I think people underestimate the difficulties of operating Air Force in high altitude conditions. Laser guided munitions can miss due to intense sunlight interference. Satellite guided bombs can miss due to terrain.
You basically need to recalibrate all of your weapons and that takes a lot of trial firing to tweak. Not all countries have the luxury of doing that.
Indeed. It's the Indians who are routinely underestimating high altitude warfare. For the last 2 years. We have seen China do plenty of live-fire exercises. While for India, we had seen only a handful of actual live-fire exercises. India could not afford to expend their imported munitions in exercises. It's one thing to do sporadic test firing and claim technical success. It's another to actually get your soldiers to fire large amounts of the same munitions in exercises, and repeat those successes.
The Indians like to cite their decades of experience in fighting Pakistan over Kashmir. But those fighting there in the last 30 years had been exclusively low-intensity warfare. That's why the Indians like to talk about doing 'surgical strikes' or 'special operations' against their enemies. India likes to assume that war with China will be fought in skirmishes. They hope that the advanced Indian weaponry could allow them to win some individual skirmishes against China. And then India can claim victory.
China, unlike India is preparing for large-scale high-intensity warfare. A war fought with India over a broad front from Ladakh, to AP. They're preparing for India going for all-out war against them. The scale of the PLA military exercises and infrastructure buildup reflects this. China is preparing for high-intensity warfare over a extended campaign period.
High-intensity warfare is beyond even the thinking of Indian military top brass. They have talked about troop numbers, but they haven't even talked about how to conduct large-scale operations. The Indians like to imagine that they are inspired by the Israeli method of modern warfare. But that is an absurdity. Bombing poor militaries and impoverished people is not high-intensity warfare, it's bullying. China will not be bullied.
The Ladakh standoff of 2020 is an example. The Indians moved some units to salami-slice pieces of Aksai Chin away from China. The PLA responded by moving troops over a broad front to take back swathes of Aksai Chin. That shocked the Indians immensely. The clashes at Galwan and Pangong Lake were all individual skirmishes within a large front. The Indians had to react to every Chinese movement. It was China that dictated the battlespace over Ladakh. China is serious about fighting over territory. They don't sneak around to steal salami-slices of land. They will grab entire areas if they wanted to. The Indians have no idea what is coming for them if China is pushed into going to war.