As tension escalated at the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the sources said around 50-60 soldiers of Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) approached the Indian post in the southern bank of Pangon lake area at around 6 pm but the Indian Army personnel posted there strongly confronted them, forcing their retreat.
The armed forces are facing a shortage of over 52,000 soldiers with the Army topping the list with over 21,000 vacant posts, the government said on Wednesday.
The defence ministry on Thursday accorded its approval to procure 30 MQ-9B Predator drones from the US to crank up the surveillance apparatus of the armed forces, especially along the frontier with China, people familiar with the development said.
The IAF chief also said Pakistan has become a pawn of Chinese policy and its dependence on China would increase further in future. He said India needs to understand the interplay of some major events in its vicinity that would impact the security scenario of the region.
Pakistan plans to buy the fourth generation stealth fighter aircraft from China to boost its defence capability, according to a media report on Saturday.
'We are facing the most critical military situation with China in the last 50 years.'
'Our biggest advantage is that the troops are much better trained and motivated than the Chinese and can improvise and manage with a part of the resources.'
US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's plane landed in Taiwan amid a heightened security threat from China, media reports said on Tuesday.
After the third unidentified object was shot down in the US on Sunday, speculations were made that they could be alien or terrestrial activities.
The Indian and Chinese troops are locked in an over-three-year confrontation in certain friction points in eastern Ladakh even as the two sides completed disengagement from several areas following extensive diplomatic and military talks.
'Could the Chinese have taken a leaf out of our book?' 'That their unprecedented build-up is their attempt at coercive diplomacy with India?' 'And if so, what is it that they could be expecting as a quid pro quo?' asks Shekhar Gupta.
Among the handful of countries with large defence budgets and armed forces, India is matched only by Saudi Arabia in the level of its import dependence. For revenge to be served cold, go beyond import bans and correct these long-term failures -- if we're up to it, notes T N Ninan.
What despots and dictators, jammers and competitors, had not managed to do in 83 years -- what the Soviet Union had failed to counter during the Cold War; what China had failed to crush during the Tiananmen Square uprising -- a US President had succeeded with his own hand, notes Krishna Prasad.
Announcing the hotline, the Chinese defence ministry said as agreed upon by the defence departments of China and Japan, the two sides have recently completed the construction of a direct telephone line for the sea and air liaison mechanism and will maintain communication on the arrangement for the launch.
Nine Chinese engineers were among 13 people killed on Wednesday when a bus carrying construction workers in northwest Pakistan's mountainous region was "attacked", according to officials and eyewitnesses.
The two sides held talks on Tuesday as well but it could not produce any tangible outcome, the sources said.
'The Olympic Spirit has been thrown to the wind in Xi Jinping's China.' 'The International Olympic Committee is ready to kowtow to totalitarian China,' notes Claude Arpi.
A suspected Chinese spy balloon, said to be the size of three buses, was spotted over the United States' airspace, the Pentagon has said, a development that has further strained the already tense bilateral ties as Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday abruptly postponed his key visit to Beijing.
The Indian Air Force on Monday ruled out that its C-130J Super Hercules transport aircraft could have crashed due to suspected counterfeit Chinese parts and said it had already sent some of the equipment from the fleet to the US for physical verification by its manufacturer Lockheed Martin.
Sources said the exercise is aimed at checking the IAF's overall combat capability and military preparedness in the region.
Prime Minister Imran Khan addressed a ceremony held at Pakistan Air Force base Minhas Kamra in Attock district of Punjab province to induct the new fighter jets.
A Chinese patrol ship searching the crashed Malaysian airliner on Saturday picked up a pulse signal from its black box detector in the southern Indian Ocean, China's official media reported, in a possible breakthrough in the nearly month-long multinational hunt for the jet.
The entire base is seeing a flurry of activity and is playing a crucial role in enhancing the combat preparedness of the country along the China border.
'The Chinese can't be trusted hence the need to verify and re-verify.'
The Heron unmanned aerial vehicles are already in the Air Force, Navy, and the Army and are being used extensively at the moment by both Army surveillance and Target acquisition batteries and Air Force in the Ladakh sector.
China on Wednesday said it will take "strong and effective" countermeasures against the US and Taiwan for violating the "One-China policy", as the US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi successfully completed her visit to Taipei disregarding Beijing's vociferous threats.
China's second woman astronaut Wang Yaping, who is currently orbiting the earth in an experimental space lab, has become the country's first space teacher as she delivered a lecture to over 60 million Chinese students about various aspects life in space.
Ranneeti: Balakot And Beyond veers between intriguing and boring, observes Deepa Gahlot.
Noting the actions and capabilities of the Chinese side, the IAF chief said, "They had brought their J-20 fighter aircraft (to areas close to Eastern Ladakh) and they go off from there but that is the flexibility of airpower. The moment Indian Rafales were brought in, their J-20 was there. We know their actions and capabilities and we are taking the required steps."
At present, the Pralay ballistic missiles can take out targets from 150 to 500 km and are extremely difficult to intercept for the enemy through interceptor missiles.
By the time the enemy aircraft is 50 km away, the Akash-NG's computers have calculated the launch trajectory and impact point and launched the missile.
The total allocation to the defence sector is 12.9 per cent of the total budget of the government of India for the financial year 2024-25.
Any miscalculation and miscommunication are fraught with the risk of a major catastrophe, warns Rup Narayan Das.
A number of "encouraging leads" of electronic pulse detected in the southern Indian Ocean on Sunday prompted multinational search teams to rush their hi-tech ships to the area to determine if these signals came from the black box of the crashed Malaysian plane.
China's official media reported air and ground movement of troops in Taiwan Straits -- the waters that separate China and Taiwan -- as US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi landed in Taipei on Tuesday disregarding Beijing's stern warnings.
The Chinese activity at an air base near the Barahoti area has also gone up and a large number of drones have been deployed by them there, they said.
'It would be a travesty if the Malaysian air force likes the Tejas, but decides against it because it sees the IAF reluctance to back the fighter.'
"China has been promoting peace and stability in this region. We hope that Pakistan and India will maintain friendly relations," he told a media briefing in Beijing.
India's combat capability and readiness to confront any multi-dimensional security threat was elaborately tested at a four-day mega military exercise conducted in the Creek sector of the Kutch peninsula that concluded on Monday, military officials said.
Over 68,000 Army soldiers, around 90 tanks and other weapon systems were airlifted by the Indian Air Force to eastern Ladakh from across the country for rapid deployment along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) after the deadly clashes in the Galwan Valley, top sources in defence and security establishment said.
