A small Florida-based drone company, which has investors in the Trump family, has just signed up one of its more significant orders of its short and storied career: a memorandum of understanding with the Pakistan Army, with a first order already placed, days after the company executives met with Field Marshal Asim Munir at General Headquarters in Rawalpindi. Powerus, which was headed by co-founder Brett Velicovich who met Pakistan's military chief on September 16, confirmed the agreement to Reuters this week.

He would not specify the size of the order or its specific contents, because of security concerns, but said it would be classified as "unmanned aerial systems. The Inter-Services Public Relations wing of Pakistan's armed forces in a statement confirmed the meeting without disclosing the actual name of the MoU's.

This is not just a handshake between the defence industry, it's a handshake on the back of Powerus' ownership. The company is closing in on finalizing a reverse transaction with publicly listed Aureus Greenway Holdings, which owns golf courses in the Orlando area, scheduled to close in early October. The resulting company will operate under the Powerus brand and will transition from a Kissimmee-based company with golf courses to one making the heavy-lift and autonomous drones for military and industrial clients with the golf facilities themselves being used to test the technology for agricultural applications, according to the companies' own statements.

The Trump family has gained a unique familiarity with the term “notable investor” in recent years, as both brothers have created a string of defence-related investments, such as Unusual Machines, a board member to which Trump Jr. has contributed, and Israeli drone maker XTEND, which has been awarded several tens of millions of dollars in orders from the Pentagon since Trump's brother Eric joined the board. Alongside a separate $50 million investment from a South Korean asset manager, both brothers are investors in the Aureus-Powerus deal around six per cent each and are involved in the financing of the combination through the company, Dominari Securities.

The Pakistan order comes at a time when there is a lot of credibility given to the deal. After spending the past year working to restore ties that had cooled over the course of several decades, the U.S. and Pakistan have a long history of working closely with each other, and President Trump has expressed his appreciation for Munir with his presence at the White House this year. Pakistan's side has been moving forward with the United States on economic and defence issues, including the cooperation for minerals, on the pathway to talks on trade, as it seeks to move away from its dependence on Chinese hardware. Pakistan's private defence industry is still in its infancy, says Powerus chief executive Andrew Fox, calling it an opportunity for American companies to act fast, and Velicovich has said he wanted to establish a two-way technology partnership, rather than a purely vendor relationship, with the possibility of manufacturing in Pakistan itself.

The commercial background is as important as the diplomatic background. Defence spending in Pakistan has risen from an estimated 2.55 trillion rupees in the previous fiscal year to 2.665 trillion and has continued to increase even as the country has been signed up for a $7 billion IMF Extended Fund Facility and a still larger $1.4 billion Resilience and Sustainability Facility. That is a government that is being exhorted by its main financier to keep its primary budget surplus close to 2 percent of GDP, but that has to squeeze more money out of the economy to finance missiles and radars and now, perhaps, American-made drones.

When the timing came around was because of the four-day military skirmish with India last year dubbed as Operation Sindoor, which compelled both armies to speed up investment in unmanned systems and anti-drone defence. The Pakistani military spokesman has since affirmed this, stating that Pakistan is not pursuing to enter an arms race with India and has moved towards the very types of arms that would fuel such a race.

New Delhi has not officially responded to the Powerus contract, but has been clear about the direction of US-Pak military engagement. The Ministry of External Affairs has recently brushed aside Munir's comments on Pakistan's nuclear arsenal as "reckless", while government sources have even gone so far as to say that he had been "responding to the mood of the day" by repeating "aggressive rhetoric" in the years when Pakistan had been getting support from Washington. In that light, any drone strike contract linked to the current American president's own sons would probably be interpreted in South Asia more of as a data point in Washington's game of playing the Rawalpindi card.

This tale is full of moral dilemmas. One of the previous Bush ethics attorneys at the White House has already identified this general trend of Trump family investments benefiting from wars the White House itself is helping to design, raising the example of the brothers' parallel efforts to sell drone interceptors to the Gulf states being attacked by Iran. Powerus has stated that there is no conflict of interest in the Trump investment, and that it's in the U.S. closing a capability gap with China and Russia when it comes to drones.