Looking Ahead

South Asia’s Escalation Problem in 2026

Date: January 8, 2026

Fahd Humayun
Assistant Professor, Tufts University

Events in 2025 made clear the increasingly hybrid nature of modern conflict in South Asia, with emerging weapons technologies in particular moving from the periphery to the centre of military competition. During the four-day India-Pakistan conflict in May, these technologies manifested in two especially consequential ways.

First, the four-day conflict marked the first time that both countries concurrently deployed weaponised drones and loitering munitions across the Line of Control and Working Boundary/international border. These deployments resulted in civilian casualties and sharply amplified threat perceptions among both populations. Going forward, both countries, having now operationally tested these systems in a live conflict setting, will likely seek ways to further integrate these systems into their tactical toolkit. The most obvious risk here pertains to strategic stability. New weapons technologies risk forcing new, hitherto unexplored rungs onto an already unstable escalation ladder. While some stability optimists might plausibly view additional rungs as shock absorbers, the danger with drone technologies, as evidenced in other conflict theaters including Ukraine and in the Iran-Israel war, is not just that they compress the so-called kill chain, but that they significantly lower the political threshold for use of force, while creating concurrent pressures on both militaries to modernize their air defenses and emphasize the necessity of short-range air-defense launchers and missiles.

A second notable way in which new weapons technologies manifested in the May crisis pertained to the deployment of cyber operations at an unprecedented scale. In May, both sides offensively engaged in data breaches and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeting government, defence, and critical infrastructure networks. While these operations were relatively low-cost and, in many cases, limited in their technical sophistication – both sides demonstrated a relatively robust ability to absorb and defend against these attacks – their relative deniability, and symbolic and disruptive value as a complement to kinetic operations introduces similar kinds of uncertainty into a tense conflict theater where the possibility of miscalculation can have be of high consequence. 

As hybrid capabilities mature and both sides seek to tighten the integration between their cyber, informational, and kinetic domains, these developments are likely to strain traditional deterrence logics in South Asia. It is highly likely that both sides will invest time and energy in 2026 to undertake doctrinal adjustments that put a premium on capability development, particularly in drone defence, cyber resilience, AI-enabled decision support, and space and counter-space systems. The danger, in the absence of better crisis management and more flexible de-escalation channels with India, is the implication of faster, more ambiguous forms of warfare on crisis instability and the risk of both deliberate and inadvertent escalation.