Somalia’s new naval MoU with Pakistan raises questions as Islamabad’s fleet struggles with readiness, maintenance, and foreign dependency. Experts warn the deal may be symbolic, leaving Somali sailors reliant on inconsistent support.
New Delhi: On August 26, Somalia and Pakistan signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to deepen defence cooperation, with a focus on naval capacity-building. Somalia’s security needs are both urgent and legitimate, making external partnerships inevitable. However, Pakistan’s own naval fleet is beset with structural challenges, raising questions about its ability to deliver sustained support. In this context, Somalia might have been better served by opting for a more reliable partner to ensure the long-term viability of its naval ambitions.
While Pakistan may showcase its eagerness to engage, the reality is stark: it lacks a credible naval industrial base and struggles to maintain even a fully functional fleet of its own.
For Somalia, and for donors watching the Horn of Africa, the pragmatic course is to treat Islamabad’s naval offer as a component of a broader, multilateral approach.
The Horn of Africa sits astride the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a choke-point linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. Hence, whoever shapes security here influences one of the world’s busiest maritime trade arteries.
Without concrete, verifiable commitments on sustainment and industrial transfer, the MoU risks being merely a show. For a navy that increasingly relies on foreign-built kit, struggles with maintenance and readiness, and is tied into long, troubled procurement relationships with Beijing and Ankara, the question is whether a force that can barely keep its own ships and submarines operational can credibly sell security to another state.
Pakistan’s intent to want to sell “capacity” to Somalia
Pakistan projects itself as a seasoned maritime security partner, often highlighting its past participation in counter-piracy missions off the Horn of Africa and its occasional command of CTF-151, the US-led multinational coalition set up in 2009. It also leverages its position in Gulf and Muslim-majority forums to burnish its credentials.
These optics, rather than genuine capability, paved the way for the recent MoU with Somalia. The agreement covers training Somali personnel in Pakistan’s Staff and War Colleges, and in counter-terrorism and international peacekeeping operations.
But political posturing cannot mask reality: Pakistan’s own naval industry remains weak, its fleet overstretched, and its capacity to deliver anything beyond symbolic gestures highly questionable.
For Islamabad, the MoU is less about transferring real capability and more a tool of defence diplomacy, where it seeks to project itself as a security exporter in the Muslim world.
In addition, it also aims to signal greater relevance in the Horn of Africa’s crowded strategic arena, while also burnishing its image through symbolic partnerships despite limited underlying capacity.
By pushing the MoU with Somalia, Pakistan aims to leverage a potential trilateral tie with Turkey to expand its influence and assert a military presence in the strategically vital Horn of Africa—despite its own glaring naval weaknesses.
Structural problems inside the Pakistan Navy
As Pakistan tries to project support abroad, its own naval ambitions remain plagued by persistent flaws.
The foremost is its heavy dependence on foreign suppliers such as China and Turkey, leaving even basic training and maintenance at the mercy of external timelines.
Moreover, chronic readiness problems, with ships often laid up for lack of spares or repair backlogs, and over-stretched procurement projects such as the Hangor submarines and Turkish MILGEM corvettes, which face delays and expose the fragility of Pakistan’s shipbuilding base.
Together, these weaknesses highlight a navy struggling to sustain itself, let alone build capacity for others.
The fleet often also lacks radar/sonar failures and long repair backlogs.
Multiple press reports and analyses since 2022 reveal that Pakistan’s warships spend more time in dock than at sea—a glaring weakness that casts serious doubt on its ability to train others in patrolling, sustaining operations, or maintaining vessels..
There is also complexity and delays with the programme.
Big procurement and co-production projects such as China’s Hangor-class submarines and Turkey’s MILGEM/ASFAT ties have put pressure on Pakistan’s shipyards and defence industry.
Even as Pakistan launches new vessels, delays persist, and its domestic shipbuilding industry has yet to demonstrate the ability to complete and sustain complex platforms reliably. True capacity-building goes beyond training sailors—it requires robust sustainment, logistics, and industrial infrastructure, all areas where Pakistan remains deficient.
Taken together, these shortcomings reveal a navy still struggling to manage its own fleet, far from capable of exporting credible or lasting maritime security solutions.
Given these factors, the question that arises is whether Pakistan is capable of offering training and doctrine despite its own fleet struggling with technical issues.
Training and doctrine are lower-tech exports and, in theory, more exportable than warships.
Pakistan may offer courses, exercises, and personnel exchanges, but genuine capacity-building for a fragile state like Somalia demands far more than classroom instruction.
It requires consistent mentorship, operational platforms for at-sea training, dependable spare parts, and robust advisory support for maintenance and logistics—areas where Pakistan’s own deficiencies make it an unreliable partner.
Episodic training without logistics backing achieves little.
Crews may learn basics, but cannot keep ships running in tough conditions. Current maintenance gaps expose the weakness of claims that Pakistan is being taught to sustain a navy.
Pakistan’s defence diplomacy or hollow posturing?
While there is a clear element of defence diplomacy at work, signing MoUs with multiple partners is a low-cost way for capitals like Islamabad and Mogadishu to demonstrate engagement and mutual goodwill.
For Somalia, it is an opening to diversify partners.
For Pakistan, the MoU is an opportunity to pose as an export-ready security actor in a crowded field alongside Turkey and Qatar. But when political theatre overshadows capability, the façade quickly crumbles. Promising to “build capacity” without proving the ability to provide logistics, sustainment, or institutional reform reduces the agreement to little more than paper. In reality, Somali sailors risk being left dependent on foreign spare parts and sporadic, unreliable training.
The only way Pakistan’s offer could gain any credibility is if Islamabad actually translated rhetoric into results—a standard it has repeatedly struggled to meet.
To even begin doing so, Pakistan would need to pair training with long-term commitments: multi-year supply of spares, dedicated repair teams, and sustained depot support, not just one-off courses.
It would also require genuine local industrial partnerships that transfer real maintenance and small-platform repair capabilities to Somali shipyards—something Pakistan’s domestic industry has yet to prove it can manage.
For Somalia and international observers to take Pakistan seriously, it would need to demonstrate that its own fleet is operationally capable through transparent performance metrics—something so far glaringly absent.