The India-Pakistan Security Dilemma Has Reached Orbit

When India and Pakistan fought an intense four-day war in May 2025, most coverage focused on fighter jets, drones, land strategies, and missile exchanges. Far less attention was drawn to a quieter, increasingly consequential layer of the conflict: the satellites above. Those satellites shaped how the fighting was observed, assessed, and fought. It is the dimension that got increasingly ignored and unexamined as both countries have accelerated their space programs. That silence is a mistake. The next India-Pakistan crisis may not start with a broader skirmish or a terrorist attack. It may begin with a satellite.

Since 2025, Pakistan has moved from a modest space program to something considerably more assertive. According to the Takshashila Institution, Islamabad has launched six earth-observation satellites into orbit between January 2025 through June 2026. This launching of satellites created a constellation capable of imaging Indian territory every two days. After six decades and only nine launches, that’s the sudden acceleration which is hard to ignore. One former Indian space official, Swarajya Mag, in June 2026, captured the change with a striking comparison: it was like watching someone who had once struggled to walk suddenly outrun an elite sprinter.

The technical details matter too. Unlike many civilian Earth-observation satellites that operate in sun-synchronous orbits, PRSC-EO3 follows an unusual inclined orbit. It sacrifices global coverage for more frequent passes over South Asia. That makes it particularly relevant to monitoring activity across Indian territory. Speaking to The Week in June 2026, space analyst Girish Linganna noted that every Earth-observation satellite can by nature spot military bases and track troop movements; the same camera that watches crops can watch a cantonment. Their dual-use nature makes strategic implications hard to separate from stated civilian purposes.

However, India has not been sitting back. Its progress in some areas was remarkable, but at some points it faced setbacks. In January 2026, Indian Space Research Organization ISRO PSLV-C62 mission failed to place EOS-N1, a satellite that is built to monitor camouflaged objects and monitor border activities into its planned orbit. This failure highlighted the challenges India still faces while trying to expand its space based surveillance capabilities. At the same time, New Delhi has been placing greater emphasis on protecting its satellites. Especially after the 2024 incident, when a satellite came within a kilometre to ISRO while carrying out activities that raised military concerns. India’s growing interest in space security is hardly new. When PM Narendra Modi announced the 2019 mission shakti anti-satellite test. He described it as a step that would make India “stronger” and more “secure.” Pakistan meanwhile faces a great gap in space-based capabilities. Pakistani researchers Mohammad Ali Zafar and Ayesha Zafar have argued that India’s growing dual-use space capabilities pose a strategic challenge for Pakistan and underline the need for Islamabad to reassess its national space policy.

That dynamic should worry policy makers on both sides. India’s growing interest in its military surveillance capabilities can allow Pakistan to build and expand its own reconnaissance architecture; in return, Pakistan’s expansion gives India better justification for its own buildup. Each side’s defensive logic becomes the other’s evidence of threat. This creates a familiar security dilemma in space. Just as Pakistan and India have long responded to each other’s missile and nuke developments, their space buildup risks falling into the same cycle of action and reaction but with less transparency.

This is what makes the trend genuinely dangerous. Not in a sense that it might bring war on the ground, but in how war on Earth is getting more dependent on and vulnerable to what happens in orbit. The problem is that there is no bilateral agreement between Pakistan and India for managing the escalation in space. A misunderstanding could therefore spread faster than diplomacy can catch up.

Some precedent already exists in the relationship. In 1988, India and Pakistan signed an agreement not to attack each other’s nuclear installations. Moreover, through expert-level dialogues in the mid-2000s worked out on the understanding of prettifying ballistic missile tests. In 2005, a Pakistani foreign ministry spokesman said of such one round: “The talks will continue… and a joint statement will be issued at the end,” a very unremarkable line, but it shows that rivals can sometimes create safeguards when ambiguity becomes a threat. Without such mechanisms, worst-case assumptions can quickly fill the silence.

No comparable understanding exists regarding outer space. There is no final threshold for hostile approach of other satellites. There’s no system that can explain away an unusual orbit manoeuvre before it is read as a prelude to something worse. The 1967 outer space treaty bans weapons of mass destruction in space but it didn’t mention anything regarding the installation of anti-satellite weapons, jamming, or reconnaissance against an adversary’s forces. In the United Nations, discussions are ongoing in the Open-Ended Working Group on the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space, where Pakistan has taken part, emphasizing current mechanisms and their shortcomings. With negotiations being held for voluntary norms. The result is years away, if it comes at all.

India and Pakistan do not need to wait for the global agreement to take basic steps of their own. They could begin with basic confidence-building measures: notifying each other about their major-military relevant orbital manoeuvre. A dedicated hotline could help with addressing suspicious activities during crises. Both sides could also agree on what sort of close satellite encounters would be considered provocative. None of these requires sharing sensitive information or technology. The goal is simple: reduce misunderstandings before they turn into conflict.

The 2025 war showed how important space has become to conflict in South Asia. That dependence could help each side to understand each other better, or it could create new risks and misunderstandings. Much will depend on whether India and Pakistan take space as seriously as they eventually took their nuclear relationship. Otherwise, they may find themselves in the next crisis without even the basic channels needed to talk about what is happening in orbit.