Geostrategic Media Political Commentary, Analysis, Security, Defense
Ankit Panda
Thinking through new information about the May 2025 India-Pakistan clash.
For this issue, I wanted to turn my attention back to the May 2025 crisis between India and Pakistan.
As a quick recap, the two countries—the great entrepreneurs of the nuclear age on conventional war under the nuclear shadow—engaged in an intense 88-hour skirmish. The skirmish—call it a “war” if you must—represented the most intense multi-modal war-fighting between two nuclear-armed states in history. Both countries introduced new technologies to the battlefield and, notably, the use of airpower featured prominently—with both crewed and uncrewed aircraft.² Chris Clary’s play-by-play for the Stimson Centerremains the authoritative account so far; Chris’ efforts to separate the wheat from the chaff amid a misinformation-laden South Asian media environment is particularly valuable.
The May 2025 crisis remains remarkably blurry—especially toward the last day or so of events. One of the remaining controversies concerns what did or did not happen at Kirana Hills, near Sarghoda (where the Pakistan Air Force maintains a base that supported its operations during the skirmish). As Chris wrote last May:
The most provocative rumor purported that India hit an alleged nuclear storage facility in Kirana Hills near Sarghoda as part of a broader effort to signal conventional counterforce capabilities. The evidence for this rumor is minimal, derived from social media falsehoods regarding radiation leaks combined with ambiguous video imagery of unknown provenance of a strike in a hilly region. (At least one of the alleged videos in circulation is from another conflict.) The Indian Air Force has denied it conducted such a strike. Sometimes this rumor is also paired with the fact that Nur Khan airbase, which was indeed struck, shares the Chaklala military cantonment with Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division, which has responsibility for nuclear planning. Yet Strategic Plans Division offices are over a kilometer away.
Note: The original social media video showing an apparent aerial impact and detonation at Kirana Hills—the source of much open-source inquisition—can be seen here.
Funnily enough, his next sentence cites me asking a question that I posed to Chris on a podcast discussion we did about the crisis shortly afterward. The question I asked was whether India, at any point, meant to “knock on the nuclear door” in Pakistan. My own answer to that question is no—not deliberately. But Kirana Hills has gotten more interesting today—and it seems maybe India did inadvertently knock on the nuclear door. But there’s a lot still murky here.
India’s former Chief of Defence Staff, General Anil Chauhan, provided what I think is a fairly remarkable bit of insight into what happened at Kirana Hills last year. NDTV reports:
An Indian loitering munition — a drone — did indeed strike Pakistan’s Kirana Hills, a nuclear hub of the Pakistani armed forces duringOperation Sindoor last year, though the strike was not deliberate.
Ending the mystery over what happened at Kirana Hills, the former Chief of Defence Staff, General Anil Chauhan, clarified that an Indian loitering munition — likely an Israeli-designed Harop drone — was searching for radars to strike but had run short on fuel in the vicinity of Kirana Hills.
“Bharti had rightly clarified that we did not target Kirana Hills,” said General Chauhan who was speaking at the Vivekananda Centre in New Delhi. ‘Bharti’ was Air Marshal AK Bharti (retired), the IAF’s Director General of Air Operations during Operation Sindoor.
“I can give an explanation,” said General Chauhan. “Before those strikes, we had sent a lot of loiter ammunitions at Sargodha and Kirana Hills, which is 10 km north of Sargodha. So the loiter ammunition was looking for radars which were in and around Sargodha and its got a lifetime. It will loiter for about two hours and if it doesn’t find a target, it will come and hit somewhere. It must have come and hit one of those hills.’‘
Now, much of this is odd, but also remarkable.
Let’s get to the remarkable first.
If these events are accurate as reported, it marks probably the clearest evidence that there was real opportunity for possible inadvertent escalation here. Inadvertent escalation, definitionally, requires that the effects of one’s military operations are considerably greater in scope and seriousness than intended. In this case, India’s intent to suppress radars at an airbase supporting conventional operations inadvertently resulted in an apparent “hit” on part of Kirana Hills. The NDTV report does leave confusion about whether Kirana Hills was intentionally targeted; Chauhan says it was “rightly clarified” that the site wasn’t targeted, but also says “we had sent a lot of loiter ammunitions at Sargodha and Kirana Hills” (emphasis added). Which is it?
Now, as I’ll get to imminently, there’s a lot that doesn’t make sense here, but I don’t see why Chauhan would have an incentive to misrepresent³ what happened here. After all, this makes India appear more risk-acceptant and sloppy and notionally feeds into Pakistan’s preferred narrative that these types of skirmishes are just a hop and a skip from nuclear conflict if allowed to persist.
Now, the odd.
The geography concerned, as always, matters. PAF Mushaf is about 10 kilometers away from Kirana Hills. An IAI Harop, based on unclassified sources, is thought to exhibit around 1,000 km in range and maintain a flight altitude of up to 4,600 meters (with a 200 km communication range). Depending on how this strike was cued and controlled, it’s extremely odd that a loitering munition would crash into a well-known, militarily sensitive site away from the air base where its radar suppression targeting apparently failed.
Did the Indians consider this in deciding to employ this munition? Possibly. Discourse around the Nur Khan Air Base strike (near, but not that near, a Pakistani Strategic Plans Division facility) emphasized the role of precision, pre-war intelligence, and the avoidance of any dynamic targeting. It’s entirely possible that when it came to Sarghoda, there was an opportunity to employ the Harop that seemed too good to pass up—and perhaps this allowed for the preservation of other munitions that might serve better ends against fixed targets. (By the end of the 88 hours, India had spent down quite a few relatively exquisite strike packages and, most notably, lost multiple crewed Rafales.)
I don’t know enough about how Harops handle terminal disposal, or “clobber,” scenarios, but one would expect any sufficiently advanced loitering munition (or, indeed, cruise missile) to have some heuristic to “safely” clobber. (In fact, my first thought on seeing the Kirana Hills video was the possibility of a cruise missile clobbering.) Harop is not autonomous and operates with a human-in-the-loop. It’s plausible, if communication links were lost, that the ditching on Kirana Hills was an attempt to deliberately avoid striking a “flat land” target (which could implicate civilians or more escalatory military targets). This further raises the question of why, per the video, there appears to be a detonation, though. Safety fuzing should prevent that.
A final thought on this is whether India knew that the ditch over Kirana Hills had happened contemporaneously and whether that prompted an attempt to offer a clarification to Pakistan via the Director-General Military Operations hotline that … they weren’t about to go all-in on a counterforce campaign. This is left unclarified in Chauhan’s remarks and the broader record.
As is probably clear by this point, this isn’t the end of the apparent mystery at Kirana Hills from May 2025. But Chauhan’s addition fits into something that I told the Times of India last year, in an interview shortly after the crisis:
The details of this crisis are still rather muddled and our true sense of the dangers, as with previous crises, including the famous Cuban Missile Crisis, will likely emerge over years, and possibly decades…
One year on, we’re learning more.
