Since the May 2025 conflict with India, the leaders of each of Pakistan’s tri-services – the Army, Navy, and Air Force – have championed the military’s adoption of multi-domain operations (MDO), which, in the words of Lt General Nauman Zakria, amounts to the “integrated use of cyber and electronic warfare, ISR, space-based capabilities, and synchronized maneuver generating cross-domain effects.”
In its most distilled form, Pakistan’s MDO is its capacity to deploy a single ‘enablement’ infrastructure – such as ISTAR – across the tri-services, allowing each service arm to tap into that infrastructure for its respective strike or attack operations; a straightforward example is the Army Rocket Force Command (ARFC) tapping into Space Command, stewarded by the PAF, for targeting information drawn from the country’s satellite constellation. There are many more aspects to this, but the basic point is that one service arm can now readily leverage systems managed by another.
Evolving Organizational Structures in the Tri-Services
Where it gets notably interesting is that beneath the terminology, an emerging organizational structure is also at play – i.e., ‘unified sub-commands.’ To be clear, the armed forces have not explicitly defined the term, so these insights are this author’s observations. The short of it is that each of the main service branches is beginning to employ a sub-service arm that would integrate deeply with a sub-service arm within another branch.
Returning to the earlier example, the ARFC operates under the Army but arguably serves as Pakistan’s primary surface-to-surface strike arm, using a growing mix of guided artillery rockets, tactical ballistic missiles, and subsonic and supersonic cruise missiles; yet for the ARFC to be as impactful as it could be, its ISTAR net requires input from the PAF’s Space Command, the steward – at least from a military perspective – of Pakistan’s growing satellite constellation (i.e., PRSC-EO1, EO2, EO3, S1, HS1, and, in the future, InSAR). The term ‘MDO’ implies that the ARFC is, or will be, directly connected at the technological level with Space Command.
Thus, if one views the traditional main arms as vertical silos, one now has – via the ARFC and Space Command – a horizontal line cutting across each of them, and where it gets particularly noteworthy is that adjacent to this horizontal line is, potentially, a command-and-control (C2) structure that takes ownership of that horizontal ‘kill-chain.’
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