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There’s a good chance you would see significant ground combat in Vietnam, Korea, or any of the island nations of Southeast Asia, plus your regular island-hopping to secure supply lines and airfields. Probably would be a lot of ground fighting with India too, but I imagine the Indians could mostly handle that themselves.
The indian military has not acquitted itself well recently.
Is there any good understanding of how the recent dust-up with Pakistan went?
The sort of muddy impression that I have right now is that Pakistan gave India a bloody nose and India turned around and drop-kicked Pakistan across the ring. But finding objective Western documentation of the conflict seems difficult.
I am genuinely curious what gave you the 'drop-kicked Pakistan across the ring' impression. Not even in the 'I think you're wrong but am curious how you got there' sense, but just that I haven't really heard that perspective outside of the red flag propoganda-dripped areas, and I know that's not what you base your opinion on.
I think part of it is the lack of strategic depth, and the nature of the bloody nose. Pakistan gave back specifically in the air domain and with Chinese systems that are most relevant to the Pacific. By contrast, most other things- even if a total Indian win- wouldn't be that applicable abroad, even as the Indians were never going to be able to make that much progress without hitting the nuclear red lines.
So the war ended shortly regardless, and then the Western interest was on one area in particular.
There was a report by the Swiss Centre for Military History and Perspective Studies that concluded that India came out on top, which is the closest thing I've seen to a thorough write-up by a Western source, and is probably be where I got my impression, at least in part. (Interestingly, as I recall, the Indian chest-thumping accounts seem to focus on the later Indian actions, which suggests strongly to me that Pakistan treated them pretty roughly at first and would corroborate CHPM's account.)
However, I'm not sure if CHPM's account is actually all that great – it's been a while since I looked at it (sorry!) but I think I recall feeling like it was not the final word on the matter – maybe it relied too much on biased sources or guessing for my taste, I'm not sure.
If you've got a good write-up or source, I'd be very interested in reading it.
War On The Rocks had a goodish writeup on the overall conflict timeline- this one iirc- last year. It may not be the detail / specificity you're looking for, but if I had to review Operation Sindoor I'd probably start there first for a refresher.
RUSI had a lessons learned report, mostly on how the air operations may fit into future Pakistan-India tit-for-tats, which you can see here.
Carnegie had their own military lessons learned here.
Thank you! I've liked RUSI's stuff on Ukraine that I've reviewed, I'll check these out.
Not sure if the Carnegie links are different, but it looks like the second one is missing.
No second Carnegie link, I'm afraid, just bad phrasing.
Hope the articles are at least interesting!
I'm sure they will be, thanks!
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