Pakistan’s Hangor submarine programme was originally scheduled to deliver its first four China-built vessels between 2022 and 2023. The first submarine, PNS Hangor, was not launched until April 2024 and was only commissioned on April 30, 2026 — roughly three years behind the original timetable.
The three remaining China-built boats, PNS Shushuk, PNS Mangro, and PNS Ghazi, were all launched through 2025 and remain in late-stage sea trials. The four submarines planned for construction at Karachi Shipyard and Engineering Works are running further behind still, with the keel for the sixth boat only laid in February 2025. Full induction of the KSEW-built vessels is now expected in the early 2030s — a programme that was contractually supposed to be complete by 2028.
The causes of delay are documented. Germany’s refusal to export the originally specified MTU 396 engines, citing the EU arms embargo on China, forced a substitution to the Chinese CHD620 — a process that consumed years of renegotiation and imposed engineering changes across the entire programme. Pandemic-related supply chain disruptions compounded those losses. Each delay extended the period during which Pakistan serviced a financial obligation without receiving an operational asset in return, and the financial terms of those obligations — the loan structure, interest rates, and repayment schedules — have never been made public.
The strategic cost of the slippage is real. India’s naval expansion did not pause to accommodate Pakistan’s procurement difficulties. India’s Kalvari-class submarines entered service on their own schedule. Its fleet of P-8I maritime patrol aircraft — twelve operational, with six more approved — continued to develop throughout the years while Pakistan’s Hangors remained under construction. Shore-based detection infrastructure in the Arabian Sea has advanced. Every year of delay in the Hangor programme is a year in which the threat environment the platform was designed to counter grew more capable.
The locally assembled component of the programme introduces a further layer of structural risk. Karachi Shipyard and Engineering Works is building this class of submarine for the first time, absorbing technology transfer from a Chinese partner, with its own institutional reasons for managing the pace and depth of what it transfers.
The construction timeline reflects that reality. Steel was cut for the fifth boat in December 2021, and as of early 2025, only the sixth keel had been laid. Pakistani engineers are acquiring knowledge and industrial capacity, but that process takes time that the original schedule did not honestly account for. Chinese technical supervision remains essential to the construction process, extending Beijing’s operational leverage beyond the supply chain and into the build programme itself.
PNS Hangor is now operational. Within weeks of its commissioning, it conducted an overseas port visit to Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia — a deliberate signal of blue-water reach. The three remaining China-built boats are expected to enter service through 2026, which would, if it materialises, double Pakistan’s AIP-equipped submarine fleet within a single year. That is a genuine capability step. The programme is delivering, albeit years late and at terms still hidden from parliamentary and public scrutiny.
What it has not delivered — and what the original schedule implicitly promised — is a completed, operational eight-vessel fleet within this decade. Four submarines remain years from completion, being built at a shipyard that has never built this class before, dependent on Chinese components it cannot independently manufacture, in a country whose foreign exchange position constrains the pace at which specia…