‘Losses are not important, outcomes are’: CDS General Anil Chauhan on Operation Sindoor ‘setbacks’ | India News
NEW DELHI: Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) General Anil Chauhan on Tuesday said that “professional military forces are not affected by setbacks and losses,” days after claiming that India did lose some fighter jets during Operation Sindoor. However, losses are not important, but outcomes are, he added.“I think, professional forces are not affected by setbacks or losses; in a war, what is important is that the morale needs to remain high even if there are setbacks. Adaptability is an important constituent of a very professional force. You should be able to understand what went wrong, need to rectify your mistake and go again. You cannot sit down in fear,” he said while delivering a special lecture on the topic ‘future wars and warfare’ organised by Savitribai Phule Pune University. Last week, Chauhan claimed that India lost some fighter jets while striking terror hubs in Pakistan and Pok and the consequent retaliation on May 7. He added that forces then changed tactics to inflict major damage on air bases deep across the border before the ceasefire three days later.“What I can say is on May 7, in the initial stages, there were losses,” Gen Chauhan had said.Making a strong statement, he said, “Pakistan should not be able to hold India hostage to terrorist activities,” adding that New Delhi is not going to live under the shadow of terror and nuclear blackmail.He added that the thinking behind Operation Sindoor was that state-sponsored terrorism from Pakistan had to stop. “Both nations (India & Pakistan) had tried to build different kinds of capabilities, so obviously there was an inherent amount of risk in this. None of the capabilities that we had acquired had been into the battlefield. There is always an element of risk in it, but as they say, you cannot succeed if you don’t take that type of risk. We knew that we had a better counter-drone system.”He further said that what happened in Pahalgam on April 22 is “unacceptable to this modern world.” “What happened in Pahalgam was profound cruelty towards the victims because all of them were killed with head shots in front of their families and their children, and they were shot in the name of religion, which is kind of unacceptable to this modern world. This caused a huge revulsion in society. There was a kind of hatred. It revived memories because this was not a single act of terror against India. Western nations may have had one or two acts of terror. India has been a victim of the maximum terror acts, and almost 20,000 people have been killed.”
