Pakistan's establishment of a dedicated conventional rocket force intensifies escalation dynamics, compelling India to invest in counterforce, denial, and dominance across every rung of the ladder
Post-Operation Sindoor, the Pakistani establishment has concluded that it needs to build its conventional strength against India. The focus of the change is in the areas of organisation, capabilities and strategy. Organisationally, the Pakistan Army (PA) has set up the Army Rocket Force Command (ARFC), dedicated exclusively to conventional strike missions. Pre-Sindoor, the entanglement between Pakistan’s nuclear and conventional forces exposed a key weakness—Pakistan’s inability to respond with alacrity, speed, and controlled escalation. Pakistan justifies executing quick-reaction strikes against an Indian conventional attack on the grounds that it was constrained by placing all its missiles under the country’s Strategic Plans Division (SPD). For instance, the Babur cruise missile could not be used because of its nuclear role, and its deployment in the middle of Op Sindoor would have been interpreted by New Delhi as a move towards nuclear use. Consequently, Pakistan sees the ARFC as its solution to avoid breaching escalation thresholds and to control escalation through conventional means.
One prominent American refrain is that India must be dissuaded from conducting counterforce attacks against Pakistan. This stems from the view that the ongoing US-Israel war against Iran has shown that the latter’s drone capabilities have survived the former’s counterforce attacks despite its significant intelligence advantages. It is contended that Pakistan can take heart from this reality. This is especially true for conventional counterforce attacks. About nuclear counterforce attacks, the notion that India should not execute them is superfluous because the distances between civilian and military targets are short in a densely populated region such as South Asia. The assertion that Pakistan should not be subjected to counterforce attacks, or that India should not succumb to the temptations of counterforce, is problematic.
Pakistan's establishment of the ARFC makes it even more imperative for India to augment its counterforce and Damage Limitation (DL) capabilities.
In the context of conventional counterforce, India must eliminate or degrade Pakistan’s offensive capabilities, irrespective of how demanding they are to neutralise, before they are used to strike India. A corollary to this point is that India will need air and missile defences to intercept Pakistani cruise and conventional missiles. Pakistan's establishment of the ARFC makes it even more imperative for India to augment its counterforce and Damage Limitation (DL) capabilities. Conventional counterforce converges with a strategy of denial. The physical elimination or significant degradation of Pakistan’s military capabilities must be a core goal of India’s decision-makers because it neutralises Pakistan’s retaliatory capabilities. A strategy of coercion by denial through conventional counterforce is geared towards altering and eventually defeating Pakistan’s use of terrorism as state policy. A denial-based counterforce strategy is most effective because it reduces Pakistan’s perceived benefits of resorting to terrorism, even if Pakistan retains the capacity for ‘organised military resistance’. Denial-based coercion is more calculable and reliable in that it constricts Pakistan’s options. By definition, coercion seeks to achieve the same goals without incurring the costs of a full victory. In due course, the target—in this case, Pakistan—is likely to see the benefit of accepting India’s demand to cease sponsoring mass-casualty terrorism. It is important to underscore that India’s response to future Pulwama- or Pahalgam-type attacks will need to be significantly disproportionate.
Some critics have already contended that India cannot pursue an Op Sindoor-type punishment-based coercive strategy to deter Pakistan from sponsoring terrorism. Coercion through punishment tends to be more demanding because it raises the costs by targeting the enemy’s civilian population, infrastructure, will, and intentions. A punishment-based coercive strategy can be uncertain in its efficacy, particularly because it is geared towards affecting the adversary’s will. Yet the claim that the government is pursuing deterrence against terrorism exclusively by way of punishment and that it requires a denial-based strategy is not entirely accurate. Op Sindoor involved the merger of both a punishment-based strategy of coercion and a denial-based strategy of coercion, rendering the two indistinguishable. The execution and pursuit[1] denial-based coercion, which imposes fairly severe costs on adversary forces, can also constitute sufficient punishment. This was evident when the Indian Air Force (IAF) struck numerous Pakistani military targets, particularly airbases, thereby not only punishing Pakistan but also damaging its capacity to retaliate. By 8 May, Pakistan had turned off its radars lest its Radio Frequency (RF) emissions be detected and suppressed by India’s Electronic Warfare (EW) capabilities and anti-radiation munitions. The IAF delivered a decisive blow in the early hours of 9–10 May 2025. This enabled India to maintain escalation control—a core tenet of denial-based strategic coercion. Pakistan’s choices had narrowed to the point that it feared further Indian reprisals if it escalated further up the escalation ladder or expanded the conflict into the land and sea domains.
India attained escalation dominance because it had the least to fear from further escalation, eventually compelling Pakistan to seek a ceasefire on 10 May 2025.
India attained escalation dominance[2] because it had the least to fear from further escalation, eventually compelling Pakistan to seek a ceasefire on 10 May 2025. This was reinforced by the terror camps struck by the IAF at Muridke and Bahawalpur at the start of Op Sindoor on 7 May 2025. The IAF’s airstrikes eliminated several terrorists belonging to Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), sending a coercive signal. The JeM and LeT’s training camps have now moved further inland to shield them from Indian attacks. Both the damage inflicted on Pakistan’s military and the costs imposed on its terror proxies combined elements of denial- and punishment-based coercion.
To achieve escalation dominance—rather than simply moving escalation to higher rungs, which would automatically confer dominance on the side least deterred by escalation—there are three core requirements[3] on each rung of the escalation ladder. First, escalation dominance is a product of what position India occupies on the escalation ladder; second, it involves the impact of each side’s capabilities on every individual rung of the ladder and the means they have to move from one rung to the next; and thirdly, their estimation of what would occur if the confrontation shifted to another rung on the escalation ladder.
Escalation is likely to be sharper in the next India-Pakistan crisis, and the establishment of the ARFC is geared towards this outcome. Since capabilities are critical for the maintenance of escalation control or dominance, there are four key areas where India will need focused investment. A larger stockpile of short- and long-range air defence systems, along with drones for aerial, naval surface, and subsurface strikes and missions, will also enhance India’s escalation control capabilities. These will need to be supplemented with missiles, especially a significantly larger stockpile of BrahMos cruise missiles. Yet ballistic and hypersonic missiles should also be integrated into an Integrated Rocket Force (IRF), which is still to be established. Supplementing this effort should be strong missile defence (MD) capabilities to protect both point-defence targets and major urban centres against a Pakistani ballistic missile volley. Layered defences against Pakistani cruise missiles will need enhancement.
To achieve escalation dominance—rather than simply moving escalation to higher rungs, which would automatically confer dominance on the side least deterred by escalation—there are three core requirements on each rung of the escalation ladder.
Finally, sensors are critical for mission success. One of India’s biggest weaknesses is in space-borne sensing capabilities. While this was not an acute challenge during Op Sindoor, space-borne sensors, in the form of a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) capability, are vital for enabling optimal strike missions. The greater India’s sensor strength, the greater its advantage becomes along the escalation ladder, helping it optimise its sensor-to-shooter capabilities. Pakistan, for its part, will likely receive Chinese space-based sensor-related assistance and augmented sensor fusion that will shrink the kill-chain in a future confrontation, as was the case during Operation Sindoor. The launch of six Pakistani Earth Observation Satellites (EOS) by China in the last 16 months underscores the gravity of the challenge facing India from Beijing and Rawalpindi’s cooperation. Further, Pakistan could acquire more advanced HQ-19 air-defence systems, fifth-generation fighter jets, as well as more KJ-500 early warning and control aircraft from China. Rawalpindi could potentially gain access to more sophisticated capabilities from the United States of America (USA) if the ongoing US-Iran negotiations succeed. In addition, drone capabilities accumulated by Pakistan—a lesson drawn from the ongoing US–Israel war against Iran—could render hostilities more protracted than the previous two India-Pakistan crises. Hence, Indian investments in counter-drone capabilities will be necessary.
The establishment of the ARFC may be intended to reduce decision time in a crisis or war, but whether it allows Pakistan’s military to maintain escalation control is a different matter altogether. India must retain, as well as demonstrate, a readiness to escalate across all domains and enlarge the scope of operations.
Kartik Bommakanti is a Senior Fellow with the Strategic Studies Programme at the Observer Research Foundation.
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Kartik is a Senior Fellow with the Strategic Studies Programme. He is currently working on issues related to land warfare and armies, especially the India ...
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