Why Pakistan Is Turning to Private Firms to Build Its Drones Pro

On 14 May 2026, the Ministry of Defence Production (MoDP) held a session on drone technology with several of Pakistan’s private-sector unmanned aerial systems (UAS) developers, chaired by the Secretary Defence Production, Lt Gen (Retd) Muhammad Chiragh Haider, at the ministry’s Directorate General Research and Development Establishment in Rawalpindi.

The official account describes the session’s purpose as strengthening coordination between the public and private sectors on drone warfare and surveillance, with the participating firms presenting their operational challenges and recommendations directly to the ministry.

The MoDP committed to providing the regulatory procedures, testing infrastructure, procurement mechanisms, and research support that a domestic drone ecosystem requires, and it described locally produced unmanned capability as a national priority.

That commitment is already observable in the field of loitering munitions (LM) and one-way attack (OWA) drones, where private firms have been supplying designs to the armed forces for the past two years.

Quwa’s November 2025 review of the one-way effector (OWE) market and its May 2026 update listed at least a half-dozen new distinct loitering-munition (LM) designs in development or early production across Pakistan’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private firms, with a meaningful share originating from the private sector.

Woot-Tech Aerospace is the most prominent of these private firms. Founded in 2021, it has moved from commercial vertical take-off-and-landing drones for agriculture and survey work into a defence catalogue that now covers target drones, the Juggernaut armed multirotor, piston-powered LMs, the HiMark-25 TJ turbojet OWA, the Nimbus 2K cruise missile, and the SHARDS drone-swarm system.

Sysverve Aerospace, a Rawalpindi-based company, sits alongside it and describes itself as Pakistan’s largest indigenous UAS developer. It built its reputation on the Hadaf and Saad target-drone families before entering the strike domain with the Mudamir-LR, a Shahed-style pusher-propeller OWA drone credited with a range beyond 600 km and intended for sea-denial operations in the Arabian Sea.

Several observations indicate that this demand comes directly from the armed forces. Sysverve has displayed inspection lines holding more than 130 assembled Mudamir-LR airframes, which points to the company’s investment in tooling for sustained production. That investment would only have occurred in response to an actual armed forces procurement requirement.

The Pakistan Navy (PN) live-fired the Mudamir-LR against surface targets in the North Arabian Sea in January 2026, in an exercise that also ran air-defence drills.

Woot-Tech’s Juggernaut has entered service with the Pakistan Navy and its special operations forces, the Special Services Group Navy (SSGN). And Woot-Tech’s recent test of the RATO-150 rocket booster could not have taken place without sign-off from one of the tri-services (likely the PN), which suggests that – at the minimum – the PN wanted that launch capability for the effectors the firm already produces.