I agree on historic part. I understand that ideally PAF always wanted to fill atleast 4-5 squadrons for each aircraft type. As you include more, the overall cost per aircraft reduces. Its not just the aircrafts but trainings and logistics as well. But there is a certain threshold to which you can take that.
However, still I think this would change in future. The cost of modern aircrafts has shoot up and the state of Pakistan's economy has gone down. Secondly, previously PAF only relied majorly on manned aircrafts. However, now PAF is also investing quite a lot on all sorts of drones and surface to air missiles. In addition, PAF never had any force multipliers prior to 2010. From 2010 onwards, PAF has to spent subtantial amount on force multipliers AEW&Cs, aerial fuel tankers, their maintenance, logistics, crew trainings, etc. So a lot has changed from the past. Modern warfare requires a more balanced force and we now no longer has liberty to induct 100+ manned aircrafts of every type. We got quite significant expenditures in SAMs, Cyberspace, UCAVs, every sort of munitions, force multipliers and more.
I believe its just not Pakistan but other countries will also reduce their manned aircrafts to some extent. The acquisition cost and flying hourly cost of these modern 4.5 gen / 5 gen aircrafts is way too high. Plus lot of new critical areas have emerged that needs investments. These are all the reasons on which I believe that golden 90 figure won't be true for next platforms. Some believed that initial order of J-10Cs was 60, while many believed it is 36. I never understood where those numbers came, perhaps people assumed that atleast 2 squadrons as initial order. However it found out only 20 aircrafts were the initial order. That number certainly will increase but perhaps not the way most are expecting. This will be even more applicable to J-31s.
