SINGAPORE: In a significant acknowledgment, India’s Chief of Defence Staff, General Anil Chauhan, has confirmed that the Indian Air Force took hits and lost aircraft during recent confrontations with Pakistan. This revelation emerged during an interview with Bloomberg Television, broadcast from the ongoing Shangri-La Dialogue security conference here in Singapore.

General Chauhan specifically spoke about Indian fighter jets being destroyed in skirmishes that happened back in May. When pressed directly by the interviewer about how many Indian aircraft were lost, General Chauhan initially tried to sidestep the question. However, he eventually admitted that the Indian Air Force had indeed “sustained losses.”

General Chauhan also conceded, “We made some tactical mistakes, and the good thing is that we identified and corrected those mistakes.”

Despite this, he held back from giving an exact count of the downed aircraft. He stressed that understanding why these aircraft were lost was more crucial than merely knowing the number.

This statement from General Chauhan, according to analysts, doesn’t just contradict earlier claims from India; it also appears to suggest that India faced setbacks in its recent encounters with Pakistan, a reality now seemingly being brought into the open.