Operation Sindoor, in May 2025, will be remembered in South Asian military history not only as the turning point at which India moved away from the doctrine of “strategic restraint” toward proactive punishment and escalation dominance, but also as a watershed moment in the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous systems into the modern battlefield between nuclear-armed powers.
While global attention focused on New Delhi’s ability to manoeuvre below Pakistan’s nuclear threshold, the real campaign unfolded in the cognitive and algorithmic domains. The crisis demonstrated, in practice, that advanced technologies, particularly the integration of AI into command-and-control architectures, have become central to strategic superiority and deterrence.
One year after India and Pakistan exchanged airstrikes over four days, India's Press Information Bureau is still publishing rebuttals of fabricated videos about the conflict.
Pakistani propaganda accounts are still generating deepfakes designed to persuade global audiences that Operation Sindoor achieved nothing, and that the Indian military was humiliated.
While the ceasefire was signed in May 2025, the disinformation is still running in April 2026. That gap is the defining feature of what war has become.
Two armies, two kinds of AI
Many would consider Operation Sindoor to be the first large-scale South Asian conflict in which AI played a central and openly declared role on both sides.
India used AI to acquire faster and more accurate information than had been previously possible. More than 23 indigenous applications gave battlefield commanders a real-time common operational picture.
The Sanjay Battlefield Surveillance System fused sensor data at the edge of the battlefield, eliminating reliance on network connectivity.
The Electronic Intelligence Collation and Analysis System, trained on 26 years of Pakistani military data, identified enemy positions and radar units with a claimed accuracy of almost 95 percent.
India chose to speak about the excessive AI usage during the operation openly, positioning itself as a sovereign AI power before the next conflict demands that legitimacy.
Shifting power dynamics
While AI use on the battlefield is not new, this overt AI framing and positioning, signaling the Indian military's supremacy over its enemy, is an interesting shift in global power dynamics.
On the other hand, Pakistan seemed to use AI to create a different reality and refrained from overt AI declarations. The deepfake of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, edited to show him conceding defeat, was convincing enough to reach millions before it was debunked. Footage from the 2020 Beirut explosion was circulated as an Indian airstrike. Video game simulations were shared as evidence of Pakistani air victories.
A growing body of online evidence illustrates the cybernetic capabilities of AI, positioning it as a central element within contemporary cyber warfare doctrines.
AI makes kinetic warfare more precise, which is genuinely valuable. It also makes the informational dimension of wars almost costless to prosecute. In fact, an alleged deepfake army needs no soldiers, no supply lines, no medical units, and no human rest. It does not demobilize at the ceasefire. It can continue at any time point.
Speed and volume
India's Press Information Bureau (PIB) Fact Check unit is relatively active. And yet, it cannot match the speed and volume of what it faces. Modern democracies committed to press freedom and platform openness must play reactive debunking and fact-checking against an adversary that holds the scale and the algorithmic advantage. This is not a technical problem requiring a core technical solution. As we argue, this is a core governance problem that requires a holistic doctrine of the hybrid battlefield as rigorous as any theory of the kinetic one.
The bigger question is whether the next generation of AI-enabled conflicts will be governed by frameworks capable of addressing both dimensions of the battlefield: kinetic and cybernetic at once.
While Operation Sindoor lasted four days, the battle for what it meant has lasted a year, and shows no sign of ending: Two theaters, operating simultaneously, governed by entirely different rules, serving entirely different strategic rationales. In one, AI enables precision. In the other, it enables online manipulation. The same technical progress makes both possible in modern hybrid warfare.
For India and Israel alike, the lesson of Operation Sindoor extends beyond South Asia. Both states operate in security environments shaped by terrorism, missile threats, hostile information campaigns, and the need to use force under intense international scrutiny.
The convergence between kinetic precision and informational manipulation creates a new agenda for India-Israel cooperation, not only in defence production, drones, missiles, and surveillance systems, but in AI-enabled command and control, crisis communication, deepfake detection, and democratic resilience.
In this sense, the future of the India-Israel strategic partnership may depend less on the platforms they trade and more on the architectures they build together: architectures capable of preserving operational superiority, political legitimacy, and human judgment in the algorithmic battlefield.