Pakistan Defence

For more than 50 years, the US aerospace industry was the main supplier of inexpensive, lightweight fighter aircraft to nations that needed a multi-role aircraft, usually as a counter to the air force of a nation next door that was flying some model of the famous Mikoyan Design Bureau (MiG) fighter aircraft. There is probably no better case of how the US and the USSR (and later Russia) have consistently developed progressively more technologically advanced fighter aircraft types for export to their respective client states than the balance of air power that the two Super Powers have helped to maintain between Pakistan and India.

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In the 1950s, for example, the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) took delivery of 120 North American F-86 Sabre aircraft and 12 F-104 Starfighters that later saw action against the Hunter and MiG-21 and other Soviet-model aircraft flown by the Indian Air Force (IAF). As the years passed, the F-86 gave way to the Northrop F-5 as the primary American export fighter (though not to the PAF) and

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