Saudi Arabia spent $83.2bn on its military in 2025, almost seven times Pakistan's $11.9bn, according to SIPRI. It was the world's largest arms importer in 2015-19 and the fourth largest in 2020-24, with the United States supplying 74 per cent. It flies F-15s and Typhoons and fields Patriot and THAAD missile defences. Yet in the past year it has signed a mutual-defence treaty with Pakistan, hosted Pakistani fighters, drones and air-defence units, and joined Pakistan and Türkiye in a collective-defence alliance now being activated against the Houthis.

The obvious explanation — a rich state hiring a poorer one's soldiers is wrong. Saudi Arabia does not need Pakistan to fight its wars. It needs Pakistan so that it can fight them. What Riyadh is buying is defensive depth, recent combat experience and a nuclear shadow. The events of 2026 show why each has become scarce.

The two armed forces were shaped by opposite pressures. Saudi Arabia's was built around regime security. Alongside the regular army sits the National Guard, rooted in tribal forces loyal to the ruling family and answering to its own ministry; the IISS has put the army at roughly 75,000 and the Guard at about 100,000. Parallel forces guarded the monarchy against concentrated coercive power. They did not produce a mass army organised for sustained war against another state. Oil wealth bought platforms instead: advanced aircraft, precision weapons and missile defences, all dependent on foreign supply chains and support.

Pakistan's was built around India, which spent $92.1bn in 2025, almost eight times as much. Facing a far larger neighbour, Pakistan built staff colleges, logistics and engineering formations, deep officer and NCO cadres, and a defence industry producing tanks, artillery, missiles and drones, with China central to modernisation. The JF-17, developed with China, captures the approach: credible capability at a price Pakistan can sustain.

Co-operation between the two dates to a 1967 training agreement and a 1982 protocol for Pakistani training, advice and deployments. For decades it ran one way: Pakistani expertise flowing into young Saudi institutions. The 2015 intervention in Yemen exposed the limits of the Saudi model. The coalition had air superiority, precision weapons and Western intelligence, yet could not produce a decisive outcome. The Houthis absorbed the bombing, exploited terrain and built increasingly capable drones and missiles. Air power could destroy targets; it could not hold ground, and Saudi Arabia leaned on Yemeni and Emirati-backed formations to do that.

Riyadh responded by trying to build its own defence industry. The General Authority for Military Industries, founded in 2017, says localisation reached 24.89 per cent of military spending by end-2024, against a 2030 target of half. But industry takes decades. The gaps Yemen revealed — ground manpower, sustained operations, and the ability to defend a vast territory against cheap, numerous........

© The Friday Times