While all the PAF's squadrons shared Pak Army's close support tasks throughout the war, at Sargodha a specialised strike wing was set up for the most active battle front along a 150-mile arc between Jammu and Fazilka facing Sialkot, Lahore and Kasur. Between them, these three sectors accounted for the major proportion of the PAF close support effort, which from 10 September onwards was undertaken as a primary role by 32 Fighter Wing, under the command of Wing Commander M A Sikander. Two Sabre squadrons, 17 and 18, each with 12 F-86s, comprised the combat strength of 32 Wing. The 2 squadrons had moved up from Mauripur to Sargodha between 4-6 September, leaving a third Sabre squadron behind for the air defence of the Karachi area and other operations in the southern sector of West Pakistan.

One of the main tasks of the strike wing was, of course, tank busting, for which its Sabres were armed with four underwing jettisonable pods, each containing seven 2.75in FFARs (folding-fin aerial rockets) with HE/AT (high explosive antitank) warheads, or with eight 5in rockets per aircraft. Napalm was also used against special targets, and the standard armament of six 0.5in Browning machine guns with 300 rounds per gun was effective against hard and soft skinned targets. This was just as well since there was often insufficient time to load the appropriate weapons for specific targets between sorties. The deadly little 2.75in rockets were good general purpose weapons, and although lacking the accuracy of gun armament, their spread when fired in salvos of seven resulted in a 75-80% certainty of knocking out a tank.

Their effectiveness was proved by the wing on a number of occasions, beginning on 10 and 11 September with strikes on Indian Army targets in the Samba area just inside the Kashmir border. This was a large assembly area for Indian armoured fighting vehicles, which were preparing for an assault against Sialkot and Jassar. After the attention of 32 Wing, however, which claimed a total of some 19 tanks and more than 100 vehicles destroyed in the first two days of their specialised operations, the enemy was never able to assemble his forces together in this area for an effective attack.