Kill chain and long-range missile gave Pakistan the edge in Rafale shootdown, according to a recent report by Reuters.

On Aug. 2, 2025, an interesting story by Reuter’s Saeed Shah and Shivam Patel laid out how a Pakistan Air Force J-10C downed at least one Indian Air Force Rafale using a PL-15 air-to-air missile fired from roughly 200 km, a kill envelope Indian planners did not expect the PAF to achieve that night.

The Reuters reconstruction of the May 7, 2025 air battle over (and just inside) Pakistan reads like a checklist of modern air warfare: BVR (Beyond-Visual-Range) shots, multi-domain sensor fusion, electronic attack, and, crucially, information superiority (or lack thereof) along with various assumptions about the enemy’s weapons that turned out to be wrong.

While very few

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