Pakistan Ministry of Defence

The September 2026 drone order

On September 16, 2026, a delegation from Powerus, a year-old American drone company backed by two sons of U.S. President Donald Trump, was received by Pakistan’s military chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, at military headquarters in Rawalpindi (Al Jazeera). A day later, the company announced it had received a “limited procurement order” from Pakistan’s Ministry of Defence for unmanned aerial systems and associated support, and that it had signed a separate memorandum of understanding with senior Pakistani defence officials (Al Jazeera).

The distinction between the two agreements matters. Inter-Services Public Relations, the Pakistani military’s media wing, said the two sides had discussed cooperation in defence procurement, production and capacity building — but its statement made no mention of the MoU (Al Jazeera). A Powerus spokesperson clarified to Al Jazeera that “the MoU was signed with the Pakistan army” while “the related procurement order was placed by Pakistan’s Ministry of Defence” (Al Jazeera). The company stressed that the memorandum was not a definitive agreement, created no purchase obligation, and would be subject to U.S. laws and government approvals (Al Jazeera).

Neither the value of the order nor the systems involved has been disclosed (Al Jazeera).

The company on the other side

Powerus was founded in 2025 and is based in Florida (Al Jazeera). Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, the president’s oldest sons, are investors in the company through a vehicle called American Ventures, which is expected to hold a 9.9 percent beneficial stake in the combined company after Powerus completes a reverse merger with the Nasdaq-listed Aureus Greenway Holdings, according to U.S. regulatory filings (Al Jazeera). ThePrint reported that the merged entity would take the Powerus name and trade under the ticker PUSA (ThePrint).

A spokesperson for Donald Trump Jr. has told media outlets that he is a passive investor with no role in the company’s operations or contracts and had no prior knowledge of the Pakistan deals (Al Jazeera). The White House has said there are no conflicts of interest (Al Jazeera). The company itself told Al Jazeera that Trump’s sons “are not advisers to Powerus and have no involvement in how the company runs its business or structures its defence relationships, domestically or internationally” (Al Jazeera).

The company’s founder and chief executive, Andrew Fox, told Reuters the two sides were aiming for a mutual arrangement pairing American and Pakistani technology, and that Powerus was weighing whether to manufacture equipment inside Pakistan (ThePrint). “Pakistan has the opportunity not only diplomatically but economically, to create industry here, create jobs, and create export opportunities. This is more than a one-off for us. This is the establishment of a long-term relationship,” Fox told the Financial Times after the deal (ThePrint).

The India and Israel complications

Less than three months before the Pakistan order, the same company had given an Indian defence manufacturer the exclusive right to make and sell its drone interceptor technology in India (Al Jazeera). In a June 30 filing to India’s stock exchanges, Paras Defence and Space Technologies said Powerus had granted it an exclusive licence to manufacture and sell its Guardian-1 interceptor technology in India (Al Jazeera).

One of Powerus’s cofounders, Ziv Marom, is a veteran of the Israeli military who founded Kaizen Aerospace, now a Powerus subsidiary — a sensitive fact in a country that does not recognise Israel (Al Jazeera). Analysts quoted by Al Jazeera questioned why a country that already builds its own drones and buys others from China and Turkiye would turn to a company founded only last year with links to Israel and a parallel deal with India (Al Jazeera). “Pakistan technically already makes or is capable of making each of the drones shown by Powerus,” said Bilal Khan, founder of the defence news platform Quwa Group; “it’s unclear where Powerus fits in the long term [from Pakistan’s perspective]” (Al Jazeera).

China has supplied 80 percent of Pakistan’s arms imports from 2021 to 2025, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Al Jazeera). A retired Pakistani general told Al Jazeera that a company less than a year old, not yet listed and without a delivery record, “would not usually clear these checks for a strategic defence partnership,” and that such firms are “typically considered too immature unless the MoU is political signalling rather than a procurement decision” (Al Jazeera).

Budget and scale

In June 2026 Pakistan unveiled a Rs18.77 trillion federal budget for fiscal year 2026-27, of which Rs3 trillion was allocated for defence services — an increase of about 18 percent over the outgoing fiscal year (The Nation). The allocation breaks down to Rs1.28 trillion for the Pakistan Army, Rs573 billion for the Pakistan Air Force, Rs293 billion for the Pakistan Navy, and Rs848 billion for Defence Production Establishments (The Nation).

Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb told parliament the increase was driven by uncertainty in the region (The Nation). Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif defended the hike, saying “the increase in defence expenditure was the need of the hour,” citing the regional situation, tensions involving Iran, Israel and the United States, and what he called India’s aggressive policies under Prime Minister Narendra Modi (The Nation). “In these circumstances, it is imperative to equip our armed forces in line with modern military requirements and further strengthen Pakistan’s defence capabilities,” he said (The Nation).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not claim a founding date, headquarters address, or constitutional basis for the ministry — those details were supported only by tertiary sources and snippets this session, not by a page read in full, so they are left out rather than asserted. It does not claim that procurement and production responsibilities were transferred to a separate ministry in 2004. It does not assert the value of the Powerus order, the systems involved, or the names of the ministry officials who signed the MoU, since none of those were disclosed. It does not claim the deal proceeded beyond a limited order and a non-binding memorandum, and it does not evaluate whether the ministry’s procurement followed standard tri-service vetting procedures.