OPINION | The Coalition Pakistan Joined, and the One It Needed

by Ashu Mann

Pakistan's relationship with the Combined Maritime Forces is often described in terms of longevity and rank: it is one of the coalition's earliest and most consistently active members, with a command record within Combined Task Force 150 that no other navy in the coalition's history has matched. That description is accurate. On its own, however, it is an incomplete answer to what CMF membership has actually done for Pakistan's exposure in the waters where its interests are currently most at risk.

The distinction worth drawing is between the CMF Pakistan has spent two decades inside and the CMF now facing the region's sharpest security challenge. Pakistan's command tenure sits almost entirely within CTF-150, covering the Gulf of Oman and North Arabian Sea, a mission built around counter-piracy and counter-smuggling operations. The corridor now generating the highest incident rate for commercial shipping, the Bab al-Mandeb and southern Red Sea, falls under a different task force entirely, one established more recently and specifically to address missile and drone threats from Yemeni territory. Pakistan has no command history there, and its naval assets have not been deployed into that mission.

This is not simply an accident of scheduling. CMF's structure evolved in stages, adding task forces as new threats emerged, while Pakistan's own naval posture evolved alongside the older half of that structure rather than the newer one. Two decades of institutional investment went toward the mission set Pakistan was already positioned to lead. Almost none went toward preparing for, or seeking a role in, the mission set that would eventually matter more for the safety of Pakistani nationals transiting the wider region.

The result is a coalition relationship that reads well in summary but looks thin in practice. Pakistan can point to fourteen command rotations as evidence of coalition standing. It cannot point to any corresponding claim on the part of the CMF structure that is currently most relevant to the threats its own citizens face. Command experience, it turns out, does not automatically transfer between task forces, and CMF appears to have no built-in mechanism for converting one member's seniority in an older mission into influence over a newer one.

The consequences of this gap are not abstract. Pakistani nationals form a substantial part of the global seafaring workforce, routinely crewing vessels that pass through the exact corridor where Pakistan has never held a command role. When incidents occur there, the response available to Pakistan runs through domestic consular and welfare channels, the same channels that would exist regardless of CMF membership. Two decades of coalition standing have not produced anything additional specific to this exposure.

None of this diminishes what Pakistan's CMF record represents within its actual scope. It does suggest that treating coalition seniority as a general-purpose credential, applicable to any threat the region happens to produce, overstates what that seniority was ever built to cover. The more honest question for Pakistan's naval leadership is not whether CMF membership has value, it clearly does within CTF-150's mission, but whether that value was ever meant to extend to the corridor now testing the region's security architecture. If not, what does Pakistan intend to do about the part of that architecture it has never had a hand in shaping?

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About the Author

Ashu Mann is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Land Warfare Studies. He was awarded the Vice Chief of the Army Staff Commendation card on Army Day 2025. He is pursuing a PhD from Amity University, Noida, in Defence and Strategic Studies. His research focuses include the India-China territorial dispute, great power rivalry, and Chinese foreign policy.

Disclaimer: This article represents the author’s independent analysis and perspective based on publicly available information. It does not constitute official guidance, intelligence assessment, or policy recommendation, and does not reflect the positions of Access Hub or any affiliated entities.