Executive Summary
The May 2025 conflict served as a critical test for Pakistan’s modernized air defences. Its outcomes against drone swarms and the implicit risk of massed BrahMos strikes will likely drive a new phase of capability assessment.
Quwa’s core finding identifies a significant and underserved capability gap – the ‘Missing Middle’ – in Pakistan’s layered defences, creating both an immediate and addressable market for modern short-to-medium-range air defence systems (SHORAD/MRAD).
Beyond this primary opportunity, the brief details growing requirements for:
- Advanced Very Short-Range Air Defence (V-SHORAD) with C-UAS capabilities.
- Directed Energy Weapons (DEW) and integrated hard/soft-kill solutions.
- Next-generation Electronic Warfare (EW) components.
Crucially, this brief moves beyond solely technical requirements to deliver actionable commercial intelligence.
It assesses the primary market-entry barriers – including fiscal constraints, domestic programs, and entrenched foreign competition – and provides concrete strategies for positioning your solution to win.
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Present State
Pre-2019 Air Defence Investment
Before 2019, Pakistan’s land-based integrated air defence system (IADS) was primarily oriented towards providing point-defence coverage of key installations. Hence, the bulk of the Pakistani military tri-services’ investments consisted of short-range surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems, such as the Thales Crotale or its Chinese-built counterparts.
The Pakistan Air Force (PAF) built upon this by inducting the MBDA Spada 2000-Plus, a comparatively longer-ranged SAM, but still working in the short-range layer. From 2014, the Pakistan Army (PA) procured the LY-80/HQ-16 from China, which (with its range of 40 km) had technically become Pakistan’s longest-range SAM for several years.
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