Through much of its history, the Pakistan Army (PA) was the military’s service arm that had been defined (relative to the Pakistan Air Force and Pakistan Navy, at least) by strength in numbers. It needed to be as its immediate adversary, the Indian Army (IA), itself was a much larger force.
There was perhaps a point in the overall equation where qualitative strength, be it borne of technology or higher proportions of higher quality or newer systems, would not be enough.
The PA had to balance its capabilities by ensuring that a certain level of quantitative mass was always maintained. This, of course, forced the trade-off of moving slowly, at least compared to the Air Force and Navy, on adopting the latest in technology and doctrine.
Thus, a great many programs – e.g., the ill-fated assault rifle tender or large aviation corps – have yet to receive the investment that General Headquarters (GHQ) would otherwise prefer to give them.
However, against the backdrop of these structural challenges, the PA made relatively significant strides in network-enabled warfare, specifically in the ‘connective’ tissue that enables its armour, artillery, and other systems to interoperate. And it has done so relatively quietly.
For example, in its latest disclosure (2022-2024), Pakistan’s Ministry of Defence Production (MoDP) revealed that the PA Directorate General Research and Development (DGRDE) developed a prototype of a new “Integrated Battlefield Management System (IBFMS).”
No other details about the IBFMS were provided, but when viewed through the wider lens of the PA’s procurement work in those years and since, e.g., the Norinco Group SH-15 wheeled self-propelled howitzer (SPH) and VT4/Haider main battle tank (MBT), the locally designed P251 wheeled SPH project, the Fatah-I and -II series of guided surface-to-surface missiles (SSM), loitering munitions, new intelligence and target acquisition platforms, and others, the IBFMS project is a central link in the PA’s general shift to a precision-fire and precision-strike-led doctrine (a key outcome of its network-enabled warfare push).
The general idea behind ‘precision-fire’ and ‘precision-strike’ is that by combining better targeting with munition-layer guidance capabilities, one can neutralize their targets by using fewer munitions than with unguided munitions. So, even though an unguided munition costs less on a one-to-one basis, many more unguided munitions must be spent to neutralize a target compared to a guided one. Moreover, the ‘cost’ of unguided munitions manifests in other ways, e.g., often necessitating larger platforms (to carry higher volumes), being slower to employ, and failing to neutralize targets efficiently.
Thus, if one had to summarize the PA’s shift to a precision-fire and strike-led doctrine, it would be to deploy sooner, neutralize targets faster, and reach farther through a wider array of platforms/assets.
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