The Pakistan-China drone nexus and the cost of strategic dependency

In October 2018, the Pakistan Air Force's aerobatic display team, the Sherdils, announced via a social media post that Pakistan Aeronautical Complex Kamra and China's Chengdu Aircraft Industrial Group, a unit of the Aviation Industry Corporation of China, had agreed to jointly produce 48 Wing Loong II unmanned aerial vehicles. Neither AVIC nor PAC publicly confirmed the signing of a sales contract, and no details were disclosed about the deal's value, when exactly it was struck, or a delivery schedule. The announcement itself was, in retrospect, a fitting metaphor for how this technology relationship has been managed.

That announcement marked a formal deepening of a drone partnership that had been quietly expanding for years. The Pakistan Air Force had begun operating Wing Loong I drones prior to 2018, with two aircraft spotted on satellite imagery of Mianwali air base in 2017 and 2018, though no official purchase was ever publicly announced.

Alongside the air force's acquisitions, the Pakistan Army Aviation Corps chose to purchase the CH-4B unmanned combat aerial vehicle from China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, with a large number reportedly ordered and the first batch of five arriving in early 2021, deployed to Bahawalpur Army Aviation Corps air base where a dedicated UAV training airspace zone had been established. The Pakistan Navy, not to be left out, was also confirmed to be in the process of acquiring CH-4Bs for maritime roles. Across all three branches of the armed forces, Chinese drone platforms had, by the early 2020s, become a central component of Pakistan's unmanned aviation capability.

The structural logic of the partnership is not difficult to establish. American drones like the MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper are technologically more advanced, but Washington limits their export, especially to de facto allies of Beijing such as Pakistan. Excluded from the higher-end of the Western market, Pakistan turned to China not purely out of strategic affinity, though that is a factor, but out of constrained choices. China, for its part, has actively cultivated this position.

The Wing Loong II has been primarily developed for export and marketed by Chinese developers as a cheaper alternative to the MQ-1 Predator, with a per-unit price estimated at around $1-2 million compared to, for example, the MQ-9 Reaper's $30 million. The price differential is real, and for a defence budget under persistent fiscal pressure, it matters. What is less clearly communicated in the marketing materials is what that price differential actually reflects in terms of performance.

The CH-4B, which Pakistan's Army Aviation and Navy now operate, is externally similar to the MQ-9 Reaper to a degree that has drawn comment from analysts for years. The resemblance, however, largely ends at the silhouette. The CH-5, China's larger follow-on platform comparable to the Reaper, is equipped with an unidentified turbocharged piston engine with less than half the horsepower of the Garrett TPE331 turboprop mounted on the Reaper. This limits the CH-5's maximum altitude to 9 km, compared to the 12-15 km of the Reaper. 

Iraq's experience with the CH-4B has been most extensively documented. As of the end of June 2019, only one of Iraq's fleets of more than ten CH-4B drones was fully mission capable, with unspecified maintenance issues grounding the remainder, creating a major shortfall in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capacity according to a US Inspector General report on Operation Inherent Resolve. It was subsequently reported that all had been grounded owing to contractual problems with maintenance support. Jordan, another CH-4B operator, drew its own quiet conclusion. The Royal Jordanian Air Force put its CH-4Bs up for sale in June 2019, having found the type lacking, with Algeria having earlier decided against purchasing CH-4s after losing two of them to accidents during testing between 2013 and 2014. The pattern across multiple operators, in different operational environments and with different maintenance cultures, points to something systemic rather than situational.

The Wing Loong II, which constitutes the higher tier of Pakistan's Chinese drone portfolio, has accumulated its own operational record, primarily through UAE deployments in Libya. As of June 2020, a total of six Wing Loong IIs had been reported shot down or lost in Libya, all operated by the Libyan National Army. The losses were not the result of engaging peer-level adversaries. The Wing Loong IIs were shot down because they do not possess any jamming or self-protection systems on board. The absence of onboard self-protection is a capability gap that goes largely unmentioned in Chinese export documentation, and it represents a meaningful limitation for any operator seeking to use these platforms.

The Architecture of Dependency

The joint venture structure that has emerged between Pakistan and China is, on paper, the kind of arrangement that defence planners would consider a success. The model broadly follows the same pattern established with the JF-17 Thunder: supply of original parts and plans by Chengdu so that PAC Kamra can assemble aircraft locally, before transferring the technologies necessary for a portion of components to be produced domestically. 

What this architecture however produces is a layered dependency: on Chinese components, on Chinese technicians for production line setup and testing, and on Chinese willingness to transfer any given tier of technology. Export variants of Chinese military platforms routinely differ from domestically fielded versions in sensor quality, data link architecture, and electronic warfare integration. The Wing Loong IIs operated by the UAE in Libya were, notably, retrofitted with Thales satellite communications systems rather than Chinese ones — a modification that led to the ironic situation in which drones fitted with Thales satcom systems were being shot down by Thales SMART S Mk2 radars operated by Turkish-backed forces. The hardware gap that necessitated a French communications retrofit on a Chinese airframe is indicative of where export-grade Chinese drone technology currently sits relative to its marketing.

Pakistan's drone programme is institutionally embedded in a way that will make it difficult to unwind regardless of how China-Pakistan relations evolve. But the capability it represents is more constrained than the volume of announcements surrounding it suggests. The price is low for a reason, the maintenance record is public, and the combat losses are documented. The relationship continues to expand despite the evidence, speaks less to the technology's merits than to the dependency Islamabad has over Beijing for sophisticated technologies.