ON 17 September 2025, Pakistan and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) signed the Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement (SMDA), which in all its manifestations, is a landmark event.
The agreement is a culmination of historic formal and informal relations between the people and the governments of the two countries with special focus on economic and security domains. The SMDA, potentially having multidimensional implications in geopolitical, geostrategic and geoeconomic domains, merits to be academically unfolded to examine challenges and opportunities it presents at the domestic, regional and global levels.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “a mutual defense agreement is a formal pact between two or more states for mutual support in the event of war”. Such agreements are generally defensive in nature and are termed as the efforts to maintain a balance of power, requiring sovereign states to join forces if one of them is attacked by another state’. Before we delve into the implications of this particular agreement, let’s examine the essential prerequisites of such arrangements: (i) Correct assessment of the prevalent geopolitical and geostrategic environment with realistic dead reckoning the follow on actions of the relevant players; (ii) Realistic and unambiguous threat perception of the imminent and potential threats; (iii) Orchestration of requisite security architecture; (iv) War gaming the likely courses of action and reactions of own and of the perceived enemies; (v) Charting out clear escalation dominance mechanisms; (vi) and last but not the least, defining multiple notions of victory to end the conflict at a favourable note. Viability and credibility of such agreements is essentially hinged upon the exhibition of collective strength of belligerents with an innate ability to withstand the security challenges with resolute resolve.
Historically, security agreements, treaties and alliances are orchestrated to create deterrence against war mongering, hegemony and irrational aggression so as to maintain peace and stability. Therefore, deterrence becomes the cornerstone of such security arrangements, which primarily is the function of possessing capabilities and exhibiting clear intentions to inflict prohibitive cost of war to the adversary in terms of unbearable attrition and destruction of its war machine. In order to achieve such an incredible milestone; existence of a robust, reliable and credible security architecture; installation of a fail-safe and unified command and control system; availability of freedom of action to the military commanders, unity of command and prompt accessibility of unambiguous political will form the prerequisites. Absence or even partial non-availability of any of these essentially required pillars can render the entire security apparatus ineffective and thus lose credibility. Although, combined effort of land, sea, air, space and cyberspace components constitutes deterrence, however, because of the attributes like speed, reach, flexibility, ubiquity and lethality, air power has predominantly become the weapon of top choice for the belligerents. Same has been exhibited during all the contemporary conflicts in Europe, Middle East and South Asia.
Pakistan’s clear ascendency over India (both in Feb 2019 and May 2025) that helped to restore deterrence and re-establish strategic stability in the region, is also attributed to the professional superiority of Pakistan Air Force over the IAF. For the purpose of academic understanding, PAF’s pre-eminence may be attributed to six basic pillars: (i) visionary leadership; (ii) indigenization; (iii) preferring quality over quantity; (iv) technical pursuit; (v) vigorous training; (vi) and continuity of policies. Pakistan, the other player in the SMDA, achieved Full Spectrum Deterrence (FSD) against the bigger adversary both in conventional and non-conventional domains, encompassing tactical, operational and strategic levels by following the above stated elements in their true letter and spirit.
Nevertheless, developing such a robust, reliable and responsive security ecosystem can take years of vigorous training, technical ingenuity and financial resources. In the case of KSA, it has numerous security arrangements with the USA pledging security guarantees during the last 80 years. In regards, the USA has not only sold military hardware worth hundreds of billions of US dollars but also deployed its precious military assets in the KSA.
Resultantly, the security apparatus (mainly sensors, shooters and command & control system) of KSA consists of all the necessary ingredients of a modern and forward-looking Air Defence system being jointly looked after by the Saudi and the American authorities. Nonetheless, for the KSA leadership, the existing security arrangement presents limitations with respect to independently controlling the decision-making cycle and exercising sovereign command and control over the deployed forces to initiate required tactical actions against the intruders and perpetrators. Unlike Houthis and Iran, who had been militarily encountered by the US forces without any hesitation, potential belligerence of Israel presents another layer of complexity to the KSA’s security architecture and for the USA.
Additionally, duality of command-and-control function already presents a response dilemma while presence of a third key player (Pakistan) would further complicate the security calculus which can be adversely exploited by the adversary. Similarly, hysterical and unchecked aggression by Israel against more than half a dozen Middle Eastern countries and unconditional support of the USA has also encouraged KSA to diversify its security architecture.
So far, none of the countries of SMDA have issued any details with respect to its scope, charter, force composition, rules of engagement and command and control mechanism, however, it may be appropriate to assume that the agreement would largely cover the conventional domain while non-conventional domain may remain as the ultimate fallback. The agreement, by design, extends the necessary security umbrella to the respective countries against the potential belligerents and discourages misadventures and hegemonic designs and as such, has the potential to encourage other regional countries to join. However, announcements have to be followed by meaningful actions. Therefore, to conclude it can be stated that, in order to orchestrate a robust, reliable, fail-safe and responsive security architecture, actions have to speak louder than words.
—The writer is a retired Air Officer from the PAF and currently serving at the DHA Suffa University (DSU), Karachi.
