“Even at a 90% loss rate … 100 targets are struck.” That arithmetic — drawn from Shahed-class employment in recent campaigns — defines the trade-off Pakistan faces: produce loitering munitions as cheap, mass-produced attrition weapons, or as relatively scarce, high-end systems that will never reach the quantities needed to shape an air-defence war of attrition.
Pakistan’s narrow industrial base and the core dilemma
The core problem is structural. Pakistan lacks the deep aerospace manufacturing capacity, advanced composite fabrication expertise, and precision electronics production needed to mass-produce carbon-fibre, AI-enabled, GNSS-independent loitering munitions at wartime rates, the source argues. Evidence from the May 2025 conflict, the Russia-Ukraine war, and the ongoing Iran war all point to the same conclusion: effectiveness in loitering munitions campaigns is determined by production scale, and scale is a function of design simplicity rather than technical sophistication.
The Shahed design philosophy: simplicity to enable scale
The Iranian Shahed-136 model — and the Russian Geran-2 program that absorbed it — reduced each major subsystem to its simplest form and used civilian commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components with manual assembly. The airframe is fibreglass from a few moulds, hand-laid with epoxy; the propulsion is a 40–50 hp air-cooled piston engine; guidance is an INS aided by a civilian GPS/GLONASS receiver and a basic autopilot; warheads are conventional high-explosive charges in the 40–50 kg class; and launch is a multi-rail rack with a small rocket-assisted takeoff (RATO) booster. That combination yields low unit cost and the ability to absorb losses while depleting enemy air-defence interceptors.
What Pakistan can reuse from existing industry
Several Pakistani industrial strengths line up with the Shahed blueprint. A relatively substantial glass-reinforced plastic (GRP) sector — driven by boat-building, water tanks, and automotive aftermarkets — already possesses moulding and layup expertise that could produce fibreglass drone shells with minimal retooling. Pakistan’s motorcycle and small-engine manufacturing ecosystem, and firms such as Millat Tractors and its Bolan Castings Limited subsidiary, supply casting, machining, and assembly capabilities that could be redirected toward 40–50 hp piston engines. Guidance modules can be sourced as COTS from China, and Pakistan’s long-running munitions industry, including NESCOM and Pakistan Ordnance Factories (POF), already produces warheads and fuzes at scale. RATO boosters would be a derivative of existing solid-fuel rocket motor production in Pakistan’s missile programmes.
Risk: a fragmented portfolio of complex systems
Pakistan’s current loitering-munition landscape is broad: NESCOM, NASTP, private firms and imports are producing or developing the Mudamir-LR (Sysverve Aerospace), GIDS Sarkash-I, the Blaze-series, NASTP’s KaGeM V3, the Sarfarosh, Highmark-25 (Woot-Tech), and Dark Angel-II (a likely licence-built Chinese design from NORINCO or CASC). At the same time, Turkish designs demonstrated by Baykar — the K2 (unveiled March 2026, ~800 kg with a ~200 kg warhead, >2,000 km range, AI-enabled swarm autonomy and visual odometry), Sivrisinek (an evolution of the YIHA co-produced by Baykar and NASTP, shown in April in mixed-class formation with K2), and the Mızrak (debuted at SAHA 2026 with 1,000+ km range and GPS-independent optical guidance) — are technically advanced but require industrial infrastructure Pakistan does not possess. The source warns that dispersing limited production capacity across many such programmes risks delivering hundreds of high-end units per year rather than the thousands required to impose attrition.
Where advanced Turkish-style drones belong in Pakistan’s concept
Advanced, jet-powered systems have operational value but a narrower one: as support assets in a layered strike architecture rather than the mass-attrition layer. The source lists specific roles — acting as radar-signature analogues ahead of cruise missiles, exposing radar emitters to cue follow-on strikes, and providing EO/IR validation and AI-enabled target recognition to confirm IMINT-derived coordinates for Army Rocket Force Command targeting. For those roles, a few hundred advanced units per year would be a sensible investment; they are not substitutes for tens of thousands of expendable loitering munitions.
What this means for Millat Tractors, NESCOM, and Pakistan Ordnance Factories
- Millat Tractors and related casting/machining firms: Could be redirected to small-piston engine production and supply precision cast components for mass-produced propulsion units.
- NESCOM and electronics suppliers: Face a near-term choice between importing COTS guidance from China to enable serial production, or investing longer-term to indigenize electronics — the former accelerates volume, the latter is a second-order priority per the source.
- POF and munitions producers: Are positioned to supply 40–50 kg warheads and fuzes at the scales the Shahed-style approach requires.
The choice Pakistan must make is stark and technical rather than rhetorical: concentrate scarce production capacity on ruthlessly simple, COTS-heavy designs built for hand assembly and distributed workshops, or pursue a diverse portfolio of advanced systems that will be produced in operationally marginal quantities. The source’s arithmetic — thousands of cheap drones forcing tens of thousands of air-defence expenditures versus hundreds of expensive drones delivering limited attrition — leaves the next step clear. Will procurement planners prioritize the industrial realism needed to field mass-produced loitering munitions, or will they chase sophisticated capability at the cost of scale?
