When India’s Chief of Army Staff General Upendra Dwivedi, declared during the Chanakya Defence Dialogue that “Operation Sindoor was just a trailer” and that India is preparing for a long war, he was not simply celebrating India’s perceived sense of military success, he was articulating a doctrine of escalation.
Operation Sindoor of May this year ended in 88 hours following Pakistan’s calibrated and strong response, and is now being misinterpreted not as a cautionary tale under the nuclear shadow but as a springboard for bolder military postures. This is a misreading with perilous implications for regional stability.
From a deterrence standpoint, the idea that limited conflict can be waged repeatedly in a nuclearised dyad is not only misleading but deeply destabilising. Pakistan has long asserted that there is no space for war under the nuclear overhang. A four-day conflict should not be taken as proof of concept for ‘space for war’, but as evidence of how quickly South Asia can edge toward escalation that India cannot control, let alone dominate. There is no safe rehearsal space for teaching nuclear neighbours ‘how to behave’. Strategic stability demands sobriety, not doctrinal spectacle.
India’s so-called No First Use (NFU) policy, projected since 1999 as a pillar of restraint, has increasingly become a rhetorical ornamentation. It is neither codified nor verifiable and increasingly, not credible. Successive doctrinal shifts from Cold Start to Proactive Operations to Dynamic Response and now Cold Strike reflect an enduring desire to retain rapid escalation options under the guise of restraint. The result has been paradoxical: India could neither strike decisively nor effectively save itself from Pakistan’s QPQ+ response.
These changes are not merely semantic. Force posture reveals doctrinal truth. India’s deployment of dual-capable, canistered systems like the Agni-V intercontinental ballistic missile, and its expansion of AI-enabled intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities, point not to assured retaliation but to flexible, even pre-emptive response options. Former officials such as Shivshankar Menon and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh have repeatedly hinted that NFU is conditional and can be jettisoned. Such ambiguity erodes the credibility of restraint.
The evolution of Integrated Battle Groups under Exercise Trishul illustrates the impact of this shift on the conventional battlefield. Envisioned initially as division-level autonomous strike formations under Cold Start, these are now being reconfigured into brigade-sized, rapid-action elements. India claims that its doctrine and operations are configured for a two-front war against China and Pakistan, but the fact is that its force configurations and deployments are clearly Pakistan-specific. It does not want to offer its neck to China for any partner or ally’s sake and hedges this in its ‘strategic autonomy’ narrative. The intent of Exercise Trishul is clear: faster deployment, quicker strikes and greater operational autonomy. Yet in a region where missile flight times are measured in mere minutes, such acceleration sharply reduces the time available for crisis de-escalation.
This evolution is occurring in parallel with a global transformation in warfare. Emerging disruptive technologies – hypersonic weapons, nuclear-capable drones, space assets and AI-driven decision systems – are not only enhancing strike capabilities but compressing political decision time. In a multi-clock environment, different weapon systems operate on distinct timelines, shrinking the window available for verification, deliberation and response.
In South Asia, where even peacetime ‘accidents’ like the 2022 BrahMos missile launch have occurred, these technologies are not theoretical; they introduce real-time volatility into an already fragile strategic equation. Dual-capable systems, especially those with AI-assisted targeting, blur the line between conventional and nuclear domains. This blurring of lines risks triggering a crisis by confusion, where uncertainty over payloads, launch authority, or trajectories invites worst-case reactions.
AI, far from guaranteeing prudence, may in fact accelerate escalation. Algorithms can inherit bias, obscure decision logic, and compress human decision loops at the very moment deliberation is most needed. In such a context, the real arms race is no longer about warheads; it is about reaction time. The question is not who strikes first, but who has time to think at all.
Pakistan maintains a policy of deliberate ambiguity that reinforces deterrence. It has not declared either NFU or first use, not from belligerence, but because rigid declaratory postures in an asymmetric dyad can be perilous. Pakistan’s Full Spectrum Deterrence, rooted in Credible Minimum Deterrence, prioritises stability. Pakistan’s architecture relies on centralised control and strong assured operations.
This contrast is vital. India has declared NFU with caveats in its Draft Nuclear Doctrine and its 2003 clarification. While it expects others to believe in its conditional NFU pledge, India rejects China’s unconditional NFU pledge. Likewise, its senior leadership from Parrikar to Rajnath Singh have declared rescinding the NFU and then denying that their statements were personal musings. India’s force posture and vertical nuclear proliferation indicate a drift from the deterrence model to one of compellence.
While deterrence seeks to prevent war by threatening unacceptable costs, compellence seeks to shape adversary behaviour through the threat or use of force. This shift from deterrence to compellence is inherently risk-prone. It relies on escalation management within compressed timeframes, an assumption dangerously at odds with the technological and strategic realities of South Asia.
Conversely, Pakistan maintains a posture of stabilising deterrence. In all nuclear-tinged crises, Pakistan has consistently displayed restraint and confidence. Its Quid Pro Quo+ response already includes restraint. Yet restraint cannot be unilateral and India must not take it for granted.
India spurns offers for dialogue and rebuilding confidence, claiming victimhood of terrorism, while we daily witness the evidence. Its Kulbushan Yadavs remain active in waging terrorism in Pakistan and Illegally Occupied Jammu & Kashmir, including their proxies in Afghanistan. Emboldened by a muted international response and a misplaced sense of ‘strategic autonomy’, India has waged international terrorism, targeting the American and Canadian Sikh communities that morally support the creation of Khalistan, their homeland.
India must now choose whether to reaffirm NFU through posture coherence and legal codification, or formally abandon the pretence and accept full responsibility for the strategic risks it creates. The current gap between declared policy and observable posture is unsustainable and destabilising.
International actors enabling India or choosing to look the other way must recognise that silence in the face of strategic drift is not neutrality; it is tantamount to complicity. By rewarding opacity with access to advanced technologies, they risk legitimising a model that undermines global nuclear restraint norms and invites mimetic behaviour elsewhere.
General Dwivedi may believe that Operation Sindoor was “just a trailer". But for those who understand nuclear fragility, even a trailer can be terminal. Restraint is not a rehearsal. It must be sincere, reciprocal, and resilient. In South Asia, the time to decide will always be shorter than the time to regret.
The writer is an arms control adviser at the Strategic Plans Division and a former brigadier.
The views are solely his own.
