The grossly deficient radar cover in West Pakistan provided low level surveillance only to the few main air bases. Whereas detection of high altitude targets was generally possible over most sensitive areas of the country, there was only 5 low looking radars against a projected requirement of nearly 50. There was no was to detect the enemy’s low level raids against Pakistan’s arterial road and railway system running close to the border. When the IAF switched from its daylight counter air campaign to interdiction of the rail/road system, this radar deficiency proved all the more frustrating. It tool only 4-6 minutes for the Indian fighters, and even An-12 transport aircraft loaded with bombs, to cross into Pakistan at low level and sneak back into India after delivering their attacks. It was out of the question for the PAF to fly round the clock CAPs over those hundreds of miles of territory; and whenever an occasional CAP was flown, any encounter with such fleeting hit-and-run raids was entirely coincidental. (The PAF was to experience another variant of this frustration ten years later in the Afghan war).

The lack of a continuous radar cover also compelled the PAF to react to every incursion that was detected anywhere along the border. For the PAF’s forward air bases specially, this was the only recourse and several sorties returned without engaging the enemy simply because he had gone in some ´coverless` direction; on many occasions, SOC (North) also had to play safe by ordering an even higher number of unrewarded CAPs. This enforced hit-or-miss employment of interceptors produced air engagements in only 23% of the total missions that were scrambled. The IAF was also having to resort to similar tactics to protect Amritsar, Pathankot, Halwara and its other forward airfields. Lack of early warning had rendered borders cities like Sialkot, Lahore and Kasur vulnerable to hit-and-run air attacks but fortunately these raids caused relatively few civilian causalities. The PAF could have, with an additional 100 fighters, provided a continuous umbrella over these cities, but the luxury of those extra fighters would remain beyond Pakistan’s resources.

The only feasible alternative in the frustrating situation was to step up the intensity of the PAF’s own interdiction campaign which resulted in significant disruption of the enemy’s logistic system, specially in the Kashmir-East Punjab area – and even decisively so in the Utterlai-Barmer sector where it forced an abort on the Indian thrust against Hyderabad. The interdiction sorties were continued with sustained intensity throughout the war. In a typical and notably spectacular Mirage mission on 15 December, Wing Commander Hakimullah’s formation caught a number of loaded ammunition trains waiting to depart from the Mukerian rail yard, 70 miles north Jullundur. The exploding trains threw up such a lot debris that one of the Mirages brought back a seriously damaged wing. Similar destruction of ammo dumps in Kashmir, Ferozepur and Barmer sectors also created major upsets in the Indian army’s moves.

The object of challenging and defeating the IAF in the air had been achieved. Both air forces had attacked each other’s airfields and radar complexes but the IAF had lost a far greater number of pilots and aircrafts within the first three days – 37 in aerial combat and 17 to ground defences. The PAF lost only 2 F-104s one to Amritsar radar’s ack ack and the other to a Mig-21 while the Starfighter was on a strike against the Mig’s home airfield Jamnagar. The PAF did not claim any aircraft that may have been destroyed during strikes against enemy airfields unless clearly visible on gun camera films (only 5 were), but admitted to its loss of 6 F-86s and 1 B-57 during IAF attacks against PAF bases.

It was this clear victory over the IAF’s air offensive which had forced the enemy to switch over to an interdiction strategy, and although severely handicapped in its attempt to frustrate that strategy, the PAF essentially maintained its dominance in the air till the end. In all it claimed the destruction of 107 IAF aircraft. Of these 51 were shot down in air engagements, 5 destroyed on the ground and 28 downed by airfield ack ack. The basis of the awards was stringent: each claim had to be confirmed by either gun camera film or an identifiable wreckage or a reliable eye witness. The renowned American test pilot Brigadier General Charles E Yeager who was at that time the US defence representative in Islamabad and who volunteered to join the PAF’s helicopter teams documenting downed IAF aircraft, says in his autobiography: “…the Pakistanis scored a three-to-one kill ratio, knocking out 102 Russian-made Indian jets and losing 34 airplanes of their own. I’m certain about the figures because I went our several times a day in a chopper and counted wrecks on Pakistani soil, documented them by serial numbers, identified the components such as engines, rocket pods, and new equipment on never airplanes like the soviet Su-7 fighter-bomber and the Mig-21j, their latest supersonic fighter.”

Of the 107 aircraft claimed, the wreckages of 31 were documented and photographed, the destruction of 21 was recorded on gun camera films and 27 were sent to go down by reliable eye witnesses (ie accompanying pilots and/or ground witness). Nine of the latter categories were also confirmed by ratio transmissions of IAF aircraft and ground stations. In East Pakistan, the gallant 14 Squadron and Dhaka’s valiant ack ack gunners shot down 28 IAF aircraft between them. Nothing can be said with certainty about the fate of IAF fighters damaged in air engagements, but post-war intelligence indicated that the IAF had lost a further 20 aircraft due to battle damage including a Mig-21 shot down by another who took it to be a PAF fighter.