The Pakistani air force has deployed the Chinese-made LD-2000 CIWS (close-in weapon system) as part of its Integrated Air Defence System, according to media reports in late September.
An expert said the deployment is in response to India’s Operation Sindoor in May 2025, during which New Delhi launched precision strikes against nine locations in Pakistan and Pakistan-controlled Jammu and Kashmir. Operation Sindoor was launched in response to the Pahalgam attack that April 22, in which 26 men were killed at point-blank range in a terrorist attack.
Dr. Bibhu Prasad Routray, former Deputy Director of the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS), Government of India, and Director of the Mantraya Institute for Strategic Studies, told Vision Times that the new Chinese air-defense system meshes seamlessly with Pakistan’s already China-centric layered air-defense architecture.
“The rationale for such deployment is primarily driven by the damage inflicted on several Pakistani airbases, including Nur Khan (Chaklala), Mushaf (Sargodha), Jacobabad (Shahbaz), Bholari, Sukkur, and Rahim Yar Khan, during India’s Operation Sindoor in May 2025,” said Routray.
Defense Security Asia, a strategic affairs media outlet, obtained an “OSINT assessment” of the Pakistani acquisition and said the deployment has increased “regional scrutiny” because the newly deployed system appears to be a mobile, land-based adaptation of China’s naval Type 730 seven-barrel, 30mm Gatling gun platform.
For the best of our weekly content！
You are now signed up for our newsletter
Check your email to complete sign up
OSINT, or “open-source intelligence,” refers to intelligence gathered from publicly available information.
“The identification matters strategically because South Asian military planners increasingly view airbase survivability, rather than fighter fleet size alone, as the decisive determinant of sustained combat effectiveness during high-intensity precision-strike conflicts involving India, Pakistan, and potentially broader Indo-Pacific security actors,” the report said.
According to Routray, the reported induction could plausibly create a cost-effective, high-volume hard-kill terminal-defense layer. He believes cost-effectiveness is particularly important for Pakistan given its weak economy and the need to acquire defensive capabilities.
“The system provides protection against saturation attacks by drones, loitering munitions, cruise missiles, rockets, and low-altitude precision weapons. The system has a rapid reaction time and a mobile, wheeled configuration, along with the ability to fire 5,600 rounds per minute, helping to fill the final-seconds engagement gap and enhance airbase survivability,” he added.
The deplpoyment’s geopolitical significance
Routray believes the deployment of the Chinese air-defense system within Pakistan’s air-defense network following Operation Sindoor signals a doctrinal shift toward hardened airbase survivability and cost-effective terminal defense.
“In South Asia, it marks an acceleration toward an arms-race dynamic focused on infrastructure resilience rather than purely offensive airpower,” he said.
He added that the deployment has several geostrategic and geopolitical implications, including enhancing Pakistan’s deterrence against India’s conventional military superiority. Meanwhile, it also expands China’s influence in the region by adding to its competition with India’s defense architecture in South Asia.
“It deepens Pakistan’s military-technological dependence on Beijing and takes one more step toward strengthening the China-Pakistan ‘all-weather’ alliance by embedding Chinese sensors, fire-control systems, and doctrine deeper into Pakistan’s integrated air-defense network,” Routray said.
Moreoever, he said, the the deployment effectively turns Islamabad into a real-world laboratory for Chinese counter-drone and point-defense technologies in South Asia.
Indian counters
Routray notes that India is raising dedicated electronic-warfare brigades along its borders with Pakistan and China and would need to build broader deterrence against the joint Pakistan-China air-defense capabilities.
“No defense system can provide 100 percent protection. In the event of another military confrontation, India could counter the LD-2000 CIWS primarily by saturating it with large numbers of low-cost loitering munitions and drone swarms that exhaust its ammunition, while employing stand-off precision weapons such as BrahMos, SCALP, and future hypersonic systems that engage targets well beyond the CIWS’s short-range gun-engagement capability,” Routray said.
BrahMos is a domestically produced Indian supersonic cruise missile.
In addition, Indian countermeasures could be supported by electronic-warfare jamming, anti-radiation missiles such as RudraM to neutralize its radars, and enhanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities to locate and destroy the mobile systems before they can fire, the expert said. RudraM is the name of an Indian family of anti-radiation missiles (ARMs) developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).
According to Routray, India is also creating electronic-warfare brigades along its borders with Pakistan and China while upgrading two systems — Dharashakti and Project Pragyashakti.
Dharashakti is a ground-based integrated electronic-warfare (EW) system being developed for the Indian Army.
Project Pragyashakti is a newer initiative aimed at creating a common electronic-warfare software framework across India’s three armed services.
The expert said India is also advancing its AI-enabled swarm programs by seeking information from potential Indian vendors on 800 swarm-munition systems.
“There have already been successful live trials of autonomous, edge-native drone swarms that can self-coordinate, redistribute tasks, and continue missions despite connectivity loss or battery constraints, as recently as June 2026,” he said, adding that all these systems are being integrated into India’s broader Mission Sudarshan Chakra architecture.
Original article
Comments