This is exactly the issue, people don’t understand the modern war and think downsizing somehow means we’re going to get rid of all our manpower. That’s not how this works. If the entire worlds military experts have agreed that downsizing in the favor of modernization is the way forward, then how are you going to justify your stance against it?
Do you know how much of the Pakistani army is simply sitting idle, doing absolutely nothing? Hundreds of thousands of soldiers. All of them poorly equipped (comparatively) to handle a major conflict. If instead we downsized, and equipped the smaller army with much better equipment, we would be much better off. You keep saying the forces need to modernize, but where will we get the money for that if it just keeps growing in size?
What do you mean india is on a warpath? I mean absolutely no offense but this is such a baseless statement Pakistanis keep repeating over and over to justify needless defense spending. There has been no such indication apart from the emotional outburst Pakistanis often show.
An all out war between india and Pakistan is less likely now than it has been in decades due to the geopolitical situation of the world and how war has evolved.
An india Pakistan war, if it occurs now (but is highly unlikely to occur in the world of political, economical and guerrilla warfare), is not going to be a massive conflict this time, it will be small, concentrated skirmishes in the air, on the the land, and in the sea, that will be confined to these areas and not all over the borders. Both countries have shown this is the case time and again. We saw it on 27th Feb, we saw it in Indias fight with China. We saw it in the last two standoffs we had with india, we saw it in 1999 in Kargil.
Pakistan at the moment is woefully unprepared for such a war because india is outdoing us in technology, they have more money and can equip their troops and forces with better and more modern equipment, so in the case of a small scale war, where both sides have equal numbers, india will have the edge due to technology, because they’ll have downsized and will have spent that money in better tech, meanwhile us with our lumbering 500 thousand troops that are under equipped will lose because we can’t use them effectively.
Downsizing is the way forward, a smaller force equipped with modern rifles, optics, radios, IFVs, UCAVs, tanks, covered by modern fighters, helicopters and artillery.
I still disagree, Even with all threats Pakistan is facing, we have hundreds of thousands of troops sitting idly. Taking up money that is better spent on equipping the troops that are actually deployed with better equipment. I’m not saying we should downsize massively, but certainly enough to where we have a better balance of reserves to quality of equipment, right now we’re fairly biased towards manpower instead of quality of equipment and this needs to change as the type of threats we face change. Even for insurgencies, do we have all our forces deployed? Or just a very minor part of them? Now what if we got rid of a portion of the manpower that’s not deployed to better equip the small amount of troops that are deployed to fight insurgency? We’d get better results instantly. That’s what we need to do. Everyone keeps saying our boys need UCAVs or Modern IFVs or new rifles, but the truth is due to our economy, equipping such a massive army with modern equipment is simply impossible, it can only be done by decreasing the amount of troops we have.