Asim Munir

Overview

On September 16, 2026, a delegation from Powerus — a one-year-old American drone company backed by two sons of the US president — was received by Field Marshal Asim Munir at military headquarters in Rawalpindi. A day later, the company announced it had received a “limited procurement order” from Pakistan’s Ministry of Defence for unmanned aerial systems and signed a memorandum of understanding with senior Pakistani defence officials (Al Jazeera). It was the latest stop in an unusual second act for Pakistan’s army chief: less than a month after Parliament handed him statutory operational command of all three armed services, Munir — whom Donald Trump has called “my favourite field marshal” — was personally doing business diplomacy with a Trump-family-backed defence firm (Al Jazeera; The Indian Express).

The September 2026 drone meeting

The Powerus delegation was led by the company’s co-founder Brett Velicovich. In its statement on the meeting, the military’s media wing, Inter-Services Public Relations, said the two sides discussed cooperation in defence procurement, production and capacity building — but did not mention the MoU. Powerus later told Al Jazeera the MoU was signed with the Pakistan army and the procurement order placed by the Ministry of Defence (Al Jazeera).

The company was careful to stress the deal’s limits: the memorandum was not a definitive agreement, created no purchase obligation, and any programme under the framework would be subject to definitive agreements, US laws and government approvals. Neither the value of the order nor the systems involved were disclosed (Al Jazeera).

What made the meeting remarkable was the ownership map behind it. Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are investors in Powerus through a vehicle called American Ventures, which was expected to hold a 9.9 percent beneficial stake in the combined company after Powerus’s merger with Nasdaq-listed Aureus Greenway Holdings, according to US regulatory filings (Al Jazeera). 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; the White House has said there are no conflicts of interest (Al Jazeera).

Analysts found the deal puzzling on capability grounds. Bilal Khan, founder of the Toronto-based defence intelligence platform Quwa, told Al Jazeera that Pakistan “technically already makes or is capable of making each of the drones shown by Powerus,” adding that it was unclear where the company fit long term (Al Jazeera). A retired Pakistani three-star general said 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,” adding that such firms were “typically considered too immature unless the MoU is political signalling rather than a procurement decision” (Al Jazeera).

Two further wrinkles went unmentioned in the official statements: less than three months earlier, Powerus had granted Indian defence manufacturer Paras Defence and Space Technologies the exclusive right to make and sell its Guardian-1 interceptor technology in India; and one of Powerus’s co-founders, Ziv Marom, is a veteran of the Israeli military — a sensitivity in a country that does not recognise Israel (Al Jazeera).

The Trump track: minerals, crypto, and “favourite field marshal”

The Powerus reception sits on a longer 2025–26 track of Trump-adjacent deal-making with Munir personally involved. In September 2025 — weeks after Pakistan signed a $500 million critical-minerals agreement with a US company — Munir and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif met Donald Trump at the White House, where the Pakistani leaders presented him with samples of Pakistani minerals, in a photo released by the White House (Al Jazeera). Then, in January, Pakistan signed an MoU with an affiliate of World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s cryptocurrency business (Al Jazeera).

Some Pakistani analysts have questioned what the armed forces get in return for this closeness. Quwa’s Bilal Khan asked whether the current gains were “photo ops and supposed pacts that obligate the armed forces” rather than the F-16s and financial assistance that once measured such relationships — though he also offered a less cynical take: Pakistan’s growing drone start-ups lack capital for production facilities, and ties with Powerus and its backers could draw US investment into them (Al Jazeera).

The most powerful officer in Pakistan’s history

The drone meeting came the same month Munir formally became the most powerful military officer in Pakistan’s history. The Defence Forces of Pakistan Act, 2026, cleared the National Assembly in late August and created the post of Chief of Defence Forces — with Munir, already army chief, as the first holder (The Indian Express).

No previous law had ever given one officer formal authority over the army, navy and air force together. The post it replaced — the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, created in 1976 — could only coordinate between the services and had no legal authority to command the navy or air force. The CDF role carries statutory operational command across all three services, reporting directly to the federal government (The Indian Express).

The law’s other provisions were equally sweeping. The nuclear-forces command post must now by law come from the army, closing off a role the navy and air force could technically have held before, according to analyst Majid Nizami. A retired three-star general in Rawalpindi told Al Jazeera the law created, for the first time, a properly written chain of command from the prime minister down to units on the ground, while retired General Naeem Khalid Lodhi said the CDF was now “a real commander” — a description that would not have fit the old coordinating post (The Indian Express).

The concentration of power drew criticism too. Lawyer and former officer Colonel Inam Raheim said the CDF could now dismiss officers by letter alone, without the cabinet summary once required. Karachi lawyer Abdul Moiz Jaferii argued the law made one service chief subordinate to another despite their formal equality, adding that Pakistan lacked a court independent enough to test the question (The Indian Express).

The soldier behind the rank

Munir’s rise was improbable. Unlike many of his peers, he does not come from a pedigreed military family — his father, who arrived in Rawalpindi from Jalandhar in 1947, was a school principal and the imam of the local mosque. He received his early education at the Markazi Madrasah Dar-ul-Tajweed, an Islamic seminary in Rawalpindi, then graduated from the Officers Training School at Mangla in 1986 — not the more prestigious Pakistan Military Academy at Abbottabad — and was commissioned into the 23rd Battalion of the Frontier Force Regiment (The Indian Express).

Religiosity marks his public persona: while posted as a military attaché in Saudi Arabia, the then-38-year-old lieutenant colonel memorised the Holy Quran, earning the title of Hafiz-e-Quran. As army chief he freely uses Quranic verses and Islamic theology in speeches, switching between English or Urdu and classical Arabic. Ramanathan Kumar, who headed the Pakistan desk at India’s R&AW from 2015 to 2020, has described him as Pakistan’s first “mullah general” (The Indian Express).

His career ran through the intelligence establishment. He became Director General of Military Intelligence in early 2017, won the Hilal-e-Imtiaz (Pakistan’s second-highest state honour) in March 2018, was promoted to lieutenant general that September, and took over the ISI the following month. His eight-month stint was the shortest ever — in June 2019 he was transferred to command XXX Corps in Gujranwala at the insistence of then Prime Minister Imran Khan, apparently after he sought to investigate corruption allegations against Khan’s wife, Bushra Bibi (The Indian Express).

He served as Commander, XXX Corps until October 2021, then as Quartermaster General at GHQ, and succeeded Qamar Javed Bajwa as army chief on November 29, 2022 — only three days before he was due to retire (The Indian Express). Legislation passed in November 2024 extended the service chiefs’ tenures from three to five years, pushing his retirement to 2027; in May 2025 the civilian government promoted him to field marshal, making him the second in Pakistan’s history after Ayub Khan — who, unlike Munir, had promoted himself after a coup and gave up army command (The Indian Express).

What he is saying now

Munir’s September 2026 calendar shows the two halves of his role side by side. Two days before this profile’s writing, on September 29, he met the co-chairs of the US Afghanistan War Commission — Shamila N. Chaudhary and Dr Colin F. Jackson — at GHQ Rawalpindi, where, according to the military’s media wing, he pressed for incorporating Pakistan’s regional perspective and experience into the assessment of the strategic, diplomatic and operational dimensions of the 20-year US engagement in Afghanistan (Dawn). The commission was established by the US Congress in 2021 to review American decisions from June 2001 to August 2021 (Dawn).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state Munir’s exact birth date or birthplace — no fully-read source confirms them. It does not adjudicate single-sourced Indian intelligence claims about militant-infrastructure rebuilding, nor repeat snippet-level criticism of the minerals photo-op or the April 2026 Vance delegation’s details. The Powerus MoU is presented as the non-binding framework Powerus itself says it is, not as a confirmed purchase; the company’s merger with Aureus Greenway Holdings was still expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026 at the time of writing. Characterisations of Munir’s religiosity and its political meaning are reported as analysts’ stated views, not this profile’s findings.