Sargodha began as a modest Royal Air Force airstrip in the 1930s, one of many laid across the Punjab in the last decades of British rule. It was the Pakistan Air Force that made it important. The PAF commissioned PAF Base Sargodha in 1959, in the years when American military aid was re-equipping the service with F-86 Sabres, and it became the centre of what the service called the Sargodha airfield complex: the main base and the satellite fields around it.

By the summer of 1965, according to a 2019 account in ThePrint cited by Wikipedia, the complex held up to 80 F-86 Sabres and five F-104 Starfighters, a large share of the PAF’s front-line strength. That concentration explains why India made it the first target when the war widened in September. Today the base is a Main Operating Base under Central Air Command, home to No. 38 Multi-Role Wing and to squadrons that Wikipedia lists as No. 9 ‘Griffins’, No. 24 ‘Blinders’, No. 29 ‘Aggressors’ and No. 82 ‘Stallions’, flying types that include F-16s, JF-17s and F-7s. The PAF does not publish a squadron-by-squadron order of battle, and the Wikipedia pages do not agree with each other in every detail.

The base sits in the same district as the Kirana Hills, a Ministry of Defence reservation that Wikipedia describes as a site of Pakistan’s subcritical nuclear experiments between 1983 and 1995. That neighbourhood is one reason the area attracts attention in every India–Pakistan crisis.

On the evening of 6 September 1965 the PAF struck Pathankot, Adampur and Halwara. India answered the next morning. Wikipedia’s account of the air war, drawing on the Indian historians Jagan Mohan and Samir Chopra, says the Indian Air Force mounted 33 sorties against the heavily defended Sargodha complex on 7 September, and that Indian losses to the local PAF squadrons were two Mystères and three Hunters. One damaged Mystère fought an F-104 and both were shot down; its pilot, Squadron Leader Ajjamada B. Devaiah, was killed and awarded the Maha Vir Chakra posthumously in 1988, some 23 years later, after his fate was pieced together.

The fighting over Sargodha produced the war’s most famous and most contested claim. Pakistani sources credit Squadron Leader Muhammad Mahmood Alam, flying a Sabre, with five Hawker Hunters in about a minute, four of them, by his own account, in 30 seconds. The IAF has always denied losing five Hunters that day. Wikipedia records that several experts have questioned the tally and that no verifiable gun-camera footage was made public. The honest summary is that both air forces lost aircraft over and around Sargodha that day, and that the numbers remain one side’s word against the other’s.

The day still matters on both sides. Pakistan named its base at Mianwali after Alam in 2014, and in 2025 the Indian film Sky Force dramatised the Indian raids on Sargodha.

The PAF opened a Flight Leaders’ School at Masroor in April 1958 under Air Marshal Asghar Khan. It faded after the 1965 war and had gone by the early 1970s. On 5 May 1976 the service set up the Combat Commanders’ School at Sargodha to revive it and go further, and it was formally inaugurated on 15 August 1977.

The school trains mid-career squadron commanders, weapons instructors and air defence controllers, develops tactics and standardises fighter squadrons. It runs a four-to-five-month Combat Commanders’ Course, a three-month Weapons Course and a four-to-five-week Fighter Integration Course; by February 2023, 57 courses had graduated. Its equipment has followed the PAF’s own history: Mirage IIIs and F-6s at the start, an F-16 squadron from 1988, F-7Ps from 1993, JF-17s from 2015 and F-7PGs from 2023. The Mirage squadron was decommissioned in January 2024.

Wikipedia’s article notes that visiting air chiefs have been struck by the freedom the school gives student pilots in dissimilar air combat training, planning and flying their own missions at very low level. Since 1992 it has also run Exercise Saffron Bandit, a large training exercise meant to come as close to war as peacetime allows.

On 20 February 2003 a PAF Fokker F27 carrying the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Mushaf Ali Mir, flew into high ground in the Kohat area in bad weather. Seventeen people died, among them his wife and fifteen senior officers. PAF Base Sargodha was renamed after him later that year. Pakistani press reports summarised by Wikipedia said in 2015 that the aircraft had been identified as faulty long before the crash.

On 1 November 2007 a suicide bomber on a motorcycle struck a bus carrying air force officers on the Faisalabad road near Sargodha, close to the Kirana ammunition depot. ABC News reported eleven dead, seven of them PAF officers, and 28 injured; the attack was blamed on Taliban and al-Qaeda militants.

On 10 May 2025, during the conflict India calls Operation Sindoor and Pakistan Operation Bunyan-um-Marsoos, India said it hit Mushaf with precision weapons, and satellite images published by Indian and US media showed a crater on the runway. The Pakistan military confirmed that one airman was killed at Mushaf, one of six killed in the strikes on its bases. Pakistan has not published a damage assessment for the base.