India has announced Exercise Trishul, projecting the tri-service choreography as a display of post-Operation Sindoor confidence – presenting failure as success. But beneath the theatre of jointness lies a deeper pattern: an Operation Brasstacks (1986-87)-style force mobilisation, cloaked as a large exercise.
In the 1980s, Brasstacks failed because it rehearsed a war plan under the guise of an exercise. It involved nearly 500,000 troops, and the plan included amphibious assault exercises near Karachi. The scale of the operation led to heightened tensions with Pakistan, and India backed off after Pakistan’s Foreign Office summoned the Indian ambassador, S K Singh, at midnight in January 1987. The-then foreign minister Noorani advised Singh that, in the event of a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, Pakistan was “capable of inflicting unacceptable damage on it”.
Even after two recent dressings down in 2019 and 2025, India’s 38-year-old itch persists. The so-called Exercise Trishul is seemingly Brasstacks 2.0 – a multi-domain, networked form designed to test integrated air-land-sea operations along Pakistan’s western flank.
The timing is hardly accidental. Both India’s Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and Chief of Defence Staff Gen Chauhan threatened in June 2025 that “the next conflict will originate from the maritime domain”. Trishul may perhaps be operationalising that threat by expanding India’s rehearsal space from the desert to the coast, from strike corps to expeditionary landings, and from deterrence to compellence. No one can afford to read it as mere pageantry.
Yet Pakistan’s answer need not be shrill. It only needs to remind New Delhi that the map does not end at Sir Creek. The same littoral that India claims to dominate forms a shared strategic continuum – one that Pakistan watches, studies and factors into every layer of its maritime and aerial vigilance.
At the risk of jumping the gun, one could draw from recent conflicts in which India failed to wage and win limited war against Pakistan. If the Trishul exercise turns into an operation, the essence of Pakistan’s response would lie in calibrated reciprocity, but one cannot rule out asymmetric escalation. Islamabad’s response horizon would run from Sir Creek to Kandla-Jamnagar, an arc that India cannot militarise unilaterally. The idea would not be to replicate India’s drills, but to show equilibrium through readiness. A few interlocking options illustrate how Pakistan could maintain credible conventional deterrence.
If Trishul rehearsals are for amphibious landings off Saurashtra (Kathiawar Peninsula, southwestern Gujarat, around 350 km east of Karachi), the Pakistan Navy could simulate sea-denial operations off Kandla-Jamnagar, which are the routes through which India’s western seaboard trade, energy supplies and naval logistics flow.
India’s creek and desert focus invites a reminder that deserts are two-sided. What if Pakistan exercises up to the Bhuj–Naliya line (60–100 km to the east, an exposed Indian flank of the maritime and desert theatres), a dry rehearsal of a riposte to disperse Indian resources across multiple fronts?
Sir Creek’s tidal marshes remain ambiguous both legally and tactically. India’s repeated exercises here allow Pakistan to justify enhanced amphibious and littoral defences, including shallow-draft operations and rapid reinforcement drills. These measures would remind India that maritime ambiguity cuts both ways.
The Jamnagar refinery complex and Kandla port, which look like sitting ducks on India’s western seaboard, illustrate that economic centres of gravity are no longer immune in conflict. Pakistan’s deterrence calculus can quietly factor these nodes into its escalation ladder, not as targets but as leverage points. Such mutual vulnerabilities would advise India to exercise wisdom rather than exercising a military that raised white flags at the drop of a hat in May 2025.
Trishul also coincides with familiar diversionary patterns. Whenever India mobilises on the western front, terrorism spikes inside Pakistan, particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. Equally revealing is New Delhi’s recent policy U-turn towards the Afghan Taliban regime. By cultivating limited accommodation with Kabul while inflaming Pakistan’s western border, India is seeking to create strategic distraction, forcing Pakistan to divide attention between eastern vigilance and western counterterror operations. This too echoes Brasstacks-era playbooks of stretching Pakistan across multiple axes.
In contrast, Pakistan’s strategic culture values restraint as strength. True deterrence lies not in the frequency of exercises but in the credibility of response. Every move from Sir Creek to Jamnagar would probably be mapped within Pakistan’s deterrence and operational calculus. The military, though weary, may not exercise its marked restraint against such repeated provocations. Field Marshal Munir recently advised India that there is no space for war in a nuclear environment, echoing Pakistan’s pragmatism and resolve to respond at a time and manner of Islamabad’s choosing.
Those who mistake spectacle for supremacy ignore that equilibrium in South Asia is sustained not by noise but by credible resolve. Pakistan does not seek parity through provocation; it maintains stability through discipline, preparedness and doctrinal clarity. The choice of whether the next conflict remains notional or becomes real rests not in Karachi or Gwadar, but in how New Delhi interprets restraint.
Exercise Trishul may be India’s stage, but its script is familiar. In replaying Brasstacks 2.0 under a tri-service banner, India is rehearsing compellence behind the facade of integration. Pakistan’s message, however, is simpler and steadier: from Sir Creek to Kandla-Jamnagar, the balance endures. Deterrence remains mutual – and if India tests its limits, it will do so at its own peril.
Author: Dr Zahir Kazmi (The author is Arms Control Advisor at the Strategic Plans Division and a former Brigadier. He can be reached through his X account, @Zahirhkazmi. The views expressed are solely his own)
