Source : Shephard Media
BrahMos Aerospace, an Indo-Russian multinational defence company, will start drop and dummy testing of the lighter and smaller New Generation (NG) BrahMos missile by mid-2025, with flight trials expected by the end of the same year.
“By 2026, we will induct [the missile] into the Indian Air Force (IAF),” claimed Atul Dinkar Rane, director general of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and CEO and managing director of BrahMos Aerospace.
On BrahMos Aerospace awaiting funds from sales of the NG, Rane – who was speaking at the NDTV Defence Summit in Delhi on March 7 – remarked: “We have finished the blueprint stage and [are] getting into [the] cutting [of] metal. The missile will be one-third the size [of the current model] and half of its weight. This will enable two missiles on a single aircraft.
“Presently, one BrahMos on the under belly of a Su-30 is its heaviest armament,” Rane noted. “There are plans to fit the NG on the Tejas Light combat aircraft. It can also be fitted on any Western platform.”
Rane confirmed the speed, accuracy and lethality of the larger BrahMos would remain the same for the NG.
While an order from the IAF has still to be confirmed, a US$2.3 billion contract for 200 BrahMos Extended Range (ER) supersonic cruise missiles for warships was awarded in March 2024. Navy chief Admiral R Hari Kumar told news agency ANI recently that the BrahMos would become the Indian Navy’s primary surface-to-surface missile replacing older systems.
The evolution of the BrahMos missile has seen it transformed, having started life as an anti-cruise missile. Rane noted that it no longer flies 300km to hit a single ship, instead becoming a salvo from one missile on many ships.
“Any navy in the future must go close to land,” Rane remarked, citing the recent example of Houthi rebels in Yemen claiming to have launched 37 drone attacks in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden on US Navy warships and a commercial ship.
“The surface drones should have been taken out before they came out of the harbour and that would mean [using] a ship-launched missile,” he remarked. “The same cartridge can hit a ship or land.”
BrahMos Aerospace was established as a joint venture between the DRDO and Russian military industrial consortium NPO Mashinostroyeniya through an inter-governmental agreement. Rane stated that indigenous content in BrahMos models since the missile’s introduction two decades ago has risen from 10% to 65% today.
“It is impossible today for any known defensive systems to reliably intercept it,” Rane claimed. “It is not just about the seeker that India is indigenizing, it is the mean liquid ramjet engine developed by the Russians which has now been shared with us. It is a work of art.”
Rane said DRDO was working on the BrahMos hypersonic cruise missile with design partner NPO Mashinostroyeniya. The missile will be called BrahMos 2 and feature similar characteristics of the hypersonic Russian Zircon missile.
