On May 7, the Pakistan Air Force used the Chinese-made J-10CE fighter to shoot down five Indian warplanes, including the so-called “most powerful 4.5-generation fighter,” the Dassault Rafale. Reuters later confirmed that none of these achievements involved F-16s. Western outlets credited China’s provision of the higher-performance PL-15E missile. Yet former PLA Air Force Colonel, Chinese strategist Professor Wang Xiangsui argues that this understanding falls into the same trap as India. The greatest assistance China provided Pakistan was, in fact, three strategic concepts.

First Strategic Concept: Systems Warfare

In this aerial engagement, one detail stands out: all the Rafales crashed on Indian territory, while Pakistan’s J-10s emerged unscathed.

On the one hand, this was indeed thanks to the PL-15E missile’s 145-kilometre range—45km longer than the Meteor missile carried by the Rafale—granting a clear advantage in beyond-visual-range combat. However, as early as 2022, India successfully tested the Astra-II missile on its Su-30MKIs, claiming a 160-kilometre reach. So why didn’t the Indian Air Force manage to bring down even a single J-10C that day?

PL-15E Beyond Visual Range Air-to-Air Missile (BVRAAM)

According to Defence Security Asia, during the operation Pakistan’s J-10Cs maintained complete radar and radio silence, firing missiles only from a safe, hard-to-detect distance. Target acquisition and guidance were handled by airborne early warning platforms like the ZDK-03, which is also imported from China. This meant that for most of each missile’s flight, the Rafale’s radar warning receivers detected nothing. By the time the missile’s active seeker sprang to life—some 20 kilometres from the target—Indian pilots had almost no time to take effective evasive action.

This tactic allows Pakistani pilots to strike from absolute safety but requires robust data links between multiple assets. In a developed data-link system, proper integration can yield synergy far greater than the sum of its parts. Cross-system communication, however, often suffers severe inefficiencies. In building its data link network, Pakistan far outpaced India—an advantage consistently underestimated.

Pakistan’s edge came simply from standardizing its fleet: it operates just six fighter jet types, and all fighters and early warning aircraft procured since 2000 are Chinese-built. In contrast, India fields fourteen fighter types from five nations; over the past 25 years it has acquired jets from Russia and France, and early warning aircraft from Brazil, tripling the complexity of data link integration compared to Pakistan.

If one looks solely at individual performance specs, India’s Air Force is not inferior. But its avionics and missile systems hail from wholly incompatible—often adversarial—Western and Russian frameworks. Times of India revealed that India’s Russian and French fighters sometimes even failed to communicate, let alone guide each other’s missiles.

This “mix-and-match” approach has exacted a bloody price. In 2019, India’s own air defence missile misidentified a friendly helicopter as hostile, killing six service members and one civilian. The mishap stemmed from the incompatibility between Israeli made missiles and Russian transport helicopters, which could not share Identification Friend or Foe data.

Indian soldiers and Kashmiri onlookers stand near the remains of an Indian Air Force aircraft after it crashed in Budgam district, on the outskirts of Srinagar on February 27, 2019.

In response, India resolved to develop its own Vayulink data link system, showcasing it at the 2023 Aero India exhibition. The service claimed it could provide real-time, accurate identification and positioning to all three services. But a month later, Forbes reported a mid-air collision between a Su 30MKI and a Mirage 2000 during exercises, leaving one pilot dead and another injured. Whether Vayulink can truly unify India’s disparate fleet remains uncertain.

Moreover, The Print noted that as of 2024, some Indian military airfields still lack modern lighting systems. For example, the Leh, Thoise and Barrackpore bases still rely on flares for night operations. Even under a mere “equipment-first” lens, there is still a long way to go for India.

Second Strategic Concept: People as the Core

In 1938 Mao Zedong stated, “Weapons are an important factor in war, but they are not the decisive factor; the decisive factor is the people, not the hardware.” This observation holds especially true in modern aerial combat.

Pakistan’s pilots fly, on average, 30–40 more hours per year than their Indian counterparts. Since 2011, the Pakistan Air Force has participated in the Shaheen joint exercises with the PLA Air Force, honing advanced aerial tactics annually. Military Observer journal notes Pakistan fields an aggressor squad that flies J-10s simulating Rafale capabilities, providing tailored adversary training. Thus, Pakistan’s ability to down three Rafales in a single day was not luck, but the product of a decade of relentless sharpening.

On 9 December 2020, the Pakistan Air Force and the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) started the bilateral exercise “Shaheen IX” at Pakistan’s newest airbase Bholari

By contrast, India’s Air Force struggles not only with training quality but also basic discipline. An Indian House panel report shows that from 2017 to 2022, over half of its 34 aircraft crashes resulted from human error—including the fatal crash that killed former Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) General Bipin Rawat. A 2024 expose in the Hindustan Times revealed that at the Ambala Air Base—India’s first Rafale hub—a Wing Commander was accused of raping a civilian intern. The Week Magazine reveals that Commander remained on active duty for a year, even forging documents to claim her as his spouse, subjecting her to repeated abuse in restricted military areas such as flying areas. The incident has highlighted serious violations of military discipline, fraudulent financial transactions, and risking the safety of aircraft and armament in an active air base. Yet, the Indian Air Force decided to administratively deal with the principal offender, and not through the military’s judicial process.

When training standards and discipline are so deficient, India’s decision to escalate the conflict only underscores its failure to recognise that its greatest weakness lies in its people, not its equipment.

Third Strategic Concept: War as the Most Serious Matter of State

War tests a nation’s finances as much as its arms. Only by answering “Why are we preparing for war?” and “What are we fighting for?” can an army gain a true soul—becoming the guardian of its people rather than the tool for politicians and arms companies to make money

On these questions, Pakistan has clear answers. Since 1947 India and Pakistan have fought three major wars, and the still-disputed border remains a tangible security pressure on Pakistan. Meanwhile, certain Indian politicians stoke border skirmishes whenever their popularity dips, using the military as a rallying tool for nationalist votes—constantly pushing Pakistan military to maintain a strong defence, instead of buying flashy decorations.

For China, although the border dispute with India persisted, India was no longer its primary concern after the 1962 war; the real trauma came in May 1999, when the US bombed China’s embassy in Yugoslavia, and murdered three Chinese journalists. Under international law, this was a direct assault on Chinese territory, yet the US dismissed it as an “accident,” confident that China lacked means of retaliation. That arrogance spurred China’s “Project 995,” fueling the rapid development of missiles, fighters, and other strategic weapons to ensure national humiliation would never recur.

Victims of the 1999 US bombing: (from left) Xu Xinghu and his wife Zhu Ying, and Shao Yunhuan

A quarter-century from now, when sixth-gen stealth fighters casting shadows, DF-17 missiles cutting the horizon, and quantum satellites threading through constellations, no country dares to provoke China with force anymore. As for those ephemeral insects still twitching in the dirt—their limited power and perspective could never shake and grasp the grandeur of the ancient oak that’s weathered ten centuries of storms.

Both China and India are the great ancient civilizations. Yet today India uses the religion of conquerors and the maps of colonialists to justify neighborly bullying. Its actions betray not only the vanishing of Eastern wisdom but also a deficiency in basic civility. If this continues, India will lose far more than a few Rafales—it will forfeit something precious that money cannot redeem.

Editor: Charriot Zhai