Renting the High Ground: Commercial Space as the Great Equaliser in South Asia

When the guns fell silent after four days of air combat between India and Pakistan in May 2025, the contest over what had happened did not end. It moved into orbit. Within seventy-two hours of the strikes, the world was adjudicating the war through the lens of a single American commercial satellite firm, Maxar Technologies, whose imagery of damaged runways and hangars circulated globally and formed the basis of a detailed visual analysis of the airfields involved. The Indian foreign ministry, for its part, openly urged the use of commercially available satellite pictures to press its account of events. The precise scale of damage on both sides remains contested, as it always will be in the fog of a short, sharp war, and many of these claims have been debunked as AI-generated. The strategic point is not who lost what, but who held the overhead. For the first time in a South Asian crisis, the most consequential reconnaissance was neither Indian nor Pakistani. It belonged to private companies selling pictures of the Earth by subscription. This is the quiet revolution that should now occupy every air staff member in the region. Space-based intelligence, once the jealously guarded preserve of superpowers, has been democratised by a booming commercial market, and that democratisation is the single greatest equaliser available to the smaller power.

Ukraine is the proof of concept, and it is worth studying without sentiment. A country far smaller than its invader and lacking a sovereign military constellation of any consequence fought a near-peer largely on bended knees. Commercial providers including Maxar, Planet Labs, Capella, BlackSky and HawkEye 360 supplied a torrent of optical and radio-frequency intelligence, while the Finnish firm ICEYE’s synthetic aperture radar saw through cloud and darkness, and within months of using its data, Kyiv reported locating over seven thousand Russian equipment and troop positions. When the state could not buy fast enough, the public did: a Ukrainian charity crowdfunded a dedicated ICEYE satellite, the so-called people’s satellite, putting an all-weather radar eye over the front line. Overlaying this was connectivity, with more than fifty thousand Starlink terminals keeping a dispersed force networked when terrestrial links were severed. The cumulative effect inverted the usual logic of overhead reconnaissance. A smaller, poorer belligerent achieved persistent, all-weather, high-revisit awareness that, a decade earlier, only Washington or Moscow could field, and it did so through procurement and partnerships rather than by launching a bespoke fleet of its own. For anyone who has worked inside an air defence picture, the implication is hard to miss, because a state that once depended on the goodwill of larger patrons for its strategic eyes can now assemble much of that picture by contract, and the price of doing so keeps falling.

The equaliser carries a warning, however, and it is one Pakistan must read carefully before leaning on it, because rented power can be switched off. In March 2025, in the span of a single news cycle, the United States suspended Ukrainian access to the government portal through which it received commercial imagery, including Maxar’s, after a political rupture in Washington. The capability had not been destroyed; it had simply been denied by a decision taken in a foreign capital over which Kyiv had no influence. The episode exposed the central vulnerability of the commercial model: a subscription is only as reliable as the politics of the supplier and the government that brokers it. The strategic conclusion is not to abandon commercial space, which would be to surrender the equaliser, but to insist that access be assured, diversified across multiple providers and orbits, and wherever possible underwritten by a dependable ally rather than a single firm or a fickle patron. Resilience, not mere access, is the objective. A picture you cannot be guaranteed in wartime is a picture you cannot build a plan around.

India has chosen the opposite and more expensive road and understanding it sharpens Pakistan’s choice. Stung by the intelligence frictions of May 2025, when it leaned on its Cartosat satellites and foreign imagery to track the fight, New Delhi has accelerated a sovereign answer. Its Cabinet Committee on Security has approved the Space Based Surveillance Phase III programme, a constellation of fifty-two dedicated military satellites, and the Defence Space Agency intends to deploy it by 2029 at a cost of nearly twenty-seven thousand crore rupees, with the first launch slated for April 2026 and roughly two thirds of the fleet built by private industry. Linked by artificial intelligence and tied into India’s air defence and targeting architecture, this is a bid for a permanent, indigenous orbital gaze over Pakistan, China and the Indian Ocean. It is an impressive undertaking, and it would be unwise to dismiss it. But it is also a particular bet, that intelligence superiority can be bought outright, satellite by costly satellite. That wager defines the asymmetry Pakistan now has to answer, and the answer need not be symmetrical.

Trying to match India launch for launch would be a strategic error, because the arithmetic is merciless. SUPARCO’s development budget runs to roughly nineteen million dollars a year, a sum that India’s space agency spends in about four days. Parity by accumulation is not on the table, and chasing it would only drain resources from the air force’s core modernisation. The equaliser strategy is the wiser path, and the encouraging reality is that Pakistan has already begun to walk it. Over the past fifteen months SUPARCO has placed a clutch of indigenous earth-observation satellites into orbit, culminating in the PRSC-EO3 launched in April 2026, the country’s most capable home-built imaging satellite to date. Crucially, EO-3 carries an onboard artificial intelligence processor that analyses imagery in orbit rather than beaming raw data to the ground, which shortens the path from collection to usable product, precisely the bottleneck that the compressed timelines of May 2025 had exposed. Layered onto this is the commercial and allied dimension that makes the strategy work at scale, for in September 2025 Pakistan signed an agreement with China’s PIESAT for a twenty-satellite constellation, complete with an in-country manufacturing plant and integrated communications and remote-sensing services. This is the equaliser in action, proliferated overhead acquired through partnership at a fraction of the cost of a bespoke military fleet.

What turns these separate achievements into a usable capability is integration, and the Pakistan Air Force is well placed to provide it rather than wait for others to do so. It is the service that operates the targeting and air defence networks that any overhead picture must ultimately feed, and it has spent recent years building the industrial base that such integration requires. The clearest expression of that effort is the National Aerospace Science and Technology Park, founded as an initiative of the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Zaheer Ahmed Baber Sidhu, and established to connect industry, academia and government across the aerospace and emerging-technology domains, with regional chapters now operating in several cities. Its practical value to an intelligence strategy is specific rather than rhetorical, because a domestic park that develops avionics, sensors, software and artificial intelligence gives the country somewhere to localise the ground processing, data fusion and machine learning on which any modern imagery enterprise depends and which cannot sensibly be entrusted to a foreign supplier. If Pakistan is to convert a scattering of indigenous, commercial and allied feeds into a single usable product, it will need precisely that kind of sovereign technical base, and the air force is the institution already building it.

The conclusion that follows is practical rather than triumphal. The opening exchanges of the next India-Pakistan crisis are likely to be contested in the overhead before they are settled on the ground, and the decisive variable will not be the raw number of satellites either side has launched. It will be the ability to combine indigenous, allied and commercial sources into one intelligence picture that is timely, available in poor weather, and reliable even when a supplier or a foreign government might prefer to withhold it. India has chosen to pursue that picture largely through ownership, at considerable expense. Pakistan can pursue it through a blend of modest indigenous capability, deepening partnership and assured commercial access, provided it treats resilience and integration as the first priority and gives the air force the lead in delivering them. The commercial revolution in space has lowered the barrier to strategic sight, and whether Pakistan turns that opening into a durable advantage will depend less on what it can launch than on how well it organises what it is already able to obtain.