India, Pakistan, Diplomacy and War
Last week, clashes between Pakistan and India after a militant group – allegedly supported by Pakistan – attacked a India -controlled cashmira zone. This kind of situations is common, especially among historical rivals that share a border, but the nature of this particular conflict illustrates recent changes in the way diplomacy and the Armed Forces operate.
The “normal” response to an Indian massacre for a force from Pakistan would have resulted in the concentration of troops on both sides of the border, followed by small clashes carried out by small infantry units. Light artillery could have been added to the mixture, and it is possible that more forces had been highlighted at some distance behind the border, whose dimension would transmit the potential threat.
Such a process is an essential dimension of diplomacy. A border confrontation suggests the possibility of a greater attack if diplomacy fails. It is an instrument that diplomats use to convince the other side that their country has not been intimidated and that the inability to resolve the issue diplomatically can lead to war. The severity of the border conflict and the number of soldiers sent to the rear allow us to infer whether it is a serious threat or an empty gesture. It is a ritual that sometimes leads to a solution, sometimes leads to war, sometimes marginalizing the underlying issue, is sometimes recurring and sometimes is just a technique of intimidation. Regardless of the frequency with which it occurs, it is not so much a military threat and a diplomatic signal.
The meeting between India and Pakistan was not a border confrontation, but it served the same goal. It was an intrusion of aircraft in the airspace of another country. Thus, diplomatic military signs were issued by drones aimed at military targets far beyond the border and nearby bases. Both parties issued diplomatic signs; They only did so in a radically new way. They ignored the border to issue the signal and started what was once a sign of total war.
Until recently, the border represented in conventional war the distinction between sovereignty and violation of sovereignty – that is, the end of diplomacy and the beginning of war. The diplomatic messages were delivered on both sides, but not on the border. Last week’s episode, therefore, it is not an idiosyncratic event; It is a deep evolution of military gestures as part of diplomacy, which reflects a change in the nature of war and the relative irrelevance of borders. The key element is in the development of drones. These are the descendants of Intercontinental Ballistic missiles (ICBM). ICBM is a strategic weapon. The drone is a small explosive missile, but it is explosive itself, a cross between an artillery projectile and an ICBM – not necessarily ballistic, but potentially maneuverable in flight. Long -range ICBMs were not a proper warning. Drones, with their less destructive potential and more limited impact, were.
Equally important, just as ICBMs altered the nature of the strategic war, drones, together with sensor satellites, altered the nature of Tactical War. This change has been fully visible in Ukraine. Drones have not been used only as horror weapons pointed to civil goods, as with ICBMs. They have also been used to attack and defeat small and large elements of conventional war: troops, tanks, fortifications, communications, logistics centers and any other element of war.
In one sense, they function as long -range artillery projectiles. In another, they function as their own right aircraft, increasingly capable of maneuvering and escaping the anti-drug missiles. And in another sense, they remodele the conventional war. In Ukraine, Russian offensive operations brought together troops, armored and artillery for a war on a model comparable to World War II. The US used satellites with multispectral sensors that could “see” and detect the presence of these troops from the heat of the body, metal and several other spectra. What was a Terra-Terra War became the aerial power, which has now become the selection of targets by terrestrial drones. Despite the impact this had on the war, it has fundamentally changed how countries can make diplomatic threats. It also made the borders more symbolic than sacrosante.
The most dramatic change – which is not especially new – is the spatial target of agile missiles designed to survive enough time to achieve its goal. This means that the use of land forces has to be rethought and that conventional war – the basis of both national security and aggression – will largely pass to air power. If each drone serves as an airplane and bomb at the same time, used once and lying outside, survival ammunition must emerge that carry submunitions also pointed out from the low orbit of the earth.
Thus, following the Ukraine War, the India-Pakistan episode indicates that border confrontations as gestures are to some extent obsolete, that advances in drones as gestures are much more dangerous than border clashes and tactical war changed deeply.
Analyst, geopolitical and strategic of international affairs. Chairman
of Geopolitical Futures
© 2025 Geopolitical Futures®. Republished with permission. Translation: Gonçalo Nabeiro
