Sheila Vemmer / Defense News Media Group Retired Indian Navy Commodore Ranjit Rai is now an independent defense analyst and vice president of the Indian Maritime Foundation.

Cruise missiles are proliferating in South Asia as the two main adversaries — India and Pakistan — are trying to play one-up against each other, said retired Indian Navy Commodore Ranjit Rai, now an independent analyst.

He cited the Indian Army’s move to field a land-attack version of the Indian Navy’s Brahmos supersonic cruise missile as a response to Pakistan’s test firing of Babur, a subsonic cruise missile that Islamabad says was indigenously developed but Rai and others say is possibly a reverse-engineered version of a U. S. Tomahawk missile.

Rai, speaking April 27 at the 2006 Cruise Missile & IED Defense Conference, sponsored by Defense News Media Group, in Arlington, Va., said the Babur also could be an adaptation of the Soviet KH-25 taken from Ukraine’s arsenal.

The missile is in the inventory of China, Iran and Ukraine, which operate it under different local names, he said.

“So you can see that cruise missiles are rapidly moving into the countries’ arsenals,” he said.

India’s Brahmos is developed by BrahMos Aerospace Pvt. Ltd., a joint venture in India between the state’s Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Russia’s State Unitary Enterprise NPO Mashinostroyenia.

The Brahmos missiles also will be deployed in India’s Type 15 and Type 17-class destroyers, he said.

The Indian armed forces feature both subsonic and supersonic cruise missiles, and military officials there are still debating which one of these classes to bet the future on, Rai said.

Though supersonic missiles are considered to be more accurate, they are more expensive than the subsonic ones, he said.

In the ballistic-missile arena, Pakistan’s missiles are considered more capable, but the country received Chinese assistance to develop its capabilities, Rai said.

India’s ballistic missiles include the Prithvi — a short-range liquid fuel-powered missile — and the Agni 1 and 2 — both intermediate range ballistic missiles. Though India has developed Agni 3, a longer range missile, the United States has pressured India into not testing it, Rai said.

India is also improving its air and missile defense systems, he said. The Pechora air defense system is being upgraded from analog to digital format.

The Akash surface-to-air missile, which serves as both an anti-aircraft and anti-missile system, is still in development, he said.

The Barak system, developed in conjunction with Israel, and the Tunguska system — a Russian system also known as the M-1 system — are part of India’s defense arsenal, he said.

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