India established air superiority over Pak, forced ceasefire during Op Sindoor: Report

India achieved air superiority over Pakistan during Operation Sindoor, leading to a ceasefire after significant strikes on Pakistani military targets.

India established air superiority over Pakistan during Operation Sindoor in early May and forced Islamabad to ask for a ceasefire, a Swiss think tank has said in a recent report, adding that Pakistan had initially achieved tactical victory “by shooting down several enemy fighters” but it failed to conduct strikes on Indian territory.

Representational image. (Representational/Sourced)

It said the Pakistani strikes were countered by an integrated (Indian) air defence system whose effectiveness was one of the surprises of the four-day conflict between the two neighbours.

“Conversely, the Indian Air Force managed to significantly degrade the enemy’s air defence system, then concluded the conflict by carrying out a series of spectacular strikes against Pakistan’s principal Air Force stations,” said a report by Centre for Military History and Perspective Studies on Operation Sindoor: The India-Pakistan air war (7-10 May 2025).

Last October, IAF chief Air Chief Marshal AP Singh said that Pakistan lost as many as 12 to 13 aircraft, including fighter jets such as US-made F-16s and Chinese-origin JF-17s, to the IAF’s precision strikes on ground and in the air during Operation Sindoor, and dismissed Pakistan’s claims of downing Indian jets as “fanciful tales” aimed at delivering a message to its domestic audience.

To be sure, chief of defence staff General Anil Chauhan said in Singapore on May 31 that India lost fighter planes on May 7 due to tactical mistakes that were swiftly rectified before the IAF returned in big numbers and carried out precision strikes deep inside the neighbouring country by punching through its air defences.

Operation Sindoor marked New Delhi’s direct military response to the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack in which 26 people were killed. India launched the operation in the early hours of May 7 and struck terror and military installations in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). Between the launch of the operation and the ceasefire on May 10 evening, Indian forces bombed nine terror camps in Pakistan and PoK, killing at least 100 terrorists, and the IAF struck targets at 13 Pakistani airbases and military installations.

By the morning of May 10, 2025, the IAF had succeeded in achieving air superiority over a significant portion of Pakistan’s airspace, the think tank said.

“This enabled it (IAF) to continue long-range strikes against enemy infrastructure at will, at least for as long as it retained sufficient stocks of munitions such as BrahMos or SCALP-EG,” the report said.

“At the same time, the Pakistan Air Force had lost the ability to repeat the operations it had conducted so successfully on 7 May 2025, owing to the loss of its forward air-surveillance radars and the threat posed by S-400 systems to its AWACS standoff weapons delivery platforms, while its own strikes conducted between 7 and 10 May 2025 had been largely thwarted by Indian defences.”

In one of the counterstrikes on the night of May 7-8, Islamabad launched aerial attacks using drones and missiles at multiple towns and cities, including Awantipora, Srinagar, Jammu, Amritsar, Kapurthala, Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Adampur, Bathinda, Chandigarh, Pathankot, Phalodi, Suratgarh, Uttarlai, Nal and Bhuj. India’s air defence shield fended off the attacks.

The report said India detected preparations for the Pakistani attack scheduled on the evening of May 9 and opted for a quasi-immediate counterstrike. “As soon as the Pakistani action had concluded, between 02:00 and 05:00 on 10 May, the IAF conducted a series of strikes using BrahMos, SCALP-EG and Rampage missiles launched from within Indian airspace by Su-30MKIs, Jaguars and Rafales. The missiles struck seven sites up to 200 kilometres inside Pakistani territory, including one surface-to-air missile battery and five air bases,” it added.