“The PAF brought down IAFs entire kill chain on May 5-10, 2025. Satellite downlinks were scuttled, radars jammed, GPS killed. IAF was fortunate not to lose more than four, yes, four, Rafales”.
That the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) displayed its professional excellence in a unique multi-domain war in May 2025 is by now of global acclaim. While lot has been said about the fast jet aero-planes, missiles, drones and the associated elements of the PAF kill chain, the pivotal role of leadership in forging a disciplined and formidable fighting force capable of delivering a razor-sharp blow has gone somewhat understated. It would therefore make sense to understand how the PAF prepared and conducted its operations by augmenting the demands of leadership at all levels of command.
The core values of the PAF are integrity, excellence and team work. Each denotes an important aspect of the character – the value system or the ethos, the competency in every fine detail, and the phenomenal team building. The PAF builds its ethos as part of its foundational training in such a way that it becomes part of the character of individuals. It builds a process of unlearning experiences that breed ambiguity and hesitancy, and learning the art of focused clarity as a way of life. The men and women of the PAF learn an important lesson early in their careers, that ‘leadership is a team sport’. They discover a practical manifestation of building upon the right stuff to create and maintain happy teams, imbued with the spirit of courage, dedication to the cause and focused performance.
The entire culture when viewed from a military lens, transforms into warrior ethos, which is a set of values and principles that guide the behavior and mindset of those assigned the noble duty to protect. This mindset begins with a dedication towards defending and protecting others, in everything one does in times of peace or war, for example in sports, or pure military aspects or other challenging fields. It embodies a commitment to a higher purpose, through five facets – courage and mental toughness, to face dangers with resolve; honour, by upholding integrity ‘when no one will ever know’; a strong sense of duty and loyalty to fulfil one’s obligations to the maximum of one’s abilities; a robust display of discipline by focusing on long term goals, despite odds, and willingness to put service to the nation above personal desires; and resilience, as the ability to persevere and bounce back.
There is nevertheless, an aspect of military leadership that often get less focus than it deserves – the notion of situational leadership and distinctively, the leadership during war as opposed to peace time. Simply stated, situational leadership demands adapting a leader’s style basing it on the situation and the readiness level of his team. This signifies differing leadership approaches for different sets of the same team. It requires the decision maker to have a strategic vision, complete situational awareness, and the ability to orchestrate different commands to different sets of teams, with complete synergy and simultaneity. During the fog of war, this is challenging. The May 2025 war that was thrust upon Pakistan by India, put the true mettle of leadership to the test. That PAF, as before, met the nation’s expectations, was because each strand of the war had been painstakingly conceived, meticulously practiced and flawlessly gamed in peace time. The age old maxim, ‘if you want peace, prepare for war’, was impeccably enacted. But the May war was different- more on that later. With changing times, some of the notions of leadership are also undergoing transformation. The most profound impact is about the fast pace of technological change, that affects, inter alia the fighter aviation. Like all air forces around the world, PAF is also meticulous about choosing and operationalizing the most suited equipment for its mission objectives and goals. This aside, it puts special emphasis on honing individuals’ human and organizational skills, thereby augmenting the psycho- social abilities for a vibrant human-machine interface.
Fred Rigg’s societal model divides societies in three categories- fused, prismatic and refracted. Fused societies are those where everyone performs every function, for example in the positivist period, before the nation states came into being, a farmer in a village was expected to pick up weapons to defend the village. He would subsequently go back to farming when the threat to the village was mitigated. Prismatic societies stayed in the middle ground, overlapping functions, blending traditional as well as contemporary roles. Refracted societies on the other hand, displayed high level of specialization. It can be argued that while several of the Pakistani management systems at the national level may still lie at fused or prismatic levels, the military and the scientific communities display a high degree of specialization and professionalism.
By its nature as well as practice, the PAF stands at a very high level of specialization, with a highly refracted community. This points at the conditioning that the PAF received over the years, from its leadership, with its vision and foresight. Let us consider how the May war was different from earlier encounters. The fact that it has been described as the largest aerial battle since the Second World War in a vastly transformed technological era – it was far more complex, more intense and marked by breathtaking speeds – each aspect requiring faster decisions, more precision and a higher degree of simultaneity in its operational actions. The synergistic conduct of operations in the air, from the space and the spectrum management of cyber space, all woven into a seamless fabric of air power. The PAF reviewed and altered its approach at all levelstactics, strategy, funding and budgeting, acquisitions, joint and combined operational exposure and realistic training. All these aspects were synergized at the highest levels of PAF leadership.
The May war was thus led by the Air Chief at all levels of planning, including delegation, timeliness, and with a culture of multi-domain operational blanket, where synergy and simultaneity both became the winning cards. Impressed with the PAF’s multi-domain operations, Chinese Air Chief came to Islamabad in acknowledgement of a ‘hallmark of modern air warfare’ and expressed a ‘keen interest in learning from PAF’s ‘battle- proven experience’, terming it ‘a text book example of precision, discipline and courage’.
It is well known by now that the PAF’s multi-domain planning and execution was in six broad realms – the EW force, the Space force, Cyber force, Ground Based Air Defence or GBAD system, an Integrated Air Defence System, and the drone element- all in support of the mainstream fast jet element. What really mattered then was that all elements seamlessly collaborated across all domains, in real time.
Standoff weapons from fast jets, killer drones, missiles, assisted with satellite imageries, cyber strikes crippling the grids and data in a flash of an eye- all happened in a swift action – with precision and enduring discipline. What is often taken for granted, was the decision- making cycle, timed to perfection, as the hall mark of strategic planning and execution.
The planning and timely acquisitions were conceived and brought to fruition years earlier, in particular post- Balakot in February 2019. The painstaking effort to plan a synergistic effect took a lot of time – both at conceptual level as well as the focus on operationalizing it within realistic scenarios, inclusive of combined operations through international multilateral exercises.
The spectrum warfare operational control was exercised at the highest level of command, led, and timed, personally by the Air Chief, who also kept his grip at the same time, on escalation management. The rules of engagement and the chain of command were therefore, clear and unambiguous. In line with what could be termed as the Moltke approach, the whole multi-domain scenario was war gamed to the minutest detail. It would be recalled that Helmuth von Moltke, the Prussian Field Marshal and Chief of Staff, renowned for his contributions to military leadership, was known to be a master strategist, who emphasized upon the importance of detailed planning and managing complex operations.
All wars are resource intensive. The realization that mere acquisitions would not be adequate, the PAF invested time and resources in aerospace industry by setting up a national aerospace science and technology park, thereby providing an opportunity for more private sector investment and involvement in this highly specialized sector. Being cautious of the overall national budgeting constraints, a conscious decision was taken to trim internal expense, aiming for a futuristic, smart and highly enabled force.
The PAF grooms its men and women for a well-rounded personality. The contours start becoming visible at the early stages of the career. In a business involving fighter aviation, time compressed situations and incidents are often a possibility. The shear timeliness of decisions can ease a situation or spill into a catastrophe.
To illustrate this aspect, a real life story is quite telling. A young fighter pilot, positioned as a pilot- instructor in a fast jet squadron, was flying a student in a dual seat aircraft, from the rear seat as an instructor, when he came across a grave emergency suggesting engine trouble in a single seat fighter jet. He punched his fuel drop tanks and proceeded to head back for an emergency landing, with restricted engine performance that was aggravating with time. The safe procedure required a wide, straight-in approach. But he realized that the troubled engine was not likely to give him sufficient time. He had the option to eject out of the crippled aircraft along with his student pilot, but knew this could mean several fatalities since they were flying over a heavily populated urban area. Meticulous as he was, he had on several occasions briefed his students how to improvise a landing pattern when the flight time was extremely limited. He shortened his flight path for landing despite by now minimal engine power, and made a flawless landing while flying from the rear seat. The flight occurrence ended with no damage to the aircraft and no injury to the pilots due to the presence of mind, meticulous practice and timely decision making of this young instructor pilot. One wrong or impulsive move, or simply a hesitant decision, could have been catastrophic. While this was an exercise of leadership in a tactical scenario, it became a prelude to futuristic strategic level decision making. In later years, this young pilot would go on to rise in the air force, and would be destined to lead the PAF from the front, as the Air Chief in May 2025.
Such are the attributes of leadership in the PAF.
