Private investors need to get involved, with a guarantee of an enterprise sort of agreement.
Bilal yaar even the Irani's didn't totally succeed here no?........yeah ok, they ahead of us in design/ R&D/ manufacturing, but typically their state funded orders are like 5,000 units for the IRGC and a 2,000 units for the regular military per year or so. Russia makes this much in one month alone! Russians actually using Irani drones and missiles to their fullest capabilities against Nato daily. Irani phuddu khud bewquff peechhay re gaey hain on their own designed weapons.........lol
I believe Russians have greater manufacturing/ industrial capability than Iran.
For us we got access to everything, just lack of Patron/ sponsor funding/ investors/ gubment subsidies/ Corporations- Collaborations-Co productions / co-funding like you say.
You've seen what our small enterprises/ companies totally capable of. World class products........
To be clear, Pakistan can scale up production capacity via NESCOM or some other state-owned enterprise. I think that's the plan for the time being.
But with that you're going to eat a lot of long-term cost, i.e., pensioned government jobs, static skill-sets, production overhead (CNCs etc) and so on.
We'd ideally shift this mass-production capacity off to the private sector that all that infrastructure and salary overhead is off the public exchequer. Moreover, with the right incentives, the military's demand will drive private investors into the area and generate lots of good jobs and, in turn, drive growth in other areas (e.g., housing, services, etc). It's the kind of economic stimulus we need and can drive through defence.
The incentives structure is key. We need to encourage the private sector to not just set up shops, but to keep innovating. Ideally, we'd reach a point similar to India or Turkey where a big defence requirement drives direct production investment which, in turn, drives the local development of tooling and jigs which, in turn, drives R&D in these areas. It's doable, but it takes time, persistence, and can-do mentality. BEC was producing jigs and tooling for Pakistani manufactures until ZAB came into power.
Pakistani private capital exists, it's just being sunk into land (literally) or into UAE due to the otherwise shaky economic climate at home. We carry out the right reforms re: tax and co-investment (e.g., government owning a minority share in new startups with an option to sell, maybe as incentives for offsets with foreign OEMs), we can start growing the economy on the right foundations and indigenize our defence needs.
