Silent to violent in hours: Cold Start 2.0 war strategy after Op Sindoor

The May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict demonstrated how swiftly modern warfare is evolving — from mass troop mobilisation to precision strikes executed in hours. At the heart of Operation Sindoor was a new Indian doctrine designed to punish, deter and dominate without triggering all-out war.

In Short

• Op Sindoor marked India’s shift to rapid, non-contact warfare against Pak
• Brahmos missiles, S-400s, real-time targeting reshaped India’s military response
• India’s shrinking decision-making loop enables retaliatory strikes within hours

A thirty-minute barrage of 18 Brahmos supersonic cruise missiles shattered Pakistani airbases and radars on May 10, 2025, ushered the world into a new era of non-contact, kinetic warfare.

India’s Operation Sindoor unfolded over 88 hours beginning May 7, 2025. Shrugging off initial aircraft losses, the IAF and Indian Army launched precision weapons at targets across Pakistan, from the mountains of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) to the deserts of Sind, without crossing the border. At least five PAF aircraft were destroyed on the ground and in the air, including one shot down at a record distance of 314 kilometres. The Indian Navy, poised to strike at Pakistan’s coast, discovered Pakistan Navy warships had hidden themselves in civilian shipping berths.

India’s swift victory in Op Sindoor was the confluence of factors — India’s political resolve and the strategic overreach of GHQ Rawalpindi. There were a host of Indian military capabilities built up over decades: a Soviet-designed missile picked up by Dr APJ Kalam and Dr A Sivathanu Pillai in the 1990s and inducted as the world’s first operational tri-service supersonic cruise missile, the Brahmos. S-400 missiles bought off-the-shelf from the Russian Federation in 2018, in the teeth of US opposition. A homegrown Integrated Air Command and Control System (IACCS) assiduously developed by the IAF with Indian industry, over three decades. A crucial factor in all this — India’s political resolve to embark down the risky path of decisive military action against its nuclear-armed neighbour.

Operation Sindoor began as a response to the killing of 25 Indian civilians in Pahalgam, Jammu and Kashmir, by the Laskhar-e-Taiba on April 22. Eight terrorist camps and launch pads within Pakistan were hit. It was a scaled-up version of India's response to the suicide bombing that killed 40 CRPF troopers on February 14, 2019 — airstrikes against a Jaish-e-Mohammad training camp in Khyber-Pakhtunkhawa.

In 2025, India struck eight targets against terrorist infrastructure inside Pakistan. Swiftly ascending each rung of a calibrated escalation ladder, India offered Pakistan an off-ramp to de-escalate. When Pakistan chose to escalate, by firing a ballistic missile towards New Delhi — the first time a nuclear-armed country has fired such a weapon at another nuclear armed country — the response was swift. The half-hour rampage by IAF jets hit 11 targets including eight PAF air bases. The PAF had no option but to pull back to rear bases and call the US for a ceasefire.

Shades of Sindoor surfaced in two other major global conflicts over the past year — the 12-day Iran-Israel war in June 2025 and the US-Israel war on Iran on February 28, 2026. Both were non-contact, kinetic conflicts where air power, missile power and low-cost drones played a decisive role. Iran’s air force and air defences failed to prevent the US and Israel from striking more than 13,000 targets in 2026 but Tehran’s investment in low-cost kamikaze drones and ballistic missiles paid off when it became the first country since the Korean War of 1950-53, to attack multiple US bases. A May 2026 CNN investigation revealed that Iranian strikes damaged at least 16 US military installations across eight Middle Eastern countries including sites in Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq and the UAE. “Satellite imagery and official assessments indicated severe damage to key infrastructure, with some facilities rendered unusable and others facing costly repairs."

Military strategy holds ‘selection and maintenance of aim’ as the fundamental precept of military planning. India terminated the conflict because the leadership deemed it had sufficiently raised the cost of terror sponsorship for Pakistan. President Donald Trump is caught in an Iranian quagmire because his aims constantly shifted or were unachievable through air power alone.

His favourite Field Marshal, Asim Munir, is in search of a new strategy to deter India.

What Operation Sindoor shattered was the Pakistan Army’s decades-old Nuclear Weapons Enabled Terrorism (NWET) strategy — where its terrorist proxies murdered Indian civilians, even as nuclear weapons protected the Army from punitive Indian strikes. The lack of an effective military response emboldened military dictators like General Pervez Musharraf to expand terror attacks across the Indian heartland, attacking India’s parliament in 2001 and killing over 366 civilians in Mumbai in terror attacks in 2006 and 2008. It took the Indian army approximately three weeks to mobilise along the border with Pakistan for punitive cross-border strikes after Operation Parakram, launched after the Parliament attacks of 2001. The prolonged deployment window allowed the build-up of global pressure to avert conflict. Mobilisation time was shortened to a few days in the early 2000s— in what was colloquially dubbed a ‘Cold Start’ strategy. Cold Start was tested in military exercises, but never implemented in practice. (Launching land forces are seen as inherently riskier because of the heightened threat of nuclear escalation).

For India’s political and military leadership, the 2025 strikes offer a swift means to punish Pakistan without crossing borders and keeping its response well below the nuclear threshold. US Military theorist John Boyd held the OODA loop of Observe, Orient, Decide and Act as vital for military success, the side which can cycle through the loop faster gains a decisive advantage. The Indian military’s OODA loop is shrinking. It took a fortnight to plan and launch the Operation Sindoor retaliatory strikes. The next military response to a terror strike could occur in hours and not days. The Indian military, for the first time in its history, has the ability to go from 'silent to violent' in hours. This has profound implications not just for retaliatory strikes but for war fighting as well. In this shortened decision-making loop, one sees the contours of a future Indian conventional warfighting response against its western adversary.

Pakistan is wedged between Iran, China, Afghanistan and West Asia. The Army-dominated country has leveraged this strategic geography, to extract rent for services — from fighting proxy wars in Afghanistan, aiding the US occupation of Afghanistan, to brokering peace between the US and China and between Iran and the US. Ironically, geography also makes this country — just 1,600 km from north to south and 885 km from east to west, vulnerable to the new age of non-contact, kinetic warfare. Pakistan’s width is about the maximum range of a Brahmos cruise missile. In such a geography, the S-400 air defence missile system becomes an airspace denial weapon, turning swathes of Pakistan into no-go zones. Upcoming Indian defence programs like the Mission Sudarshan Chakra, an IACCS on steroids, announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on August 15 last year, will aggravate Islamabad’s lack of geographical depth. Its open coastline is also vulnerable to precision strikes and a naval blockade.

Using ‘Cold Start 2.0’, the Indian military can paralyse Pakistan's military infrastructure, without crossing either the LoC or the International Border. Airbases can be shattered, radars can be destroyed, warships and submarines can be hit in ports, before they sail out to do battle. Also at risk are upcoming Chinese-built acquisitions like fifth generation fighter jets and Air Independent Propulsion (AIP)-equipped submarines.

Pakistan’s military vulnerability could reassure Indian military planners who worry about a ‘two-front war’ with China and Pakistan. This scenario never materialised in the one war that India fought with China and the four wars fought with Pakistan in nearly 80 years. American pressure played a role in keeping Pakistan from joining the 1962 India-China war. Soviet military pressure kept China away from joining the 1971 Indo-Pak war. An increasingly collusive Beijing-Islamabad partnership in recent decades prompted Indian military contingency planning — fighting the Chinese to a standstill in the north, in ‘holding’ operations, while ‘fighting’ to defeat Pakistan on the west. Fighting a two-front war require enormous resources — land armies, artillery, fighter jets and missiles. ‘Cold Start 2.0’ means India now has the capability to paralyse the Pakistan front with fewer resources, while concentrating the bulk of its combat power to hold and fight on the northern front. The lessons from this 88-hour operation will be studied for years to come.

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