Brief View of Powerful Indian Supersonic Brahmos Missile
The BrahMos, a supersonic missile system is way more than an anti-shipping weapon with a flight range of up to 290 km. It maintains the supersonic speed all through the flight that eventually shortens the flight time. It leads to lower target dispersion and quicker engagement. It has an identical configuration for multiple platforms like land, sea and sub sea.
This two-stage missile has a solid propellant booster engine. In the first stage, this engine brings it to the supersonic speed and then gets separated. The second stage, also known as the liquid ramjet takes the missile closer to 3 Mach speed and puts it in the cruise phase. The major principle of operation is ‘Fire and Forget’. On its way to the target, it keeps adopting varieties of flight trajectories.
The primary purpose of this project was to make the country’s defense system self-sufficient in missile programs. It all started in 1990, as a joint venture of India’s DRDO and Russia’s NPOM. The term BrahMos has been derived from the name of two rivers, the Brahmaputra in India and Moskva in Russia. Initially, it was developed as an anti-shipping missile for Navy but now this weapon system has its own unique place in all three sections of Indian Armed Forces. The first ever successful launch of BrahMos took place on June 12, 2001. Later, it was deployed successfully on Rajput destroyers. Since then it went through a number of test trials to meet the requirements of potential users. The most recent version of BrahMos missile has an extended flight range of 450 km.
This powerful Brahmos missile can hit ground based targets that make it an ideal weapon for precision attacks against radars, airbases and other fixed installations. When striking the target, it releases a huge amount of kinetic energy which is 9 times more than the existing state-of-the-art subsonic cruise missiles. For transportation, storage and launch of the missile, a Transport Launch Canister (TLC) are used. The Ship-based Weapon Complex and Land-based Weapon Complex are in service and the Air launch version is still in progress.
This missile can fly at an amazing speed of 2.8 Mach. It can potentially carry a nuclear warhead weighing 660 pounds. It is very difficult to detect and intercept because of its capability of maintaining supersonic speed all through the flight. Shortly before the impact, it performs an evasive ‘S-maneuver’ which makes it difficult to shoot down in a close range. If the target is located within 120 km range of the point from where the attack is launched, it can make the flight at very low altitudes. According to an analysis of the strength of this missile, it was said that a U.S. Arleigh Burke-class destroyer could not handle 12 BrahMos missiles at once even with its layered air defense.
Although our country has no territorial designs we do have all the necessary equipment and infrastructure to stay well-protected. With a stealth and deadly weapon system like BrahMos, we are capable of destroying command and control centers, firepower centers and air defense sites of our enemies. We are still pressing ahead in developing even deadlier and more powerful variants of BrahMos. There are plans to test hypersonic BrahMos missiles that can fly at an astonishing speed of Mach 7. It would be more difficult to detect and shoot down giving a time window of few seconds to the target to react.
