India spends roughly eight times more on defence than Pakistan (about $86 billion to Pakistan’s $10 billion). On paper, that gap should settle almost any question about relative capability, right?
But the 2025 aerial exchange over Kashmir showed something more structurally interesting; that Pakistan was able to contest the air domain credibly despite chronic fiscal distress and repeated IMF bailouts!
How? Through its industrial architecture.
More broadly, Pakistan is part of a rising class of mid-tier defence producers (à la Turkey and South Korea), whose military systems are “good enough,” entirely sovereign, and economically… cheap?
These producers are obviously not competing at the technological frontier, but where they can compete extraordinarily well is on coordination, integration, and resilience.
I’ve spent about a year getting stuck deep into mid-tier defense production and capabilities, and this research on Pakistan’s JF-17 was an outcome of the time I spent with the Pakistan Air Force last year, mapping in great detail the Pakistani industrial strategy.
In short, the 2025 India-Pakistan episode did not overturn the regional balance of power. But… it did shift the analytical lens. Military capability is increasingly an industrial property; an emergent function of how institutions, suppliers, and doctrine align over time.
This article applies the architecture-lag and coordination-architecture frameworks developed formally in two companion papers by me, Sinéad O’Sullivan: “Institutions as Coordination Architectures” and “Market Formation as a Systems Engineering Problem.” Available on request: s@sinead.co