How Space Will Drive the Pakistan Air Force’s Target Management Quwa Premium

The Indian Air Force (IAF) revealed an interesting detail about the Pakistan Air Force’s (PAF) airstrike on the former’s S-400 air defence system. Basically, the IAF contends that it moved the S-400’s systems ahead of the PAF airstrike.

Without getting into the validity of either side’s claims, one truth is apparent: the PAF is at risk of ‘stale targeting’ when it comes to mobile assets, like air defence systems and others. Information about a target’s location or deployment cannot be taken for granted and can become out-of-date ahead of a strike, rendering sorties, munitions use, and even possibly personnel loss null due to said target being missed.

The PAF recognizes the risk, which is why it began taking space development seriously, and that too years ahead of the recent conflict with India in May 2025. In 2021, the PAF revealed a ‘Space Command’ to ostensibly leverage Pakistan’s then growing inventory of orbiting satellites, notably the PRSS-1, its first sovereign-controlled remote-sensing satellite equipped with an electro-optical (EO) system in 2018. 

Pakistan likely supplanted the PRSS-1, launched in 2018 with a stated operational life of seven years, with the PRSC-EO1 in January 2025. A recent article on the PAF by AirForces Monthly indicated that Space Command was using satellites for ISR.

However, there are constraints. PRSS-1 had a revisit rate of four days, meaning that was the time it would take for it to take fresh imagery of an area. PRSC-EO1’s revisit rate was not disclosed, but it was unlikely to have been less than one day. 

Thus, the constraint affecting PAF image intelligence (IMINT)-based planning was that targeting may not be up-to-date – an acute problem when dealing with mobile targets, like the S-400.

Besides stale targeting data, the other challenge is timely post-battle damage assessment (BDA). While a significant focus of BDA has gone into proving the effectiveness of airstrikes for narrative-building efforts, timely BDA is also tactically valuable. It can, for example, be used to determine if a precision airstrike was successful and, if not, initiate the process for a follow-on strike.

To address these issues, recently, the Government of Pakistan signed a low-key agreement with China’s PIESAT Information Technology Co. Ltd. for a constellation of 20-plus satellites equipped with interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) capability. While Pakistan’s main ‘contractor’ for the system was the Ministry of National Food Security and Research, this constellation will, at some level, be used by the PAF’s Space Command (alongside PRSC-EO1 and PRSC-S1).

PIESAT’s Nuwa constellation reportedly promises to enable a global revisit rate of one hour via 54 satellites. Thus, it stands to reason that a constellation of at least 20 satellites could potentially offer that capability at a regional level. This would be a significant step towards near-real-time IMINT, but it will also drive – from necessity – a whole space systems ecosystem on the ground for both civilian and military applications. This article will only delve into one specific application, but as one will see, it would be significant in of itself and, as a result, require the PAF to rethink how it is steering in-house initiatives like the National Aerospace and Technology Park (NASTP).

The short of this analysis’ argument is that NASTP’s growth should primarily be in the area of military software. Indeed, Quwa analyst Aseem ul-Islam discussed that NASTP could be a promising entity to drive military software development in areas like AI, while Arslan Khan envisioned the same, but in the realm of communications. 

This article posits that NASTP should take the lead in developing the PAF’s stack for translating InSAR imagery into tangible tactical outcomes.