A team from the National University of Sciences and Technology has finished first among all visiting countries at the 13th International Army Cadets Week in Nanjing, China, taking the overall silver medal in a field of 29 teams. The cadets, from NUST’s College of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering (CEME), earned their recognition with a student-built machine: the Boxer Unmanned Ground Vehicle, presented in the competition’s Concept and Paper category at the People’s Liberation Army Army Engineering University from 2 to 6 November.
- Event: 13th International Army Cadets Week, PLA Army Engineering University, Nanjing, 2 to 6 November 2026
- Field: 29 teams, cadets from military academies in 11 countries alongside 18 Chinese military academies
- Result: first among the international teams, second overall, silver medal
- Project: Boxer Unmanned Ground Vehicle (BOXER PHOENIX, a modular autonomous multi-mission UGV)
- Confirmation: Pakistan Embassy in China congratulated the team on X
First of the Visiting Teams at the International Army Cadets Week
The Army Cadets Week, first held in 2005, is one of the largest gatherings of its kind: a week of academic contests, innovation challenges and professional exchange between the officer cadets of different armies. This year’s edition drew academies from 11 countries, with Myanmar, Azerbaijan, Singapore, Thailand, South Korea, Egypt and Vietnam among the visiting teams, alongside cadets from 18 Chinese military academies. Finishing ahead of every other visiting nation, and behind only one team in the whole field of 29, puts the CEME cadets in rare company, and the Pakistan Embassy in China marked the result with a public congratulations to the team on Thursday.
This year’s week ran under the theme “Addressing Key Regional Security Risks, Deepening International Military Security Cooperation, and Delivering International Public Security Products”. Around the contests, the programme is built for exchange as much as competition: visiting cadets study and train alongside their Chinese counterparts, present their academies’ work to one another, and take part in a cultural programme, so that the officers who may one day serve beside each other in peacekeeping missions have already shared a classroom and a parade square in Nanjing.
Photo: Radosław Botev, via Wikimedia Commons
The Boxer Unmanned Ground Vehicle
The team’s entry, styled BOXER PHOENIX on its display boards, is a modular autonomous multi-mission unmanned ground vehicle: a robot vehicle designed to be reconfigured for different jobs rather than built for one. It was presented in the Concept and Paper category of the week’s innovation competition, the Future Co-creation International Military Cadets Innovation Competition, whose four themes were international peacekeeping, escort missions, humanitarian rescue and international and regional counterterrorism cooperation. Those themes explain the design brief: a vehicle that can carry supplies on a peacekeeping patrol, scout ahead of a convoy, or work in a disaster zone is worth more to a modern army than a single-purpose machine. Cadets were also organised into mixed international teams during the week, so the Pakistani students competed both for their own college and alongside the cadets they were ranked against.
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Why the Result Matters Beyond the Medal
CEME, based in Rawalpindi, is the Pakistan Army’s own engineering college within NUST, and its students build for real military problems rather than classroom exercises. A silver medal in Nanjing is therefore more than a trophy: it is an external audit of Pakistani engineering education by the toughest possible jury, the academies of 28 other teams. It also lands in a season of visible momentum for Pakistani student technology, from free robotics training being opened to 10,000 school learners to free Google career certificates for minority students in Punjab. The pipeline from school robotics clubs to an army engineering college beating the world in Nanjing is exactly the pipeline Pakistan needs more of, and this week it produced a silver medal to prove it works.
Sources
- The Public Purview: Pakistani Army Cadets Win Silver Medal at International Competition in China
- The Daily CPEC: Pakistani Cadets Win Silver at China’s International Army Cadets Week
- Bloom Pakistan: NUST Team Wins Silver Medal at International Army Cadets Week in China
- Daily Global South: NUST Cadets Win Silver Medal at International Army Cadets Week in China
- Featured image: A ground unmanned support vehicle on display, the class of vehicle the Boxer belongs to; file photo. Photo: U.S. Navy photo by John F. Williams, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
- In-body image: The Nanjing skyline from Jiming Temple. Photo: Radosław Botev, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0 PL)
Umar Farooq is the founder and editor of Good News Pakistan. An engineer by profession and a writer by passion, he started the site in December 2022 to share good news from Pakistan, and has since written and edited more than 200 articles about its people, sports, science, business and world records. He believes the story of Pakistan is bigger than its headlines, and that good news, told honestly, is worth telling every day.