India's Very Own Cruise Missile: Nirbhay .

Image Credits: DRDO

Image Credits: DRDO

India was taken in to surprise during the gulf war and other american led war compaigs on seeing a particular weapon system that is cheap to own,cheap to operate, highly versatile, smart enough to change its target during the flight,smart enough to loiter in the war zone just waiting for the right target, have the capability to beam back the live high quality video footage until its target is hit,capable of doing autonomous manoeuvre to evade enemy air defences , capable of flying in subsonic speeds with out any trails and can cover a range of more than 1000 kms!!!,can be launched from land and sea(ships and submarines) and the smart weapon is called Tomahawk Cruise Missile.

On seeing the advantages and flexibility of the weapon system Indian government ordered DRDO to develop an similar system for Indian armed forces. The answer is Nirbhay Cruise missile!!

Before getting in to the details about the Nirbhay a short introduction about a cruise missile. Unlike a Ballistic missile which travels in a ballistic flight path, an Cruise missile will cruise to its target just like an Jet aircraft cruising to the intended airport. The only difference is unlike an conventional aircraft an Cruise missile will take-off vertically like an Rocket, using its first stage rocket booster and by using thrust vectoring technology positions itself in to Horizontal flight path. Once in horizontal trajectory its second stage will take over after that its wings will be automatically deployed and making it an conventional aircraft. Unlike its first stage which is powered by a rocket booster its second stage will be powered by a turbofan engine similar to an passenger jet aircraft. This Engine is more fuel efficient, less noisy and more reliable. Once in cruising altitude the missile's endurance is decided only by its on-board fuel. The missile can have its own guidance or can take occasional course correction from the ground stations or can hook onto satellite based navigational systems to pinpoint its target!

Generally there are different kinds of Cruise missiles which depends up on the type of the second stage used. if it is a turbofan engine chances are high that it can be a subsonic(speed that is less than the speed of sound) cruise missile, if it is an RAM jet engine the missile can be supersonic cruise missile(eg. Brahmose cruise missile and some Russian cruise missiles), finally if the missile has SCRAM jet powered second stage means it can be a hypersonic cruise missile.At present there is no known hypersonic missile in any country's arsenal.India and Russia are in preliminary talks to develop such an missile. Already India had a supersonic cruise missile called Brahmose which can be fired from land,sea and under water. 

But there are some disadvantages of Brahmose. Although it is pitted as  a joint venture between India and Russia, the propulsion stage of the missile is a Russian design which is adapted for Indian requirements and the Guidance and control is Indian designed. Because of this Russian companies have a greater say in any future modifications. 

Also because of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) the range of the Brahmose cannot be extended beyond 300 kms. Although its supersonic and packs a great surprise and punch during attacks, its weighs twice as that of other subsonic cruise missiles like Tomahawk which reduces the no of missiles carried by a ship or submarine. Lower range means ship has to venture near the enemy lines to launch the missile. because of its highly complex second stage RAM jet propulsion, the missiles are costlier to build!!

To strike a balance between all this a new requirement was developed for a subsonic cruise missile and DRDO started working on this project. Finally the product of the project was named as Nirbhay. As this missile was completely developed by India, We can incorporate any modification in to the missile unlike Brahmose which needs an approval from Russian companies. Some of the advantages of Nirbhay are its cheaper to build, weighs less, its all-weather capable and can be launched day and night,can carry more and different types of pay loads based on the individual mission and has the capability to loiter around the target area waiting for the right time to strike and many more via future upgrades.

In the latest test the missile demonstrated its capability of continuously flying for more than one hour at subsonic speeds and successfully crossed more-than 15 way points set by the testing agency. The entire testing mission was recorded by a fighter jet that travelled along with the cruise missile. As the size of the missile is so small it will be very tough to detect it on the radar.

Long way ahead:

This is just a starting of a family of Indian cruise missiles! There is long way to go. At present the turbofan engine deployed in Nirbhay was imported from Russia.Already there is effort going on to develop this engine in India. And then there is the Air force(air launched), Army(Land based) and Navy (Ship and Submarine launched)  version of the missile proposed . So the DRDO team should make this missile a potent platform and also pull considerable private players to reduce the development time.