How Pakistan is Entering the Global Race to Build Cheap Cruise MissilesPlusPro
Wire desk byline Sourced from Xinhua, Dawn, Arab News, Anadolu and Minute Mirror. Translated and abridged by the GSRRA Desk.
In recent years, a growing number of vendors across the United States, Europe, and the Middle East have been developing low-cost cruise missiles.
These are distinct from the advent of new jet-powered one-way attack (OWA) drones, which, to be clear, are also, technically speaking, ‘cruise missiles.’ These OWAs are also designed to be low-cost and scalable, not different in intent from the munitions discussed in this piece.
However, where these ‘low-cost cruise missiles’ differ is that they are the developmental branch out from the traditional design approaches. So, the OWA is typically a tailless delta (analogous to the Shahed-series) airframe configured with a miniature turbojet. The low-cost cruise missile design, in contrast, seems to claw back the complexity of the traditional designs, indicating the aim to achieve comparable range and payload carriage to the older, more expensive missiles.
Therefore, if one had to demarcate between the OWA munition and the low-cost cruise missile (LCCM), then consider the latter as the heavier payload (e.g., 200-400 kg warhead) option. To be clear, range is not necessarily the demarcating factor as a lighter-weight jet-powered OWA can, with certain design choices, achieve a comparable range (e.g., 700-1,000 km). So, as an example, Pakistan’s Sarfarosh offers a range of 1,000 km, but at a total weight of 175 kg and warhead mass of 50 kg. Therefore, the real differentiator is the warhead and total weight.
MBDA, which led with the term ‘One-Way Effector’ (OWA) for its new low-cost, highly scalable guided munitions solutions, categorizes its LCCM – i.e., Crossbow – as the ‘Heavy OWE’, and this ‘Heavy OWE’ complements the ‘Light OWE’, the MBDA Deluge, which is analogous to the jet-powered Geran and Shahed variants. So, there is an overlap in the intent in terms of the cost and scale aspect, but the LCCM basically sits at the heavier end of that spectrum.
Reference Link:- https://quwa.org/pakistan-missile-news/how-pakistan-is-entering-the-global-race-to-build-cheap-cruise-missiles/
Zamir Ahmed Awan is the founder and Chair of the Global Silk Route Research Alliance, a think tank in Islamabad. He studied engineering at Shanghai University in the 1980s, and years later he went back to China as Pakistan's science counsellor in Beijing, from 2010 until 2016, working on science and higher education cooperation between the two countries.…
