The Command Chain

The Command Chain

As geopolitical tensions mount, the latest an audacious Ukraine drone attack that reportedly took out 40 Russian bombers, ongoing conflicts have become the cradle of battlefield innovation across the globe. The Command Chain brings you in-depth analysis of security and defence centric developments shaping warfare today. 

In this edition we cover, after Operation Sindoor, how a water war may be in the offing between India and Pakistan, how India’s scramjet advances may power its future weaponry, assassination as a tool of war in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and how poor attribution convolutes the problem around vulnerability of submarine cables.  

Military measures in Operation Sindoor

Beyond Operation Sindoor: Is the first water war in the offing
The India-Pakistan relationship has always been defined by war or near war-level conflict ever since the two countries emerged from the Raj in 1947. The low intensity conflict since the 1999 Kargil war was kept smoldering by Pakistan, using hybrid tactics that targeted India’s military and civilians alike. On several occasions this has nearly boiled over into full scale conflict – especially following assaults such as the 26/11 Mumbai terrorist attack that targeted civilians in 2008, the 2016 Uri and 2019 Pulwama attacks that targeted Indian military in Kashmir. The April 22, 2025, that killed 26 tourists in Kashmir’s Pahalgam heightened tensions to the same level.

Indian defence ministry’s special briefings revealed the trends of what is yet the most active phase of hostilities against Pakistani since 1971:

a) India fully expected that its initial strikes against terror infrastructure in Pakistan and POJK would elicit a response from Pakistani military. A challenge to India’s point defence and air defence capabilities was expected by not only manned fighter aircraft and missiles but also unmanned precision strike platforms such as quadcopter drones, Medium Altitude and Long Endurance (MALE) drones, as well as radar homing and other types of loitering munitions in volumes that rival those observed in the 2020 Nagarno-Karabakh conflict as well in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. 

b) India wanted the retaliatory strikes against Pakistani military installations to be proportionate despite having no obligation to hold back after its own military installations were targeted. While India could have destroyed more assets and crippled Pakistan’s strategic military capabilities, escalation management was deemed as important as punitive operations.

c) While the operations between May 7 and May 10, 2025, have been a major flashpoint for the history books, they will unlikely become anything more than a notable skirmish between the two nuclear neighbours.

d) Pakistani inventory of air to air missiles and drones sourced from both China and Turkey served as perhaps the most threat-rich adversarial vectors for the now battle-proven multi layered and informatised Indian air defence umbrella protecting Indian airspace.

A less noted dimension may define future hostilities between New Delhi and Islamabad. GOI’s diplomatic and non-kinetic retaliatory measures against Pakistan kicked in days before its military action. The most important of these was placing the 1960 Indus Water Treaty (IWT) in abeyance. The treaty deals with division of river waters — the eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas, Sutlej) to India, the western rivers (Indus, Jhelum, Chenab) to Pakistan. India is allowed “non-consumptive” use on the western rivers, but has historically underutilised its rights. With the suspension, India has halted data sharing, project notifications, and coordination mechanisms, effectively freezing the institutional framework. While water continues to flow, Pakistan’s ability to forecast and plan downstream usage has been compromised. This will adversely impact its kharif crop in the immediate season and by extension its food security in the medium to long term.

India’s water ministry has accelerated clearances for long-pending hydropower projects in J&K, particularly the 850 MW Ratle project and the 1,856 MW Sawalkot dam. These projects, long opposed by Pakistan, are now strategic necessities for India to ensure its own national security interests. 

This breakdown of water diplomacy is unprecedented. Even during the 1965 and 1971 wars, the Indus treaty endured, hailed globally as a model of apolitical cooperation. Its unraveling now suggests that water may no longer be insulated from the subcontinent’s volatile politics. What began as a limited conflict in retaliation for a terror strike now risks laying the foundation for South Asia’s first pseudo-water war, a precedent that alters strategic planning on both sides.

Slow boiling cauldron

The low intensity military threats to India from Myanmar over the years is seeing an uptick. India’s northeastern frontier with Myanmar has long been characterised by a quiet volatility, defined less by overt confrontation and more by persistent, low-intensity military threats. These originate from a combination of cross-border insurgency, criminal networks, arms trafficking, and more recently, cyber-intrusions. Unlike India’s contested borders with Pakistan or China, the Indo-Myanmar boundary lacks a sharp visibility but presents a grey-zone challenge to India’s internal security.

Insurgent groups in India’s northeast such as the NSCN-K and ULFA have for decades exploited the ungoverned stretches of Myanmar’s Sagaing and Kachin regions. These rear bases offer sanctuary, training grounds, and logistical depth for operations inside Indian territory. Myanmar’s fragmented control over these regions – aggravated by its own decades-long civil war and the 2021 military coup — has created a permissive environment for such groups to flourish. 

New Delhi has historically relied on intermittent surgical strike operations, like in 2015 and 2017, cross-border targeting of militant camps. But the post-coup collapse of central authority in Myanmar has sharply reduced the efficacy of bilateral coordination mechanisms.

This strategic vacuum has enabled external actors to gain indirect influence. Chinese-origin small arms have increasingly found their way into India’s northeast via Myanmar’s black market routes. Intelligence intercepts have indicated an uptick in weapons and narcotics smuggling through Chin and Sagaing regions, with routes feeding into the conflict zones of Manipur and Nagaland. Localised ethnic conflicts – as between Meitei and Kuki groups in Manipur — have been exacerbated by these flows, suggesting that the instability is not merely a domestic insurgency issue but a regionalised conflict ecosystem.

According to an April 2025 report by India Today, during humanitarian relief operations following a 7.7 magnitude earthquake in Myanmar, an IAF C-130J aircraft on aid mission under Operation Brahma experienced GPS spoofing while flying over Myanmar. The attack attempted to mislead the aircraft’s navigational systems, forcing pilots to switch to inertial navigation system (INS) to maintain flight accuracy. Though no harm was reported, implications were strategic. This marked one of the first known attempts at cyber-interference against Indian military platforms during peacetime relief operations. The source of spoofing remains unknown, but the incident underscores the risk of cyber tools being deployed in contested or loosely governed airspaces—either by rogue actors or state-aligned proxies seeking to test India’s digital defences.

Security dynamics in this border region has shifted. India has fast-tracked road-building and outpost upgrades under the Act East framework, with paramilitary force Assam Rifles assuming an increasingly assertive posture in sensitive zones like Kamjong and Moreh. However, conventional force projection is limited by both terrain and trans-border ethnic kinships — Nagaland, Manipur, and Mizoram share cultural and familial links with groups across the border. This creates intelligence blind spots and complicates rules of engagement.

The Indo-Myanmar frontier exemplifies a new era of conflict. Insurgency, organised crime, external manipulation, and cyber threats converge in this low-visibility theatre. Absence of high-intensity war does not imply stability. It masks slow attrition of control, where strategic space is eroded by actors operating just below the threshold of open conflict.

Scramjet to hypersonic weaponry

Implications of India’s advances in hypersonic propulsion are hard to ignore. In April 2025, DRDO’s Hyderabad-based PSU, Defence Research and Development Laboratory (DRDL), conducted a long-duration ground test of an actively cooled scramjet combustor. Clocking over 1,000 seconds of sustained operation, the test marked a critical waypoint in India’s ongoing efforts to field next-generation missile systems capable of operating at speeds beyond Mach 5.

Scramjet — short for supersonic combustion ramjet is not a new concept in propulsion technology with the base technology going as far back as the 1980s in its modern form. However, achieving stable combustion under hypersonic conditions remains one of the most demanding frontiers in aerospace engineering even in 2025. 

A scramjet engine operates without moving parts, relying instead on the kinetic energy of incoming air at supersonic speeds to compress it before combustion. While elegant in principle, in practice the system faces punishing thermal and pressure conditions that challenge material integrity and flight stability. DRDL’s latest test demonstrated progress on both fronts, particularly in managing the extreme heat load through active cooling which is a precondition for transitioning from lab validation to sustained flight operations under what are likely to be combat use conditions.

This development slots into the broader Hypersonic Technology Demonstrator Vehicle (HSTDV) programme — India’s flagship initiative aimed at mastering air-breathing hypersonic cruise missile flight. The HSTDV platform’s aerodynamic viability proven, its validated capabilities now include propulsion endurance . Taken together, these steps reflect a gradual but focused attempt to close the hypersonic gap with near peer military powers like the US, Russia, and China.

Strategically, the engine’s trajectory points toward a possible integration into the BrahMos-II, an Indo-Russian co-development effort intended to yield a Mach 8-class hypersonic cruise missile with a range of around 1,500km. The first iteration of the Brahmos has already been battle tested during Op Sindoor between May 7 and 10, 2025, by the Indian armed forces in strikes against targets inside Pakistan and POJK. It’ll be prudent for defence policy makers to push the second iteration of the missile to derive some of its propulsion hardware in at least one variant from India’s own HSTDV programme.

Assassinations as tactic 
State sponsored targeted killings have emerged as a calculated and recurring element in the Russia-Ukraine conflict since the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the start of hostilities in Donbass. Assassinations have served both strategic and symbolic functions. Battlefield commanders have been neutralised, sowing fear among collaborators, and disrupting command chains. While not new in modern warfare, the use of assassination in this conflict mirrors similar patterns seen in past conflicts that involved Russian adversaries in NATO, both together and separately in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Northern Ireland.

In the early years of the Donbass conflict, a string of assassinations took out high-profile separatist leaders. Between 2016 and 2017, figures like Arsen “Motorola” Pavlov and Mikhail “Givi” Tolstykh both commanders of rag-tag militias backed by covert Russian support of the then self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic were likely killed in bombings attributed to Ukrainian special operations or internal factional purges. Pavlov was killed by an IED planted in an elevator, while Tolstykh died after a thermobaric rocket launcher was fired into his office. 

Though at the time Ukraine officially denied involvement, the precision and timing of these attacks aligned with Kyiv’s interests in degrading separatist leadership morale and capabilities without overt escalation.

These killings had dual effects. They disrupted the operational stability of separatist militias and sowed distrust among their ranks. Russia, for its part, blamed Ukrainian sabotage units, while simultaneously tightening its control over separatist forces, often replacing eliminated field commanders with figures more closely tied to Russian intelligence community including military intelligence service GRU.

On the Ukrainian side, multiple assassinations and attempted assassinations have targeted military officers, intelligence personnel, and politicians. In July 2020, the then Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov narrowly survived an assassination attempt in Kyiv. Explosives planted under his car failed to kill him. 

The attackers were later linked to pro-Russian networks operating inside Ukraine. Separately, high-profile figures aligned with Ukraine in occupied territories, such as pro-Kyiv mayors and civil administrators have been abducted or assassinated in both Donetsk and Luhansk during and after the full-scale invasion of 2022.

Ukrainian special forces and intelligence reportedly have officially expanded, engaged in assassination operations targeting collaborators, Russian-installed officials, and occupation military leaders in the Russian-annexed Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Luhansk regions. 

Such tactics mirror the targeted killings used by Western forces against Taliban commanders in Afghanistan and Al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq, where special operations undertaken by coalition forces were often about eliminating high value targets, often outsourced to intelligence services, and strategically calibrated to decapitate terrorist leadership.

However unlike in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the US and its allies had technological superiority and operated in asymmetrical environments mostly in counter-insurgency mode – the Russia-Ukraine war in the beginning had represented a more conventional formation against formation kind of attrition warfare.

But Ukraine’s use of drones – especially the latest one — where reportedly Ukraine-made drones moved 3,000km inside Russian territory to destroy at least 40 Russian bombers, an estimated loss of over $7bn, and loss of face for Putin, is clearly taking the war to a different level, where technological innovations could well alter warfare.

Check these out:

1. The French nuclear deterrent in a changing strategic environment – Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique

2. Five Lessons for the Current Iran Nuclear Talks – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 

3. Quad Concludes Simulation Exercise to Advance Indo-Pacific Logistics Network – United States Department of State

4. Targeted Killing in Modern Warfare – Canberra Law Review

5. Space Threat Fact Sheet – US Space Force

6. US Space Force warns Chinese satellites are ‘dogfighting’ in space – The Register

7. Russia’s New Space Weapon – CSIS

Thank you for reading The Command Chain. Stay tuned for our next edition.