Reaction, Not Range: How Pakistan’s Air Defence Must Evolve to Survive the Next War Plus Pro

Pakistan’s integrated air defence system (IADS) was not built for the type of war India wants to fight.

The Pakistani IADS’ long-range surface-to-air missiles (SAM) – i.e., the Army’s HQ-9/P and Air Force’s HQ-9BE – were procured for deterrence, but not for active, high-intensity warfighting. They were meant to stop isolated incursions, not absorb or defeat large-scale, multi-axis missile salvos combining BrahMos, SCALP, Nirbhay, loitering munitions, and rocket-powered surface-to-surface missiles (SSM).

But India’s doctrine has changed (or been revealed) in May 2025. The emphasis is no longer on single-point “surgical strikes,” but on sustained, high-tempo missile warfare, i.e., salvos designed to overload, deceive, and burn through an IADS within hours.

Pakistan’s problem is not range; it is reaction time. Once a missile appears on radar, a high-value site – from cities like Lahore to key air bases such as Shahbaz – may have mere minutes before impact, which is a cycle too short for centralized command to respond.

This article dissects how Pakistan’s geography, procurement choices, and organizational mindset have left its IADS structurally misaligned with modern threats. It then outlines what a credible, next-generation IADS posture must look like to survive the opening waves of a future conflict.

• The Blueprint for Pakistan’s Future-Proof Air Defence System
• Market Brief: Pakistan’s “Missing Middle” Surface-to-Air Missile (SAM) Requirement
• Pakistan’s In-House SAM Projects Hint at Future Air Defence Direction

The Threat is Not a Specific Missile, but Scale

Modern Missile Tactics Exploit Gaps and Latency

Be it supersonic-cruising missiles (SSCM), subsonic cruise missiles, or ballistic missiles, modern missile strike strategies are centered on exploiting gaps in the defender’s air defence posture or their response latency cycle, i.e., the time lag between detection, classification, decision-to-engage, and surface-to-air missile (SAM) launches.

To exploit these two weaknesses, attackers can leverage:

• Terrain masking and low-altitude flight: subsonic cruise missiles can aim to fly below the radar horizon for many ground-based radars, forcing the defender to rely on distributed land-based radars and/or airborne radars to close coverage gaps. If left unaddressed, these gaps can lead to the risk of shortened detection-to-intercept cycles. However, it could still be difficult to achieve complete coverage as low-flying and terrain-following missiles can leverage radar clutter (e.g., from hills, vegetation, etc.).
• Stealth and radar cross-section (RCS) reduction: it is now common to see air-launched cruise missiles (ALCM) designed with low observability (LO) on radar. Leveraging the right mix of a small airframe, composites for materials, low-altitude flight, and terrain-hugging, these ALCMs can be quite difficult to detect at long range and, in turn, intercept in time.
• Multi-axis and multi-speed salvo fire: leveraging speed, attackers can also use a mix of SSCM and ballistic missiles at scale. Mixed in with the use of decoys, subsonic cruise missiles, and/or loitering munitions (LM), these attacks can force defenders to expend their SAMs early and, in turn, create new gaps for stealthy ALCMs, for example, to penetrate.
• Electronic warfare (EW) and sensor overload: combined with kinetic striking measures, the use of electronic attack (EA) for decoy and spoofing and electronic support measures (ESM) for emission exposure can serve to both deprecate ground-based radars and expose them for targeting by suppression-of-enemy air defence (SEAD) and destruction of enemy air defence (DEAD) threats. In fact, one of the intended goals of a missile strike could be to carry out SEAD/DEAD ahead of an air campaign.
• The detection-to-launch bottleneck: the advent of both SSCM and, in the future, hypersonic missiles aims to reduce the time available to the defender’s IADS for intercepting threats. However, subsonic missiles can also do the same by avoiding early detection, only to emerge on defender radar visibility at a relatively late stage.

Pakistan is Constrained by its Geographical Depth

In addition to the technical challenges posed by robust enemy missile strategies, Pakistan also suffers from its structural limitation: its lack of geographical depth relative to India. Basically, the country’s critical political, economic, and military centers – e.g., Lahore, Sialkot, Rawalpindi, and Karachi – all lie within 200-250 km of the international border.

This is well within the reach of the BrahMos, Nirbhay, and SCALP, effectively creating situations that from launch to impact, many of Pakistan’s strategic nodes may have only three to six minutes of warning time, leaving the IADS with minimal reaction margin.

This proximity essentially compresses Pakistan’s detect-to-engage cycle, as terrain and curvature of the earth constraints limit radar detection ranges for low-flying missiles.