Pakistan’s Mirages: Today’s Success and Tomorrow’s Roadmap Plus

Note: This article is a partial re-write of an older Quwa Premium piece – “Pakistan’s Mirages: Specialists Enduring Out of Necessity.” However, the latter half of this article delves into how the PAF used the Mirage III/5 during Swift Retort as well as how the PAF may configure the JF-17 to support the Mirages and how the lessons of using the Mirages in strike and maritime operations for decades could confirm Project AZM.

In April 2018, the AFP News Agency published an article detailing its visit to the Mirage Rebuild Factory (MRF) at Pakistan Aeronautical Complex (PAC).[1] The complete AFP article is available on Dawn News, but it provides an insight into the MRF’s activities in keeping the Pakistan Air Force’s (PAF) Dassault Mirage III and 5 fighters serviceable, especially with much of the fleet averaging 50 years in terms of airframe age.[2]

Interestingly, AFP was able to extract the reason why the PAF persists with operating the Mirage III/5, i.e. its continuing value as an effective strike aircraft, which the PAF Air Commodore Tariq Yazdani described as a “very agile aircraft capable of penetrating deep into the enemy’s territory without being detected by radar, which makes its sole mission — to drop bombs on the enemy’s position — quite easy.”[3]

Since its introduction to the PAF fleet in the 1968, the Mirage III/5 has transitioned from being the PAF’s mainstay high-tech fighter in the 1970s to a complementary asset to the newer F-16 in the 1980s. Today, the Mirage III/5 may not command as much attention as the F-16 and JF-17 as an air-to-air asset, but it is significantly more than just a valuable strike fighter – it is the PAF’s prime strike asset.

This prominence stems from two factors.