From Air Force to Aerospace Force: The Case for Pakistan’s Space Command

In April 2024, the People’s Liberation Army carried out its most significant reorganisation in nearly a decade. It dissolved its Strategic Support Force and, in its place, stood up three new arms reporting directly to the Central Military Commission, chief among them a dedicated Aerospace Force charged with the whole of China’s military space enterprise. Western analysts quickly observed that the new force’s remit made it broadly comparable to the United States Space Force, leaving only two independent space services in the world. For Pakistan, and for the Pakistan Air Force in particular, the moment carries a lesson that has nothing to do with imitation and everything to do with logic. The most capable militaries on earth, including the one Pakistan works most closely with, have concluded that space can no longer be treated as a scattered set of enabling functions bolted onto existing services. It requires an institutional home of its own. Pakistan’s own doctrine has quietly arrived at the same conclusion. What remains is to complete the journey in structure, and the case for doing so now, through a dedicated Space Command evolving toward a full aerospace force, has become difficult to refuse.

The direction of travel among serious air forces is unmistakable, spanning both the West and the East. The United States led the way, establishing the Space Force as an independent service in December 2019 to ensure that space received the doctrine, budget, and advocacy that a subordinate role had denied it. In the same year, France created its Space Command, placing military space governance under an air arm that it renamed the Air and Space Force, and framing its own approach as the defence of air, very high altitude and space as one cohesive whole. The United Kingdom followed with a Space Command under the Royal Air Force, and the wider alliance moved in step when NATO designated space an operational domain alongside land, sea, air and cyber. To the east, Russia had already folded its space troops into a combined Aerospace Force in 2015, and China’s 2024 reform completed the pattern. Read together, these decisions describe a spectrum of institutional choices rather than a single template: a space command inside an existing air service at one end, a fused aerospace force in the middle, and a fully independent space force at the other. The common thread is the recognition that space power withers without an owner.

That recognition has already crossed Pakistan’s eastern frontier. India created a Defence Space Agency in 2019 as the nucleus of a future integrated space organisation, issued a joint military space doctrine, and has since accelerated the development of a dedicated military constellation of dozens of surveillance satellites under that agency’s direction. Whatever one makes of the pace or the expense, the institutional signal is clear: New Delhi is building not merely satellites but a structure to command them, with its own doctrine, budget and chain of authority. For Pakistan to match India in doctrinal language while lagging in institutional form would be to win the argument and lose the organisation. Structure, in the end, is what converts capability into sustained advantage, and it is structure that India is now putting in place.

The encouraging reality is that Pakistan does not need to be persuaded of the principle, because its air force has already adopted it in thought and in combat. Under Air Chief Marshal Zaheer Ahmed Baber Sidhu, the PAF has organised itself around a declared concept of full-spectrum multi-domain dominance that integrates air, space, cyber and electronic warfare into a single operational framework, and it has been recast from a platform-centric service into a capability-centric next-generation air and space power. This is not an aspiration alone. Marking the anniversary of the May 2025 fighting, the Air Chief noted that the force had, for the first time, conducted full-spectrum, multi-domain operations, drawing on indigenous space and cyber assets within a homegrown kill chain. In doctrine and in practice, then, space is already treated as integral to how the PAF fights. The concept is settled. It is the container that is missing.

For all that conceptual clarity, Pakistan’s space effort remains institutionally dispersed. The national space agency SUPARCO sits under one ministry, the air force’s National Aerospace Science and Technology Park under another authority, and the country’s growing fleet of earth-observation satellites and its emerging commercial partnerships are spread across yet more bodies. Each is a genuine achievement, yet none amounts to a single organisation that owns the space mission, holds its budget line, writes its doctrine and grows a professional cadre dedicated to it. This is the classic condition of a capability whose doctrine has outrun its structure, the same condition the United States diagnosed when it judged that space would never receive its due while it remained one competing priority among many inside a larger service. Pakistan now stands at precisely that juncture. The pieces exist; what they lack is a roof.

The remedy best suited to Pakistan’s means is not an expensive independent service on the American model but the pragmatic middle path that France has taken, a dedicated Space Command located within an air arm that formally becomes an aerospace force. Such a command would give the space mission what it presently lacks: a clear owner, a protected budget, an authoritative voice in force design, and a career stream that produces genuine space professionals rather than aviators on temporary attachment. The organisational logic is well understood in the scholarship on force design, which stresses that the central question is less whether a capability matters than which bureaucratic home allows it to mature and to connect across the domains on which it depends. For Pakistan, the answer lies close at hand. The PAF already operates the targeting, air defence, and electronic warfare networks that space assets must feed; it already runs the aerospace industrial base through NASTP; and it already thinks in multi-domain terms. Housing a Space Command within an evolving Pakistan Aerospace Force would therefore not create a new stovepipe but consolidate an existing strength at a cost the country can bear and on a model an allied air force has already proved.

Timing in institutional reform is everything, and rarely have the conditions been so favourable. Structural change of this kind fails without continuity at the top because it takes years to stand up a command, write its doctrine and grow its people, and each change of leadership risks reopening settled questions. Pakistan is unusually well placed on this count because the Air Chief who authored the multi-domain doctrine now has the mandate to institutionalise it. His tenure was extended by two years to March 2028, giving him a rare and deliberate runway. He also brings the three ingredients that reform requires and which seldom align at once: a doctrine that already names space as a domain, an industrial vehicle in NASTP through which to resource it, and the credibility of a force whose multi-domain approach was validated in combat in May 2025. Set against the PAF’s own stated ambition of a next-generation air force by 2047, a Space Command is not a leap into the unknown but the logical next milestone on a road the service has already mapped.

The question facing Pakistan is therefore not whether space matters to its defence, which its doctrine and its recent operations have already answered, but whether it will give that conviction an institutional form before its rivals consolidate theirs. The wider world has resolved the same question decisively, from Washington and Paris to Beijing, and India is resolving it next door. Standing up a Space Command now, as a considered step toward a Pakistan Aerospace Force, would turn a decade of scattered space achievement into a coherent institution with a doctrine, a budget and a cadre of its own. It would be a decision less about new hardware than about how the force is organised to think and to fight, and it would fall to a leadership that, for once, has both the vision and the time to see it through. The concept is ready, and the moment is here. What remains is the decision.