that's fine. but it's just amazing to me that the "great Rafale" couldn't even identify a missile flying at it. It's amazing what French marketing turned Rafale into.
Well, to be fair you might be a little too critical here.
Most MAWs rely on the thermal heat plumes to detect missile launches and incoming missiles. With the engagement ranges cited, it’s very likely, almost certain even, that the PL15s would have already exhausted their rocket fuel and were gliding in on pure inertia, so MAWS failure to detect them isn’t that big of a failure if that was the case.
Depending on the speed of the PL15, there might have been literally no reaction time left for the pilots to do anything by the time the PL15 went pitbull and triggered the RWR.
If I was to guess, considerable effort would have been made by the PL15 designers to hit the sweet spot of when to trigger the second stage such that it burns out before enemy MAWs can detect it, but late enough to retain maximum energy for the missile, and also delay going pitbull long enough to give minimal warning but still sufficient time for course corrections to maximise KP. It would be a great disservice to the PL15 to just heap all the blame on India and Rafales and not give it the credit it deserves for being able to bypass all of the defences of one of the world’s best fighters.
Similarly, I think it would be both too harsh on the Rafale and underscoring the skill and capabilities of Pakistani pilots and EW in the Rafales not being able to detect the missiles on radar as they were incoming.
For all we know, the shots could have been made at oblique angles to avoid easy detection by the target’s own radars. Also, EW could have significantly degraded the Rafales’ radar and RWR performance and/or given them so many false alerts that the pilots ended up basically turning them off or ignoring the warnings when the actual missiles came in.
The fact that the PAF achieved a near full house of kills against almost every frontline fighter aircraft type within the IAF strongly suggests that it was more a case of how well the PAF and Chinese tactics and weapons performance combined with how backwards IAF tactics were, as opposed to how bad the Rafale was. It does prove that the Rafale isn’t magic as French marketing would have you believe. But then, I think even the F22 and J20 would have struggled in IAF hands in those same circumstances.