Quotes
These missile launch rails are attached to the aircraft, and it being on the ground, along with the large fire in the background indicates a crash likely occurred,
Ball said
There’s a lot of political weight being put behind the planes because neither side has yet crossed a threshold of full-scale conventional warfare,
said Sameer Lalwani, a fellow at the D.C.-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary AssessmentsThe Indian government during a crisis is typically very guarded about operational details,
he saidThese claims are entirely unfounded, politically motivated, and part of a reckless propaganda campaign aimed at maligning Pakistan."
However, the government of Pakistan categorically rejected the baseless and irresponsible allegations propagated by the Indian media, saying
India attacks Pakistani Capital Islamabad!”
The channel DNA, for example, posted a bombastic update on its official X account proclaimingPakistan has made very clear that it will use nuclear weapons to prevent a full-scale Indian invasion of its territory, and the potential for uncontrollable escalation is part of what makes every crisis between India and Pakistan particularly dangerous."
Liang said
Western intelligence in particular will be focused on the readiness and the outloading of nuclear stocks inside both Pakistan and India and monitoring what’s happening to them very closely indeed.”
Colonel Philip Ingram, a former British Army commander, previously told The Sun
India has killed the brutal terrorist assassin Abdul Rauf Azhar, whose psychopathic beheading of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 we all remember,
said former US special envoy Zalmay KhalilzadThis isn’t just a bilateral clash anymore; it’s a glimpse of how Chinese defense exports are reshaping regional deterrence,
said Craig Singleton of the US-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies
I don’t need to remind the audience where bin Laden was found.”
Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said
I promise that we will take revenge for every drop of blood of these victims.”
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has vowed revenge, sayingThe US Secretary of State, flying into India and Pakistan, would carry out shuttle diplomacy between the two."
He saidIt is a very modern aircraft in the Indian arsenal and one of the top line fighter aircraft in the world. India's acquisition of it was a key point of the modernization of the Indian Air Force,
Walter Ladwig, Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the UK's leading defense and security think tank, told Newsweek
I think that this brings us back to a type of aerial combat that we haven't seen in a long time because fighter jets and things like that took a second backseat. Now we're back to this is two states in a clash with their mainline weapons. It reminds us, you know, this is what state on state war looks like, right?"
Walter Ladwig, Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), told NewsweekThat's close by kind of aircraft standards. In an ideal sense, you know, you still might be looking to be destroying your target at multiple hundreds of miles,
Ladwig saidAir warfare communities in China, the U.S. and a number of European countries will be extremely interested to try and get as much ground truth as they can on tactics, techniques, procedures, what kit was used, what worked and what didn't."
Douglas Barrie, senior fellow for military aerospace at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told ReutersEven 20 years ago, during the First Gulf War, better sensors, weapons, and networks had already made close-range air combat less common and fighter agility less important,
former U.S. Air Force officer and defense analyst John Stillion wrote in a 2015 report for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA).It's interesting that Pakistan is saying it is using Chinese jets that it has imported from China to shoot down Indian aircraft,
said Lisa Curtis, director of the Indo-Pacific security program at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank
This information warfare is compounded by both sides’ commitment to save face,
it saidThe presence of Chinese military advisers and other personnel in Pakistan is well-known given how Pakistan's Ministry of Defence has been importing some of its most advanced military hardware from China, so we can be certain the PLA would be able to access relevant data,
said James Char, a Chinese security scholar at Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies