While the world’s attention is fixed on the U.S.-Iran war, a quiet arms race is accelerating between nuclear rivals India and Pakistan.
Last year’s brief but intense missile exchange across the India-Pakistan border ended with a ceasefire on May 10, 2025. So far, that agreement has held, but both countries have spent the past year preparing for future conflict.
Delhi and Islamabad are expanding their investment in drones, precision missiles, air defense systems, and surveillance technologies that played a central role in their most recent clash.
Why We Wrote This
India and Pakistan are accelerating a largely underexamined arms buildup. After last year’s military clash, the shift toward faster, less predictable technologies is raising new concerns about future confrontation between old rivals.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, India’s military expenditure rose 8.9% in 2025 to $92.1 billion, making it the world’s fifth-largest military spender. Pakistan’s defense budget grew even faster, increasing 11% to $11.9 billion. Delhi and Islamabad are aiming to boost their 2026-2027 military budgets by an additional 15.2% and 13.5%, respectively.
Experts say this buildup is lowering the threshold for future confrontations between the nuclear-armed rivals.
“The India-Pakistan relationship remains crisis-prone,” says Praveen Donthi, senior India analyst at the International Crisis Group. “Last year’s ceasefire froze the conflict and triggered a race for defense acquisitions based on the lessons learnt.”
These acquisitions are reinforcing what he describes as a “new framework” for military engagement between India and Pakistan – one that enables both sides to strike deeper into each other’s territory through faster, less conventional, and harder-to-predict forms of warfare.
A new kind of conflict
India and Pakistan have fought four wars and several smaller confrontations since the 1947 partition of British India created the neighboring nations. But for residents watching swarms of glowing, orange drones float across the night sky last spring, the 2025 skirmish felt like science fiction – unfamiliar, and unsettling.
For decades, the threat of nuclear war has acted as a deterrent against large-scale conflict between India and Pakistan, and when the countries did fight, it was largely confined to remote, Himalayan border areas. Occasional artillery exchanges, tank battles, or aerial dogfights were common near the Line of Control that divides the disputed Kashmir region between India and Pakistan.
Michael Kugelman, a senior fellow for South Asia at the Atlantic Council, says last year’s conflict – triggered by a militant attack on tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir – marked a sharp escalation from previous crises, both in weapon sophistication and geographic reach.
For the first time, Islamabad and Delhi both used long-range precision missiles and modern fighter jets with enhanced firing capabilities, in strikes that pushed warfare closer to dense, civilian areas. Swarms of surveillance and combat drones flew over cities far from traditional front lines. And though there is no evidence that either state used fully autonomous weapons, both militaries relied on artificial intelligence to assist with surveillance and drone coordination.
The shift matters because of an international relations theory known as the “stability-instability paradox” – basically, the idea that the presence of nuclear weapons decreases the chances of full-scale war, while increasing the number of smaller conflicts, because both sides are confident that the other won’t escalate. The concern is that new military technologies – which compress reaction times and reduce the role of human decision-making – could make these smaller conflicts more frequent, more destructive, and harder to control.
“One of the more unsettling takeaways from last year’s conflict is that India and Pakistan have clearly become quite comfortable using increasing amounts of limited conventional force below the nuclear threshold,” says Mr. Kugelman.
A flurry of acquisitions
The rise in military spending suggests that both countries expect more confrontation in the near future, says Amalendu Misra, professor of international politics at Lancaster University. The buildup is also deepening strategic alignments that place India and Pakistan in competing geopolitical camps.
Since the ceasefire, Pakistan has strengthened defense ties with Turkey and China, which already supply much of its military hardware, including fighter jets, air defense systems, and missile technologies used in last year’s conflict. This month, Pakistan’s navy received its first of eight Hangor-class submarines from China, which have state-of-the-art sensors and highly advanced digital combat management systems.
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, New York Times
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Jacob Turcotte/Staff
India, meanwhile, has expanded defense cooperation with Israel, France, and Russia while also pushing to boost domestic weapons production and reduce dependence on foreign suppliers. In recent months, Delhi moved forward with plans to acquire 114 additional Dassault Rafale fighter jets from France and S-400 air defense systems from Russia – both used during the 2025 conflict – and expanded joint production agreements with Israeli and French firms for drones and precision-guided weapons.
Officials are also in talks with Israel about developing India’s own Iron Dome, called Mission Sudarshan Chakra, after last year’s strikes exposed the limits of existing air defense systems.
Despite the accelerating arms race, analysts do not believe either country is preparing for total war. Instead, the danger lies in repeated, low-level conflicts gradually becoming the new normal.
“We are moving into what strategists term ‘hybrid warfare,’” says Mr. Misra, in which rapidly evolving technology is used in formal military operations and unconventional attacks, like disinformation campaigns.
Hybrid warfare doesn’t fit neatly into the existing rules of war, and is inherently unpredictable. Yet the 2025 conflict added merit to a growing belief that such wars can be fought and contained under the nuclear threshold.
Analysts warn this assumption – more so than any one kind of weapon – could lay the foundation for a more volatile phase of India-Pakistan relations.
