The Combined Maritime Forces, the 40-plus-nation partnership Pakistan has belonged to for two decades, was built around a threat environment that no longer matches what is actually killing sailors in the corridor Pakistan now depends on it to help secure. CMF's founding mission, dating to the early 2000s, centered on counter-piracy operations against Somali pirate skiffs armed with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. The threat that killed six people, including three Pakistani crew members, aboard the cargo vessel Tihamah on August 11, 2026, was a guided missile strike — in fact a double-tap attack using multiple missiles — a category of threat CMF's original doctrine and force structure were never built to counter.
track pirate skiff movements
Piracy off Somalia peaked between roughly 2008 and 2012, prompting the international naval response that shaped CMF's operational identity for the following decade: boarding teams, small-arms deterrence, escorted transit corridors and information-sharing centers designed to track pirate skiff movements. Those tools worked, and piracy incidents in the region dropped sharply as a result. But a missile fired from Yemeni territory at a transiting cargo ship is not intercepted by a boarding team, and a naval escort configured to deter a pirate skiff offers little protection against an anti-ship missile with a range measured in tens of kilometers.
doctrinal shift within the broader CMF structure
Combined Task Force 153, the CMF unit specifically stood up for Red Sea security in April 2022, represented an attempt to adapt the coalition's structure to this newer threat, and the US-led Operation Prosperity Guardian that operated under its umbrella from December 2023 brought destroyers with layered air-defense systems, including Aegis-equipped US Navy vessels, into the corridor specifically to intercept missiles and drones. That represented a genuine doctrinal shift within the broader CMF structure. Pakistan Navy, whose CMF experience and reputation were built almost entirely within the counter-piracy mission set through CTF-150, has not fielded anything approaching that layered, Aegis-class capability, nor has it been listed among the naval forces conducting intercept operations in the Red Sea corridor.
genuine area air defense capability
That said, Pakistan is not entirely without medium-range air-defense capability at sea: its four Chinese-built Type 054A/P frigates carry the vertically launched LY-80N (the export version of China's HQ-16) surface-to-air missile, with a stated range of roughly 40 to 70 kilometers and a successful live-fire intercept test conducted as recently as January 2026. That system is a genuine area air-defense capability, just one built and tested for a different scenario than a saturation or double-tap missile attack of the kind used against the Tihamah, and it has not been deployed to or exercised in the Bab al-Mandeb.
This is not a criticism unique to Pakistan. Most CMF member navies lack the Aegis-class air-defense capability that missile interception in the Bab al-Mandeb requires, a capability concentrated among a small number of advanced navies including the United States, and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom and France.
provides less practical security
The broader point is structural: CMF as an institution has evolved to address the missile threat in the specific task force built for it, but individual member navies, including Pakistan's, have not uniformly evolved their own capabilities and deployments to match, meaning coalition membership provides less practical security than its scope suggests for members whose own fleets and deployment patterns remain oriented toward the piracy-era mission.
publicly framed by Pakistan Navy
Pakistan's naval modernisation, built around Chinese-supplied Type 054A/P frigates and Hangor-class submarines, has not been publicly framed by the Pakistan Navy or its Inter-Services Public Relations wing around missile-defense integration for Red Sea operations specifically. Until that changes, Pakistan's CMF membership offers institutional access to a coalition addressing the missile threat, without Pakistan itself having deployed the assets it does possess to contribute meaningfully to that specific mission.