We dropped the ball on Denel and South Africa. Yes, it'd cost money to basically transplant their operations to Pakistan. But we're talking about shifting people, IP, and other non-capital-intensive elements. While the UAE can drop dimes, it'll never overpay for anything. Despite being a Gulf state, the UAE is ruthlessly pragmatic. I guarantee you we wasted a lot more money in the last 5 years than whatever the UAE spent to transfer Denel's organs into EDGE Group, Halcon, etc.
I go back to my articles about the Marlin LRAAM. I get that it wouldn't have been as long-range as the PL-15E. Fair. But it would've given us more independence in how to configure the JF-17 Block-3. It also would've helped build an R&D base for future DPMR technology which, in 5, 10, or 15 years, could translate into a cutting-edge AAM as good as any other available to us on the world market. Instead of paying a pretty dime for the Albatros-NG, we could've been developing a 60+ km range SAM based on the Marlin and Umkhonto. I don't even need to take note of South Africa's prior work on ramjet applications.
We're even talking about the JF-17's engine. Well, Ukraine thinks it can develop an RD-93-type engine. We can call it vaporware or "just an illustration," but Ukraine's R&D foundations are leagues ahead of Pakistan. Their 'vapourware' can materialize into substance because they know how to do it. We don't. Worse, we don't want to put our money towards learning or building those foundations. We can literally see what UAE and KSA are doing.
Unless we have leaders who just say, "enough is enough of this garbage," our future involves taking out loans to buy Chinese weapons. God knows no one's even doing anything to change our fiscal state so that we don't fall further into debt. Our military capability will gradually diminish relative to others because there's only so much you can buy with a PKR perpetually losing its value. One answer to our problem, perhaps, is the fact that to build a strong indigenous defence industry, you need strong economic thinking. Our economic thinking is woefully weak, so the R&D culture, industries, etc all mirror it.
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