Despite possessing the Babur cruise missile, Pakistan deliberately withheld its use, recognising that deploying a dual-capable system would risk signalling nuclear escalation. This restraint highlighted the paradox of South Asian crises: they are defined as much by what is withheld as by what is employed.
The subsequent Iran war of 2026 reinforced the lesson that modern conflicts, once ignited, can expand rapidly across domains and regions, exposing vulnerabilities in supply chains, maritime security, and crisis management.
Pakistan’s response has been to shift its emphasis towards conventional strike capabilities as the core of escalation control. The creation of the Army Rocket Force Command, distinct from nuclear command structures, represents an institutional effort to build credible long-range strike options below the nuclear threshold.
Systems such as the Fatah-series rockets and Fatah-IV subsonic cruise missiles, with ranges of up to 700 kilometres, now enable Pakistan to hold Indian military assets at risk without triggering nuclear alarm. This development reflects a deliberate move away from reliance on nuclear signalling, instead focusing on conventional firepower to manage escalation.
The Iran war underscored the viability of such an approach, demonstrating that states can impose costs through missiles and drones without crossing nuclear thresholds, though at the risk of horizontal escalation into energy infrastructure and maritime disruption.
The 2025 crisis also revealed that future India-Pakistan conflicts will be multi-domain by default. Airpower, drones, cyber operations, and information campaigns unfolded simultaneously, requiring integration across domains.
Pakistan has prioritised multi-domain warfare as an operational necessity, integrating artificial intelligence, electronic warfare, cyber capabilities, and precision-strike systems into a unified battlespace.
This approach seeks to offset India’s conventional superiority through speed, coordination, and disruption. Yet the Iran war showed that even technologically advanced states struggle to control escalation once multiple domains are engaged, reinforcing the need for discipline in escalation management.
Structural reforms within Pakistan’s military reflect this emphasis on escalation discipline. The move towards a Chief of Defence Forces consolidates operational authority across services, reducing decision latency and aligning military actions with political intent.
Jointness, therefore, is not merely about efficiency but about ensuring coherence in escalation. Centralisation reduces the risk of miscalculation but compresses decision-making timelines, a dangerous trade-off in nuclear environments where faster decisions are not always safer.
While India remains Pakistan’s primary strategic focus, the Iran war exposed vulnerabilities beyond the eastern front. Disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz highlighted Pakistan’s dependence on Gulf energy imports, threatening military readiness through shortages of aviation fuel, naval diesel, and transport fuel. Limited strategic petroleum reserves constrain Pakistan’s ability to sustain prolonged operations, forcing prioritisation between peacetime readiness and wartime endurance.
The Pakistan Navy has been compelled to divert resources towards securing sea lines of communication, reducing attention to India-focused contingencies. Economic shocks from rising oil prices and currency instability further strain defence modernisation.
Simultaneously, Pakistan faces the prospect of multi-front contingencies, with tensions on its western flank involving Afghanistan and instability along the Iran-Pakistan border. Recent airstrikes in Kabul and Kandahar illustrate Pakistan’s willingness to employ direct military coercion against western threats, marking a departure from proxy-based strategies.
Crisis management has also become increasingly externalised. The Iran war demonstrated that escalation is shaped not only by bilateral signalling but also by external actors, global markets, and information flows.
Pakistan has positioned itself as a mediator between the United States and Iran, reflecting both strategic necessity and diplomatic opportunity. Narrative control has become central to shaping perceptions of restraint and credibility, with information management influencing escalation as much as military capability. Credibility now depends not only on Pakistan’s actions but also on how those actions are interpreted by India, external powers, and global audiences.
Taken together, these developments point to a new model of deterrence in South Asia. Pakistan is moving away from a static framework in which nuclear weapons cap escalation, towards a dynamic approach centred on managing instability through conventional strike capabilities, multi-domain integration, joint command structures, and external crisis management. Yet this model carries inherent contradictions.
The more usable conventional options become under the nuclear shadow, the more likely they are to be employed, and the harder it becomes to prevent escalation. The Iran war demonstrated that even significant military capabilities cannot guarantee containment once conflicts expand across domains and regions.
The central paradox remains unresolved: the preparation for limited war makes such wars more likely, while simultaneously reducing the certainty that they will remain limited.
Pakistan’s strategic recalibration reflects a rational response to a changing battlespace. It seeks to create space for controlled conflict below the nuclear threshold, but in doing so, it risks contributing to a more permissive environment for limited war itself. The lesson of 2025 was that limited war is possible. The lesson of 2026 is that limited war may not stay limited.
Agencies
