Watch Pakistan test new long-range precision strike weapon

ISLAMABAD — Pakistan efficiently test-fired a brand new indigenous long-range precision strike weapon with a variety of about 249 miles, in accordance with the navy’s media department.

This distance is a substantial leap over the prevailing Fatah 1 spherical, which has a variety of about 87 miles.

The Fatah 2 is “geared up with cutting-edge avionics, subtle navigation system and distinctive flight trajectory,” Inter Companies Public Relations mentioned in Wednesday’s announcement.” Primarily based on footage of the check launched by ISPR, the Fatah 2 seems to be a two-round guided a number of launch rocket system primarily based on the Chinese language Taian TAS5450 eight-wheel drive chassis.

Its predecessor, the Fatah 1, is manufactured by International Industrial Defence Options. The conglomerate says the Fatah 1 is meant “to exactly assault and destroy enemy’s group and space targets, comparable to navy bases, huge armored troops, missile launching websites, massive airports, harbors and different necessary services.”

The Fatah 1 is an eight-round guided a number of rocket launch system primarily based on the identical Taian chassis because the 10-round A-100 a number of launch rocket system in service with Pakistan.

The Fatah 2 check “marks one other step in Pakistan’s efforts to area a number of precision strike artillery techniques with variable ranges to carry adversary targets in danger,” mentioned Frank O’Donnell, a nonresident fellow with the Stimson Middle assume tank’s South Asia Program and a senior analysis adviser on the Asia-Pacific Management Community.

The very fact Pakistan developed the weapon, he added, demonstrates the nation has realized classes from latest or ongoing conflicts.

“When seen within the context of Pakistan’s parallel efforts to area a equally numerous arsenal of fight drones, its implementation of sure classes — which the navy feels the Azerbaijan-Armenia and Russia-Ukraine wars have bolstered — develop into clear,” O’Donnell instructed Protection Information. “They embody some great benefits of assigning adversary precision floor bombardment missions to comparatively low-cost artillery and fight drone techniques, preserving manned fighter plane for higher-end strike missions and interception of their counterparts.”

India’s S-400 air protection system is probably going a key goal of the Fatah 2, he added, as Pakistan might hearth the weapon as a decoy to create “better room for a fight drone to strike the S-400 itself within the midst of the bombardment.”