been potentially devastating. Pakistan was testing India’s defences, searching for gaps, looking for vulnerabilities. They found none.

The IAF, meanwhile, continued to maintain robust air defence – fighters on combat air patrol, surface-to-air missile systems at full alert, radar networks scanning every cubic metre of airspace along the borders. They were ready for Round 2 of the aerial slugfest.

Three hundred drones were unprecedented: the Indian skies had never encountered drone attacks at this scale. But Pakistan was about to unleash something far worse – a storm of drones. These were launched indiscriminately, often with poor precision. They were unable to strike Indian military targets of any significance.

On the night of May 8, blending into the early hours of May 9, Pakistani forces intensified their drone attack. The activity spanned the entire front, from Kashmir to Gujarat, targeting military bases like Srinagar, Avantipur, Jammu, Udhampur and Amritsar. As many as 600 drones – some armed, some for reconnaissance – were detected by the IAF that night.

Six hundred.

The IACCS nodes blazed with contacts lit up across the skies. From his underground node, the Node Commander watched the scenario develop. Even for a veteran with decades of experience reading the patterns of aerial warfare, the scale intrigued him.

“My reaction was, this is huge,” the Node Commander recalls. “I didn’t expect that they would come in such large numbers. Drones that were coming were being picked up well across the international border. They came in more in the Jammu and Kashmir sector than in our sector. [And they came in] a little bit in the central sector [of the area of operations of the Western Air Command].”

But one thing needs to be made absolutely clear, the Node Commander insists. Despite the fever-pitched rumours spreading across social media, despite the panic beginning to ripple through online forums and WhatsApp groups, the drones could never have threatened the capital.

The Node Commander categorically denies that drones came anywhere close to the NCR. “Accounts on social media,” he says, “are entirely incorrect. Nothing ever could come anywhere close to threatening Delhi. That I can tell you with authority and conviction. This was under my area of operations.”

Pakistan’s expansive drone operations dipped on the morning of May 9 and then picked up with a vengeance that evening. “On May 9, once again, Pakistan’s drone activity started around 8.30 pm. We also assessed that there was a heavier buildup of aircraft and had inputs from Air Force channels of an imminent strike from their side,” says Air Marshal Bharti. The intelligence was clear. Pakistan was preparing something bigger. Along with the intense drone attacks, now came air-launched missile attacks from Pakistan’s aircraft.

As on the May 8 night–May 9 early morning, India saw attacks across IAF bases. The attacks themselves weren’t particularly deep penetrations. These were assessed as relatively shallow strikes across the LoC and the international border, primarily targeting IAF bases and some Indian Army positions. But the scale was another matter.

The Pakistani strategy was transparent: saturate Indian air defences, force them to reveal their positions by firing, then localise and target Indian radars and surface-to-air missile systems. At the heart of battle, there lies a paradox: the minute you attack, you also reveal yourself and thus open yourself to attack. It was death by a thousand cuts, an attempt to overwhelm through sheer numbers. These were missions where the PAF appeared clearly unwilling to deploy its fighter aircraft.

India hit back. One senior officer noted, “Once again, we responded by hitting their radar sites and surface-to-air missile sites in a bid to shape the battlefield.” The phrase “shape the battlefield” is military speak for something more direct – degrading the PAF’s ability to continue fighting as a formidable adversary, in this case, by targeting Pakistani Air Defence sensors, and progressively blinding them. This was a key objective woven into every strike mission.

“We needed to create some gaps by knocking off some of their sensors, some of their systems, so that we faced less and less resistance in our areas of interest and had the required degree of control of the air,” says Air Marshal Bharti.

The specific radars targeted by the IAF in this phase revealed just how deeply IAF planners understood Pakistan’s air defence network. IAF strikes – both from the ground and air – reportedly destroyed three AN/TPS-77 units at bases in Pasrur, Sialkot and Rahim Yar Khan. The destruction of these systems would definitely have severely degraded the PAF’s radar network, creating blind spots through which Indian aircraft could operate with a higher degree of lethality.

The PAF aircraft, however, did not move in to engage the IAF’s fighters. “They were there but at further ranges,” says Air Marshal Bharti. They were playing defence, staying alive, preserving their combat power for a fight that might come later – or might never come at all.

In the meantime, back home, it was up to the IACCS nodes to manage the infernal chaos of the drone attack. The challenge was as much economic as tactical. Each drone that appeared on their screens demanded a decision: engage or ignore?

The calculus was brutal. A surface-to-air missile can cost millions of dollars and cannot be easily replenished – certainly not during an ongoing conflict. Some of the commercial drones the Pakistanis were using cost only a few hundred dollars. Shooting a million-dollar missile at a 300-dollar drone is the definition of an unsustainable exchange rate.

“Identifying everything in the air was the job of the node,” one officer explains. “So, whatever I cleared to fly was a particular colour. Something which I had not identified as yet, was shown differently. Anything that I identified as a hostile, had another particular colour … Anything other than that was cleared to be engaged.”

This colour-coding system became the language through which critical decisions were made at machine speeds.

Drones have redefined military conflict around the world since the start of the Ukraine–Russia war. The footage from Ukraine’s battlefields – first-person views from drones diving into Russian tanks, dropping grenades through tank hatches, hunting soldiers through forests and trenches – had made it clear. Unmanned systems weren’t the future of warfare. They were the present.

At the time of Operation Sindoor, it is believed that the IAF already had procedures in place to counter mass-drone attacks. “There are situations where we do practise for a saturation strike. Not just for drones. This was a saturation strike. So, there are procedures defined about how to tackle it. And we just followed that,” says the IACCS Node Commander.

While the S-400 system was instrumental in hitting high-value targets and fighter jets, shorter-range missiles deployed across the region took on the incoming drones. This included shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles – several launched from frontline army posts, including high-altitude positions in Rajouri and Poonch, deployed mere metres from the LoC. Upgraded, radar-guided L-70 guns of the Indian Army were ordered to open fire on any drones they detected.

Other short-range and medium-range weapons the IAF used were MR-SAM, Akash, SpyDer, Pechora and SAMAR. The Army units were linked to a fully automated Air Defence Control and Reporting System (ADCRS) called the Akashteer (‘sky-arrow’ in Hindi), operating under the command and control of the IACCS.

One of the biggest challenges for each node commander involved in Operation Sindoor was ensuring that airborne targets designated for destruction were military, not civilian flights. This wasn’t paranoia. This was based on hard evidence of what Pakistan was doing.

As tensions between India and Pakistan built up, even after India’s strikes on multiple terror targets in Pakistan on May 7, civilian airspace remained open over Pakistani airports. This was clear evidence of the PAF using civilian aircraft as shields for their fighters.

The goal? Confuse the air picture. Distract IAF surface-to-air missile batteries from launching, in the fear that innocent civilian flights would be hit. It appears hundreds of passengers ended up being used as human shields as PAF fighters manoeuvred near them and launched missiles at IAF targets.

“The really unscrupulous actions by our adversaries were that at a particular stage, they closed airspace in the lower half [of Pakistan] and diverted all their civil traffic to the northern part. Within that, they threw in their fighters. They funnelled in their civilian traffic to an area which would have hampered the operation of the S-400. There were very clear instances when we could make out that the [PAF] fighter is under the shadow of a civilian plane, perhaps without the civilian aircraft coming to know about it. Some aircraft would have gotten airborne from Lahore, others from Chaklala, Islamabad. You could make out [on the IACCS displays] that a projectile was coming from a civilian aircraft,” says the Node Commander.

The implications are staggering. Pakistani fighter pilots, operating under orders, were deliberately positioning themselves in the radar shadow of commercial airliners – planes filled with families, business travellers, students – using them as cover to launch attacks on Indian military targets. It was a gambit that relied on Indian restraint. If the IAF fired and hit a civilian airliner by mistake, Pakistan would have an international incident of catastrophic proportions. Images of civilian wreckage and bodies would flood global media. India would be painted as reckless, trigger-happy, a danger to international aviation.

The Indian commanders held their fire when civilian aircraft were in the picture. They waited. They tracked. They let some shots go untaken rather than risk innocent lives. It was the right call.

As May 9 turned into the 10th, as drones swarmed the air and Pakistani fighters hid behind civilian airliners, the nature of this conflict fully revealed itself. This wasn’t just a military confrontation. It was a test of systems, of doctrine, of national will – and of the moral lines nations would or wouldn’t cross in pursuit of victory.

Excerpted with permission from The Sky Warriors: Operation Sindoor Unveiled, Vishnu Som, Juggernaut.