Geostrategic Media Political Commentary, Analysis, Security, Defense
Dr. Yashwant Singh
Most comparisons between Iran’s 2025–26 war with Israel and the United States and a hypothetical Pakistan–India conflict ask the wrong question. They tend to focus either on the two sides’ ability to manage escalation or on whether Pakistan possesses “enough” missiles, drones, satellites, and other systems to sustain a prolonged exchange in the way Iran did. These approaches treat attrition capacity as if it were a single variable that can be increased through the acquisition of additional weapons systems. It is not. The ability to sustain a war of attrition is the product of at least four interdependent variables: industrial production, geography, escalation architecture, and economic depth. A state needs these variables to reinforce one another if it is to sustain a prolonged conflict without suffering disproportionate strategic or economic exhaustion. Iran possesses significant advantages across three of these dimensions. Pakistan possesses only a partial advantage in one—and, critically, it is not necessarily the variable that would determine the outcome of a prolonged conflict with India.
The more useful comparison, therefore, is not simply who possesses more missiles, but what a sustained war costs each country every week and who is better positioned to absorb those costs. Iran’s military and economic structure has evolved over decades under sanctions and repeated confrontation with technologically superior adversaries. Its defense architecture has consequently emphasized relatively inexpensive, dispersed and replaceable systems, including ballistic and cruise missiles, drones, underground infrastructure and geographically distributed military assets. This does not make Iran immune to attrition, nor does it mean that Iran can sustain unlimited warfare. Rather, it gives Tehran mechanisms for imposing costs on an adversary without necessarily matching that adversary system-for-system. Pakistan’s structural position is different. Its economy is considerably more vulnerable to prolonged disruption, its geographic depth is limited relative to the scale of the potential Indian theater, and India’s substantially larger industrial and economic base creates an asymmetric endurance problem. In a prolonged exchange, the central question would therefore become whether Islamabad could replace losses and sustain expenditure faster than New Delhi could impose them.
Geography further complicates the comparison. Iran possesses enormous territorial depth, mountainous terrain, dispersed population centers, extensive underground facilities and strategic access to multiple theaters. Its geography allows Tehran to distribute military infrastructure and complicate an adversary’s targeting cycle. Pakistan has important geographic advantages of its own, particularly its mountainous western and northern regions, but its principal confrontation with India is concentrated along a comparatively constrained strategic frontier. Moreover, Pakistan’s major population centers, economic infrastructure and military facilities are concentrated in areas that can be placed under substantial pressure from India’s larger conventional and stand-off capabilities. Geography therefore cannot be reduced to a question of territory alone. What matters is how effectively territory can absorb punishment, conceal military assets, preserve logistical networks and sustain national economic activity under attack. On those measures, Iran’s geography provides a stronger foundation for prolonged attrition than Pakistan’s.
The escalation architecture is equally important. Iran’s strategic approach has historically relied on maintaining multiple layers between the initial battlefield and the threshold of existential escalation: conventional missile forces, drones, proxies and partner organizations, maritime capabilities, cyber capabilities and calibrated signaling. This creates options for imposing costs while retaining some control over the pace and geography of escalation. Pakistan possesses nuclear deterrence, a major strategic advantage against existential threats, but nuclear deterrence does not automatically translate into conventional endurance. Indeed, the existence of nuclear weapons can create a paradox: they may deter a full-scale war while simultaneously placing greater pressure on both sides to keep conventional operations below the nuclear threshold. Pakistan would therefore need to manage a narrow escalation corridor in which it could impose sufficient costs on India to preserve deterrence without triggering a level of escalation that neither side could control. India, meanwhile, has increasingly invested in stand-off weapons, drones, air defense, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and precision-strike capabilities that could increase the cost of Pakistan’s fixed military infrastructure without necessarily producing immediate escalation to the nuclear level.
The decisive variable may ultimately be economic depth. Iran’s experience under sanctions has created a distinctive form of wartime resilience: the ability to operate with constrained access to global finance, substitute imports, develop domestic production and prioritize military expenditure despite economic pressure. Pakistan does not possess the same degree of insulation. Its dependence on external financing, foreign exchange availability, energy imports and international financial institutions creates vulnerabilities that could become increasingly severe during a prolonged conflict. India, by contrast, possesses a far larger economy, greater industrial capacity, deeper financial reserves and a substantially larger domestic market. Consequently, a Pakistan–India war should not be assessed primarily through inventory comparisons. The more consequential question is which side can sustain the replacement cycle longer—replacing missiles, drones, aircraft, air-defense interceptors, precision munitions, communications equipment and infrastructure while simultaneously maintaining the civilian economy. Iran’s comparative advantage has been its ability to turn attrition into a strategic instrument: making each exchange impose political and economic costs on its adversary while preserving enough capacity to continue fighting. Pakistan would face a fundamentally different equation. Unless Islamabad can expand domestic production, diversify supply chains, strengthen foreign-exchange resilience and preserve escalation control, a prolonged war could progressively shift the balance toward India. The lesson from Iran is therefore not that Pakistan needs more weapons. It is that war endurance is an ecosystem—and Pakistan currently lacks several of the structural components required to sustain a long war of attrition.
Production: The Difference Between Owning a Factory and Owning a Subscription
Iran’s missile and drone arsenal is domestically manufactured. The Shahab, Emad, Kheibar Shekan, and Fattah families, and the Shahed loitering-munition line, are produced inside Iran by an industrial base built for wartime replenishment, not peacetime display. When Iran expends a hundred missiles in a salvo, the question of what replaces them is a question about Iranian machine tools, propellant chemistry, and workforce, not about a foreign government’s export licensing calendar.
Pakistan’s recent modernization is real but runs on a different mechanism entirely: acquisition, not production. Its 2025 satellite cadence – PAUSAT-1, PRSC-EO1, PRSS-2, HS-1, and the EO-series that followed – flew exclusively on Chinese Long March vehicles, built and launched by Chinese state industry. Its most capable strike drones, the Bayraktar TB2 and Akıncı, are Turkish airframes integrated through supply agreements. Pakistan’s indigenous line, Burraq and Shahpar, exists, but even sympathetic assessments describe it as limited-capacity and parallel to the imported systems rather than a substitute for them.
This distinction is not cosmetic. An attrition war is, mechanically, a competition in replacement rate: whoever can regenerate stock faster than the enemy destroys it wins, independent of who fights better in the opening days. A state that manufactures its own munitions controls its own replacement rate. A state that imports them controls only its order size, and a partner’s willingness to keep filling that order under wartime pressure, sanctions risk, and its own competing priorities is a variable Islamabad does not control. Chinese and Turkish technology transfer makes Pakistan’s existing stockpile more accurate and more efficient per unit fired. It does not create a second stockpile behind the first. Those are different problems, and only one of them scales with time.
Geography: Externalizing Cost Versus Absorbing It
Iran’s second structural advantage is rarely stated in military terms because it is, at bottom, economic: Iran sits beside the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil trade passes. This gives Tehran something Islamabad structurally cannot replicate: the ability to make the cost of a prolonged crisis a global problem rather than a purely domestic one. A shipping disruption near Hormuz moves oil markets in Rotterdam and Tokyo; it forces outside powers to have a stake in how quickly the crisis ends, and it means Iran is not the only party absorbing the bill for a long war. The Arabian Sea gives Pakistan useful access, but it commands no comparable chokepoint. If a Pakistan-India war runs long, the entire cost, fiscal, infrastructural, humanitarian, is borne by the two combatants and, disproportionately, by the weaker economy of the two.
The physical geography of the fight compounds this. Iran fought Israel and the United States entirely at range: no shared border, no realistic invasion scenario, a war conducted through interception rates and reload cycles rather than territorial contact. Distance functioned as its own form of depth: a bad week of missile exchanges could not collapse into loss of ground. Pakistan and India share a live, heavily garrisoned border with forces already forward-deployed on both sides. A prolonged exchange there carries a structural risk that a Tehran-Tel Aviv exchange never had: escalation from stand-off strikes into contact along the line of control, a shift in the character of the war that neither government could fully control once triggered. This is precisely why Pakistani doctrine compresses toward a matter of days rather than weeks; not as a preference, but as an acknowledgment that time itself works against it in a way it never worked against Iran.
Nuclear Weapons: A Ceiling, Not a Fuel Tank
The most common error in this comparison is treating Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal as Iran’s missing industrial base by another name, as though warheads could substitute for factories. They cannot, because they solve a different problem. Iran fought as a non-nuclear state against nuclear-armed or nuclear-capable adversaries; the asymmetry ran in Iran’s favour in one specific sense: Tehran could absorb escalation risk without triggering the mutual-annihilation calculus that governs a fight between two nuclear peers, because it was not itself a nuclear target in that exchange in the way its adversaries were.
Pakistan and India are symmetric nuclear powers facing each other directly, and that symmetry does not extend the tolerable length of a war; it compresses it. Nuclear deterrence, correctly understood, does not require the Cold War arithmetic of Mutually Assured Destruction; it requires only assured retaliation; a survivable second-strike capability and credible willingness to use it, which both Pakistan and India possess at a rough threshold of sufficiency regardless of exact warhead counts. But a deterrence threshold is not a war-fighting resource. It stops India from believing it can convert its conventional and economic advantages into unlimited pressure at acceptable cost; it does nothing to manufacture Pakistani missiles, restore Pakistani foreign exchange reserves, or replace Pakistani aircraft. Signalling nuclear readiness during a losing conventional exchange does not resolve the exchange in Pakistan’s favour; it transforms the crisis into one with a set of possible outcomes uniformly worse than the conventional pressure it was meant to relieve. The doctrine works by keeping the threshold ambiguous, not by making the threshold usable. This is the opposite function of what a war of attrition needs: it is a lid, not fuel.
Economic Depth: The Variable That Decides Everything Else
Underneath production, geography, and nuclear posture sits the variable that ultimately governs all three: fiscal capacity to sustain a state at war. India’s defense expenditure runs roughly seven to eight times Pakistan’s in absolute terms, and the gap that matters is not the ratio itself but what the ratio does over time. In a four-day exchange, existing stockpiles and readiness dominate, and the spending gap barely registers. In a multi-week exchange, the gap determines who can still import fuel, service external debt, and keep currency reserves from collapsing while simultaneously paying for war. Pakistan’s economy operates with persistently thin foreign exchange buffers and recurring balance-of-payments strain; a prolonged crisis does not just cost Pakistan materiel, it threatens the financial plumbing that keeps the state solvent. Iran, despite decades of sanctions, built its wartime posture around exactly this problem and engineered around it through domestic production that does not require hard-currency imports to sustain. Pakistan has built no equivalent insulation. Its own hydrological dependence (roughly four-fifths of its irrigated agriculture drawing on a river system whose upstream governance sits partly outside its control) adds a slow-moving but real amplifier to this fiscal fragility, one that operates on a seasonal and annual timescale but compounds precisely in the months where a long war would already be straining the state.
This is why Pakistan’s rational strategy is not attrition at all, but time denial: rapid escalation to a credible ceiling, fast diplomatic closure, and reliance on outside actors, chiefly China, to shorten the crisis window, rather than any attempt to out-produce or outlast India in a sustained exchange. China’s interest in avoiding a nuclear crisis on its border and protecting its own regional investments gives Pakistan real, but bounded and probabilistic, depth: an opportunity cost imposed on Indian planning, not a standing guarantee of Chinese material support at wartime tempo.
What the May 2025 Crisis Already Demonstrated
Pakistan does not need a hypothetical comparison to Iran; it has already run the experiment. The India-Pakistan crisis of May 2025, assessed by outside observers as the most significant escalation between the two states since Kargil, was fought over roughly four days and involved, by most accounts, a large-scale employment of Pakistan’s Turkish-supplied tactical drone inventory against India’s layered air-defence network. Whatever the genuine disagreement between Indian- and Pakistani-aligned characterizations of the outcome, the episode’s very shape confirms the argument: it stayed short, it stayed below the nuclear threshold, and it ended through rapid diplomatic closure rather than sustained exchange. That is not what a state confident in its capacity for attrition produces. It is precisely what a state built around time denial produces when time denial works as designed.
Two Different Kinds of Leverage
Iran’s capacity for a long war rests on production it owns, distance that converts a bad week into an interception problem rather than a territorial one, a nuclear asymmetry that let it absorb risk rather than manage mutual annihilation, and, quietly underwriting all of it, a chokepoint that lets it externalize the war’s cost onto the rest of the world. Pakistan possesses none of these in comparable measure. Its hardware pipeline runs through Beijing and Ankara rather than its own factories; its adversary sits across a live, garrisoned border rather than hundreds of kilometres of open territory; its nuclear relationship with India is symmetric rather than asymmetric, which caps escalation rather than extending it; and it has no equivalent lever to make the rest of the world share its war’s cost.
None of this means Pakistan cannot fight, or cannot inflict serious costs, or cannot generate real escalation risk in a crisis. It means Pakistan cannot afford to fight on India’s terms, where terms means duration, and everything Pakistan has actually built, from satellite constellations to drone fleets to its nuclear posture, is coherent only when read as an attempt to avoid ever needing to. Iran’s model is built to survive a long war. Pakistan’s model is built to make sure one never starts.
Author’s Bio:
Dr. Yashwant Singh is an Indian sociologist working at the intersection of urban studies, development, nature and geopolitics. He holds an M.Phil. in Sociology from the University of Delhi and a Ph.D. from the University of Hyderabad, and recently served as Assistant Professor of Sociology at GITAM (Deemed to be) University, Bengaluru. Alongside his academic work, his essays and analyses have been published across several international platforms, including Across Voices, Modern Diplomacy, Geostrategic Media, South Asia Journal, World Geostrategic Insights, and IA-Forum, where he offers sociological and analytical perspectives on global affairs, strategic developments, and the changing dynamics of contemporary societies.
