India's top air force officer has said that Operation Sindoor demonstrated, in the clearest possible terms, that distance and geography no longer shield a target from Indian air power. In an exclusive interview published on Sunday, Chief of Air Staff Air Chief Marshal A P Singh said the operation showed that no place was beyond the reach of the Indian Air Force, a message he presented as both a summary of what was achieved and a warning to any future adversary.
Singh, who oversaw the operation, described a calibrated campaign across the western front that stretched about 1,200 kilometres in breadth and extended some 200 kilometres in depth. The operation lasted four days, he said, and was conducted with a discipline and precision that, in his assessment, set it apart from earlier cross-border actions.
According to Singh, the scale of the air campaign, combined with the care taken in choosing and striking targets, underlined how far the Indian Air Force has travelled in its ability to plan, execute and sustain a complex operation under pressure.
The operation was launched in response to the terror attack at Pahalgam, and it involved precision strikes against terror infrastructure in Pakistan and in Pakistan-occupied territories in May 2025. It has been described as India's most daring cross-border military action since the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, a comparison that places it in a distinct historical category.
Singh's remarks, however, focused less on that comparison and more on what the operation revealed about the present state of Indian air power and what it must become next.
Central to his account was the performance of indigenously developed weapons. Singh said these systems performed exceptionally during the operation, delivering what he called crippling blows deep inside enemy territory. The point was not simply that Indian-made weapons were used, he suggested, but that they proved themselves in the most demanding conditions possible, against defended targets and in a live operational environment.
For an air force that has placed growing emphasis on self-reliance, that assessment carries weight well beyond a single campaign, because it speaks to the maturity of India's domestic defence industry and to the confidence commanders can now place in it.
Equally important, in Singh's telling, was what did not happen. He said the Indian Air Force honoured its commitment to zero collateral damage, a claim that goes to the heart of how the operation was planned. Precision, in this account, was not an afterthought or a public relations consideration.
It was built into target selection, weapon choice and timing, so that strikes hit their intended objectives without causing unintended harm. That discipline, Singh implied, is what separates a calibrated military response from indiscriminate force, and it is what allows a state to act decisively while retaining legitimacy in the eyes of the wider world.
The operation also tested India's air defences in a way that few peacetime exercises could. Singh said an indigenous networked air defence system countered large numbers of drones and stand-off weapons launched by the Pakistani military. The significance of that, he argued, lies in the word networked.
Rather than relying on isolated batteries or individual platforms, the system worked as an integrated whole, sharing information, tracking threats and responding across a wide area. The ability to absorb and defeat a large volume of incoming weapons, while simultaneously conducting offensive strikes, is one of the clearest measures of a modern air force, and Singh presented it as evidence that India's defensive architecture is keeping pace with the evolving threat.
For Singh, the broader lesson of Operation Sindoor was the validation of what he called a capability-centric approach. Under this approach, aircraft, sensors, weapons and networks are not treated as separate assets but are integrated so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual parts. A fighter aircraft is only as effective as the sensors that guide it, the weapons it carries and the networks that connect it to commanders and to other platforms.
When those elements work together, Singh argued, the result is a force that can act with greater speed, precision and adaptability than any of its components could manage alone.
That integration, he said, has changed the role of air power itself. Singh described air power as a primary responder and as a strategic deterrent, a force that can be brought to bear quickly when a crisis erupts and that shapes the calculations of potential adversaries long before any shots are fired. Speed matters because crises can escalate in hours rather than days.
Precision matters because modern warfare is judged as much by what is avoided as by what is destroyed. Integration matters because no single service, platform or domain can win a conflict on its own. Adaptability matters because the enemy, the technology and the battlefield are all changing at a pace that punishes rigid thinking.
Singh was, however, careful to guard against complacency. A successful operation, he suggested, is not a reason to rest but a reason to ask harder questions about what comes next.
Among the priorities he identified were building greater combat mass, improving intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, strengthening electronic warfare capabilities, developing better counter-drone systems, making networks more resilient, and introducing artificial intelligence-enabled decision support.
Each of these, he implied, addresses a specific lesson from recent experience: that future conflicts may be larger, faster, more congested in the electromagnetic spectrum, and more dependent on the rapid processing of vast amounts of information than anything the force has faced before.
Sustaining high-intensity operations was another theme. Singh pointed to logistics, maintenance, infrastructure and indigenous production as the foundations that allow an air force to keep flying, fighting and adapting over days and weeks rather than hours. A spectacular first strike counts for little if aircraft cannot be turned around, weapons cannot be replenished and networks cannot be repaired under pressure.
The emphasis on indigenous production, in particular, links operational readiness to national industrial capacity, reducing dependence on external suppliers at precisely the moments when supply chains are most vulnerable.
The Air Chief also stressed joint multi-domain integration, the idea that modern warfare must be fought across air, land, maritime, space, cyber and electromagnetic domains simultaneously. Singh said a joint framework under the Chief of Defence Staff and the service chiefs now allows assets to be reallocated rapidly between services and domains as a situation develops.
That flexibility, he argued, is essential when a threat can move from the air to the sea, from cyberspace to the electromagnetic spectrum, in a matter of minutes. No service can afford to plan in isolation, and no commander can afford to wait for a slow, sequential decision-making process when the battlefield demands an immediate, coordinated response.
Looking further ahead, Singh placed the future of the Indian Air Force within the national vision of Viksit Bharat 2047, the ambition of a developed India by the centenary of independence. In that long-term view, air power is not merely a military instrument but a pillar of national strength, technological progress and strategic autonomy.
The development of indigenous weapons, networks and production capacity that Singh praised in Operation Sindoor is, in this framing, part of a much larger national project, one in which military capability and economic and technological development reinforce each other.
In his broader remarks, Singh also sounded a note of caution about organisational reform, warning against phased theatreisation based on rigid or foreign models. The remark, reported in his wider comments on the future structure of the armed forces, suggests that while he supports jointness and integration, he believes any restructuring must be shaped by India's own strategic circumstances rather than imported wholesale from elsewhere.
It was a brief but pointed intervention in a long-running debate about how best to organise India's military commands for the conflicts of the future.
Taken together, Singh's interview offers both a retrospective and a programme. The retrospective is of an operation that, in his account, proved Indian air power could reach deep, strike precisely, defend effectively and sustain itself under pressure. The programme is for a force that is larger, better connected, more intelligent in its use of information, more resilient in its networks and more deeply rooted in indigenous capability.
The message to potential adversaries is unmistakable: no target is beyond reach. The message to his own service is more demanding still: that reach must be maintained, extended and never taken for granted.
(Reporting based on The Times of India, The New Indian Express and The Economic Times.)