E-Paper
Review: Operation Sindoor by Lt Gen KJS Dhillon
A timely book that highlights operational details and the thought process behind conducting an integrated joint operation in response to the attack on tourists in Pahalgam in April 2025
On April 22, 2025, the Baisaran Valley in Pahalgam, the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir, witnessed a horrific attack. Heavily armed terrorists from the Resistance Front, a proxy of Lashkar-e-Taiba, opened fire and selectively killed tourists based on their religion. This was one of the most barbaric terrorist attacks in over two decades, aimed at rupturing the secular fabric of India. The Indian government responded by launching the ongoing, but strategically paused, Operation Sindoor, a joint operation between multiple services, wings of different services, and agencies, to punish Pakistan and re-establish credible deterrence against its proxy warfare. In this regard, Lt Gen KJS Dhillon’s latest book, Operation Sindoor: The Untold Story of India’s Deep Strike Inside Pakistan, is extremely timely. It highlights not only the operational details such as planning and implementation of a complex military manoeuvre, but also the thought process and restraint behind conducting such a complex, integrated joint operation in a highly informatised environment.
Lt Gen Dhillon is a former infantry officer who has served in Kashmir and Northeast India. He was in charge of the Srinagar-based 15th Corps in Kashmir during the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019. Clearly, he has used all his operational experience to highlight the tactical aspects of Operation Sindoor. The core of the book lies in three standout chapters: The Four-Day War, Battle at the Line of Control, and Strategic Communication. Here, Dhillon reconstructs the fighting with granular detail, situating it within the larger picture alongside the challenges. While the book focuses on the four-day war between India and Pakistan, it begins with a phase-by-phase account of the events leading up to it: the background of Pakistan-sponsored terrorism in India, the details of Pahalgam attacks, India’s restraint and preparations, and phase one of India’s counter attack that involved the Indian Army and the Indian Air Force’s synchronised and coordinated operations to destroy nine terror camps. Notably, five of these nine camps were in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir, and four were deep within mainland Pakistan. The Indian Army and Air Force’s use of kamikaze drone attacks coupled with multirole fighters and precision-guided ammunition to destroy these camps is not very well documented by mainstream media. The author fills this gap by narrating India’s tech advances and efficiency in using drones and swarm drones to destroy these terrorist camps. More importantly, the author also highlights the elimination of several high-value targets like Hafiz Mohammad Jameel, Mudassir Khadian, Yaqoob Malik, Mohammad Hamza Jameel, Mohammad Yusuf Azhar, Mohammad Amir, Muhammad Hassan, Abdul Malik, and Noel Malik - all of them were at the top of India’s most wanted lists for decades.
The book follows a reaction-counterreaction framework, where India’s every action is rightly placed as a counter-reaction to Pakistan-sponsored terrorist activities in India. The book also highlights the rationale for the government’s decision of whole-of-state mobilisation during Operation Sindoor rather than limiting it to the armed force, like in response to the Uri attacks in 2016 and the Pulwama attacks in 2019. The book delves into details about Pakistan’s response to India’s counteraction of destroying terrorist camps in the form of ISI-assisted drone warfare using Chinese and Turkish drones, and using artillery fire and battlefield-range rockets targeting India’s military, civilian, and religious places. The author repeatedly emphasises that India was fighting on three fronts: Turkish and Chinese resupplies, Chinese information and intelligence assistance, and Pakistan’s armed forces.
The two key highlights of the book are India’s well-documented use of an air defence umbrella and its integration of advanced Indian-manufactured and imported weapons. For instance, the author points to India’s three-layered air defence layout, with the S-400 forming the outermost layer, capable of engaging targets up to 400 km. The mid-layer consists of the India-Israel jointly developed MRSAM air defence system for high-velocity threats and Akshateer, the Indian Army’s air defence integrated command and control system. Finally, the surface-to-air Python and DERby short-range systems for low-flying threats and drones used for low-altitude engagements alongside Akshateer. All of them coordinated under India’s indigenously developed D4 (Detect, Deter, Destroy, and Document) system, developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation and Bharat Electronics Limited. This is perhaps the most visible change under this government’s Make in India project, in which imported weapons are seamlessly integrated with Indian-manufactured weapons and systems to enhance security and accuracy.
Lt Gen Dhillon’s book narrates the conception, conduct, and consequences of India’s Operation Sindoor with rare candour. It offers an authoritative ground-level view that few others can match. However, the analysis would have benefited from a more explicit engagement with the operation’s inherent limitations and challenges. Such complex operations unavoidably entail collateral damage, adaptive learning, and misfiring in practice. This is the precise reason for the appointment of committees after every major military operation to study what went right and the scope for improvements. A systematic treatment of these trade-offs, failure modes, and unintended consequences would have enhanced the explanatory rigour of this account.
Nonetheless, the book fills a major gap in narrating India’s complex operation under an informatised condition. Such a systematic study is indicative of a broader trend for the future of military warfare as a discipline for emerging scholars.
Suyash Desai is a Political Scientist and a Non-Resident Fellow with Foreign Policy Research Institute.
