On 10 May 2025, Pakistan launched Operation Bunyan un Marsoos in response to India’s Operation Sindoor. What followed was not a conventional retaliatory strike. It was a coordinated, multi-domain military campaign that fused missile systems, drone swarms, electronic warfare and offensive cyber operations into a single integrated operational tempo. The operation lasted hours. Its doctrinal lessons will be studied considerably longer.

The name derives from Surah As-Saff 61:4 of the Quran, meaning a wall cemented with molten lead, a structure that does not yield. It was an accurate description of both the operation’s philosophy and its execution. According to statements by Pakistan’s DG ISPR and analyses by the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies, Operation Bunyan un Marsoos represented the first major combat demonstration of Pakistan’s evolved multi-domain operations doctrine, integrating kinetic and non-kinetic capabilities across all service branches under a unified command structure in real time.

Military doctrine has moved decisively away from the platform-centric model of previous decades, in which the superiority of a single weapons system determined battlefield outcomes. The emerging framework, refined through observations of conflicts in Ukraine, Syria and the South China Sea, holds that modern warfare is decided by the speed and coherence with which effects across multiple domains are fused into a single operational tempo. A missile strike coordinated with simultaneous radar jamming, drone engagement and cyber disruption produces effects that no single platform, however advanced, can replicate independently. Operation Bunyan un Marsoos was Pakistan’s demonstration that it has operationalised this framework.

Indian authorities maintain that Operation Sindoor, conducted using Rafale jets equipped with SCALP-EG cruise missiles and AASM HAMMER precision-guided munitions, was a focused and non-escalatory counter-terrorism action, and that damage from Pakistan’s retaliatory strikes was limited and effectively contained through air defense systems. That position requires engagement with the operational record.

Pakistan deployed Fatah-1 and Fatah-2 precision-guided ballistic missiles against hardened military targets, marking their first combat use. JF-17 Block 3 and J-10C fighters equipped with PL-15 beyond-visual-range missiles operated in the air domain. Armed drone swarms and loitering munitions extended operational reach beyond what conventional strike aircraft could access without triggering broader escalation thresholds. Electronic warfare assets jammed Indian radar installations and early warning systems, degrading the situational awareness on which air defense coordination depends. Simultaneously, offensive cyber operations targeted command systems and digital infrastructure. Pakistan claimed significant disruption to power grid supply in affected areas, though independent verification of the full extent remains contested given the information environment typical of active conflict.

What separated Operation Bunyan un Marsoos from a conventional retaliatory strike was not the individual capability of any platform but the network-centric architecture connecting them. Real-time data sharing across army, air force, navy and cyber command compressed decision cycles and enabled synchronized effects at multiple target sets simultaneously. This sensor-to-shooter loop, the ability to move from detection to engagement across domains faster than an adversary can respond, is the defining characteristic of mature multi-domain operations doctrine.

India acknowledged limited damage to four airbases, Udhampur, Pathankot, Adampur and Bhuj, and confirmed one soldier killed at Udhampur. The Stimson Center’s post-crisis report “Four Days in May” noted that both sides suffered damage and that the operation exposed gaps in air defense resilience and electronic warfare preparedness that carry significant implications for future force planning. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace observed that the confrontation demonstrated the growing capacity of both states to impose meaningful costs through integrated conventional strikes while managing escalation below the nuclear threshold.

The operational lesson of Bunyan un Marsoos is precise. Technological investment in isolated platforms, however advanced, does not produce the battlefield coherence that integrated multi-domain doctrine achieves. The fusion of Fatah ballistic missiles with drone swarms, electronic warfare and cyber operations created compounding effects that no single domain could have generated independently. Pakistan’s DG ISPR described the operation as a milestone in what analysts have termed the new art of war, combining restraint with resolve, delivering calibrated effects without crossing into full-scale conflict.

For military strategists and defence planners across the region, the four days of May 2025 produced a body of operational evidence that cannot be dismissed. The age of single-domain warfare in South Asia is over. The state that integrates fastest, coordinates most coherently and compresses its decision cycles most effectively will define the terms of any future limited conventional conflict. Operation Bunyan un Marsoos established, with combat-verified evidence, where Pakistan now stands in that competition.

The author is a researcher at the Kashmir Institute of International Relations Islamabad. He can be reached at amirmushtaq9300@gmail.com