India looks to extend Cruise Missile Lead through Development of Mach 5 Brahmos Missile

India and Russia have jointly developed the Brahmos Cruise Missile which is said to be one of the most advanced Cruise Missiles in the World.This Cruise Missile is also the Fastest in the world with a speed of 3000 km/hr or around 2.6 times the speed of  sound and can be launched from multiple air,sea and land platforms.India’s Traditional Adversaries Pakistan and China are one generation behind in the Cruise Missile Technology Race.While Pakistan’s lone Cruise Missile Babur is based on the outdated Tomahawk Missiles,China’s Cruise Missiles also don’t match Brahmos in speed and sophistication.

The Brahmos Missile has been a huge success in Russian-Indian Defense collaboration and India is going to further invest in this partnership with plans to extending the speed of the next generation of Brahmos to 6000 km/hr or Mach 5 which would make it by far the speediest missile in the globe.Note the high speed of a missile makes it difficult for energy anti missile weapons to bring down besides increasing the kinetic impact of the missile.With its low trajectory and hypersonic speed,this missile would be almost impossible to shoot down.

India, Russia to develop missiles having speed of 6,000 kmph – Deccan Chronicle

India will soon become the first country to have cruise missiles with hyper speed of over 6,000 km per hour, as an agreement for their joint development will be signed with Russia during the visit of President, Mr Dmitry Medvedev, here in December.Mr Medvedev will be undertaking the visit for annual India-Russia Summit with Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, during which the two sides will discuss ways to further enhance their relations in various fields.

One of the highlights of the visit would be signing of a contract for joint development of hypersonic version of the BrahMos cruise missile, Defence ministry sources told PTI here.This version of the missile will have a speed of over 6,000 kms per hour, making India the only country in the world to pssess such missiles of this speed.The speed of the existing variant of BrahMos is half than that of the proposed ones.With a range of 290 kms, the hypersonic missiles are expected to be ready by 2015-16, the sources said.