I think our honey moon with f16s is over. I feel that our future lies with China.
Generally speaking, I agree with your post. We must break the shackles, so to speak, and reduce our reliance on the Americans alone. We could do that by diversification, as
Abu Zulfiqar has mentioned above, and there are still many markets that we can explore. The Europeans are expensive, I know, but they're not too far behind the Americans in terms of tech, and the overall cost can be brought down by incorporating long-term benefits into the deals as well (Transfer of Production Technology etc). Russia is also, in my opinion, an avenue waiting to be explored. With US-India relations at all-time highs, and an expanding Russian defence industry, I don't see why Russia would not want to deal with us. Russian President himself said that his country will look for new defence partners and new markets to increase Russia's defence exports. We can't expect the Indian lobby to allow the Russians to sell us Mig-35s right away, but we can certainly start with small acquisitions and build bridges. And of course, as you say, we have a very strong ally in China that is currently seeing immense growth. However, over-reliance even on China would not be a great thing for us, we don't want to end up in a situation akin to
"aasman se tapka khajoor mein atka".
Our defence future doesn't lie with anybody else, our future lies with Pakistan. We must draw out short-term and long-term strategies to increase our technical capabilities. The government and the Armed Forces can't do much about that on their own, they will require private investment and new businesses, foreign investment and an incentive for foreign companies to expand into Pakistan. A two-pronged approach to enhance both the blue and white collar sectors related to defence must be devised and executed. In the modern world, no country is completely self-sufficient, however, self-reliance must be our ultimate objective.
..anyway sorry about it
