New Delhi: In candid assessment of India’s Operation Sindoor, Lieutenant General Rahul R. Singh, Deputy Chief of Army Staff (Capability Development & Sustenance), has said that there are multiple lessons to be learnt from the 87-hour conflict, with the biggest lesson being that while there was just one border, there were a minimum of three adversaries.
Speaking Friday at an event ‘New Age Military Technologies’ organised by FICCI, Lt Gen Singh said, “First, one border, two adversaries. So, we saw Pakistan on one side, but adversaries were two, actually four, or let’s say three.”
Further explaining his statement, he added, “Pakistan was the front face. We had China providing all possible support. This is no surprise because if you look at statistics, in the last five years, 81 percent of the military hardware that Pakistan is getting is all Chinese. China, of course, the good old dictum, killed by a borrowed knife…So, he would rather use the neighbour to cause pain than get involved in the mud-slinging match on the northern borders.”
China has been able to test its weapons against others, he said. “So, it’s like a live lab available to them. It is something that we have to be very cognizant about. Turkey also played an important role in providing the type of support it did…” he said on the use of Turkish drones of various kinds by the Pakistani military.
Lt Gen Singh also spoke about what has emerged as one of the primary concerns within the defence and security establishment—China using its satellites to monitor Indian military deployment. “The next important lesson is the importance of C4ISR and civil military fusion. There is a lot to be done as far as this domain is concerned.”
C4ISR stands for Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance.
“When DGMO-level talks were on, Pakistan actually was mentioning that we know that your such and such vector was primed and ready for action, and we would request you to perhaps pull it back. So he was getting live inputs from China. That is one place we really need to move fast and take appropriate action,” the Deputy Chief said.
While ThePrint held back a lot of information verified by it while Operation Sindoor was underway, it has been learnt that China was indeed an active participant in this conflict by providing strategic military inputs to Pakistan.
Indian leadership has been trying to downplay the involvement of the Chinese in the conflict. Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan had said on 31 May that while Pakistan may have leveraged Chinese commercial satellite imagery, there is no proof of real-time targeting support.
ThePrint’s Editor-In-Chief Shekhar Gupta had written in his column “National Interest” on 7 June how Operation Sindoor was the first battle in India’s two-front war, and that the Chinese use Pakistan as a cheap instrument to triangulate India between them. “It is safer to presume that the Chinese now see Pakistan as an extension of their Western Theatre Command,” he wrote.
Lt Gen Singh said that “thankfully our population centres were not quite at risk” during Operation Sindoor.
“In the next round, we will have to be prepared for that. For that more and more air defence, more and more counter rockets, artillery, and drone sort of systems has to be prepared for which we have to move very very fast,” he noted, while admitting that while indigenous systems did very well, some did not.
