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How the Pakistan Army’s New Rocket Force Drives a Conventional Deterrence Posture Quwa Premium
The Pakistan Army’s new Rocket Force Command (ARFC) marks another step in Pakistan’s ongoing shift in building its conventional deterrence posture. ARFC’s emergence is recognition on the part of Pakistan’s defence planners that surprise missile attacks can neutralize their key military assets before a conflict fully escalates, thus necessitating a need to leverage such capabilities as a means to deter the adversary from similar preemptive actions.
The recent conflict with India in May 2025 provided a stark demonstration of this new reality. India’s ability to leverage stand-off weapons like the BrahMos cruise missile to conduct relatively sparse yet effective strikes against Pakistani air bases highlighted critical vulnerabilities in Pakistan’s defensive posture. (Context: live updates & recap of May 2025 and the follow-on analysis “Pakistan Has a Serious BrahMos Problem”) (podcast). The lesson was not about the specific damage inflicted, but about the potential for a much larger, saturated, and unannounced preemptive strike to cripple Pakistan’s airpower when it is least prepared.
In this context, the ARFC emerges as Pakistan’s answer to this challenge, i.e., a dedicated land-based force designed to deter and, if necessary, disrupt such threats at their source. (Deep-dive podcast: “Pakistan’s Answer to India’s ‘New Normal’: A Rocket Force Built for Pre-Emptive Strikes”) (listen). This analysis will explore the strategic rationale behind the ARFC, the logic of creating an independent strike capability within the Army, and the industrial and supply-side challenges that will determine its ultimate credibility.
Potential Strategic Rationale
The strategic imperative driving the formation of the ARFC is multifaceted. On the surface, ARFC offers the Pakistan Army with the ability to target key Indian strike assets deep inside its territory, such as missile launchers, logistical hubs, and command-and-control centers. However, the overarching goal is potentially much more ambitious, i.e., to actively disrupt Indian military operations against Pakistan before they could be fully executed.
During the recent conflict, Indian officials suggested that Pakistan benefited from real-time intelligence from China regarding potential launch vectors. If this claim is accurate, it logically follows that the Army would seek a dedicated capability to act on such intelligence, enabling it to preemptively strike those vectors before they can be employed.
In this sense, the ARFC’s doctrine is a land-based derivative of the Pakistan Navy’s apparent A2/AD (anti-access/area-denial) strategy. The PN aims to push its defensive lines outward from the Arabian Sea and into the wider Indian Ocean, thereby disrupting Indian Navy operations far from Pakistan’s shores (see A2/AD series overviews: Part 1, Part 2 – Submarines, Part 3 – ISR) and related PN capabilities like SMASH ASBM. The ARFC applies this same logic to the terrestrial domain. Its purpose is not merely to defend against incoming threats – a task for air defense systems – but to proactively target the “archer” rather than solely the “arrows.” By holding Indian missile launch sites at risk, the ARFC can disrupt offensive operations at their point of origin.
This is particularly relevant in countering the threat posed by systems like the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile. India’s ability to deploy and launch the BrahMos from positions close to the international border drastically shortens Pakistan’s response time, creating critical windows for rapid, devastating strikes. The ARFC’s primary role, therefore, is likely to leverage a suite of precision-strike tools to disrupt, preempt, and saturate these potential BrahMos launch sites. (See also: Countering the BrahMos Threat (sample) and Blueprint for Pakistan’s Future-Proof Air Defence.) The strategic effect would be to compel India to push these threat vectors farther east, deeper within its own territory, thereby increasing the flight time of its missiles and providing Pakistan with a more manageable reaction window.
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