Islamabad has just set a new record. For the 2026-27 fiscal year, Pakistan’s defence allocation has crossed Rs 3 trillion for the first time, roughly $10.8 billion, and the single sharpest jump has come in the “physical assets” head, the line that pays for weapons, ammunition and equipment, which the finance ministry says has risen by 39.62 percent in one year alone. This is not an isolated spike. Analysts at Quwa note it is the second consecutive double-digit increase since the brief but bruising May 2025 war with India, and defence trade publication Janes confirms the trend has held in double digits every year since 2023-24.
On paper, the logic is straightforward. Pakistan fought a real shooting war with a nuclear-armed neighbour just over a year ago, and it is now racing to institutionalise the lessons: accelerating induction of the Hangor-class submarines built with Chinese assistance, finalising a deal for J-35 stealth fighters, and layering in HQ-19 missile defence. Islamabad’s military establishment reads all this as vindication, proof that its Chinese-sourced systems performed under fire and that further modernisation is not optional but existential.
But a national budget is a statement of priorities, and this one tells an uncomfortable story. According to figures highlighted by PJ Media, the federal government has set aside roughly $165 million for higher education and a mere $89 million for healthcare, sums that look almost token beside a defence outlay running into the billions. Pakistan still carries the world’s second-largest out-of-school child population, and the budget does little to change that trajectory. At a seminar reported by the same outlet, economists at the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan gathering concluded the budget was, in effect, an austerity document for everyone except the security establishment.
The fiscal arithmetic makes the imbalance harder to defend, not easier. Whalesbook’s breakdown shows debt servicing alone now consumes about 68.5 percent of net federal revenue, even as Islamabad tries to hit an IMF-mandated primary surplus target. In other words, Pakistan is borrowing against a shrinking revenue base to fund both debt repayment and a record weapons build-up, while starving the human-capital spending that might eventually grow that revenue base. And the true cost of the security state is likely understated: defence pensions, worth hundreds of billions of rupees, sit outside the formal defence tally altogether, tucked into civilian expenditure where they attract less scrutiny.
This spending is also happening against a backdrop that should give pause to anyone calling it purely defensive. A recent Carnegie Endowment analysis on the military’s consolidation under Army Chief Asim Munir describes an institution simultaneously fighting an intensifying Baloch insurgency, an “open war” with the Afghan Taliban, and navigating a new mutual-defence pact with Saudi Arabia that could pull Pakistan into conflicts far from its own borders. None of these fronts are addressed by a stealth fighter or a submarine. The Balochistan Liberation Army’s ability to storm a high-security prison earlier this year, despite the province being among the most militarised in the country, suggests the threat Pakistan faces most acutely is not conventional at all, it is a legitimacy and governance problem that no procurement budget can buy its way out of.
None of this means Pakistan should disarm or ignore genuine external threats; the region remains volatile, and no state abandons deterrence unilaterally. But there is a difference between deterrence and a runaway trajectory. A country cannot out-arm demographic and educational collapse. If a quarter of Pakistan’s school-age children remain outside classrooms, if health spending stays a rounding error next to weapons procurement, and if debt servicing swallows two-thirds of federal revenue, the state is not building resilience, it is mortgaging it. Security, ultimately, is not just about what a country can shoot down. It is about whether the society behind the guns is strong enough to be worth defending. On current trends, Pakistan’s policymakers are answering that question the wrong way.
