GIDS Nishana PGK: The Low-Cost Tech Breathing New Life into Old Munitions
QUWA
Key Takeaways
- Nishana kit turns unguided shells into smart weapons.
- Delivers precision capability at a fraction of missile costs.
- Compatible with mortars, artillery, rockets, and general bombs.
Pakistan’s Global Industrial and Defence Solutions (GIDS)
revealed its own family of screw-on precision-guidance kits (PGK) under the “Nishana” designation.
The Nishana PGK was designed to adapt to a wide variety of non-guided munitions – including mortar shells, artillery shells, rockets, and general purpose bombs (GPB) – into satellite-guided (GPS/GNSS) munitions.
This is done by replacing the munition’s standard fuzes with Nishana fuzes, which pair a new fuze with a GPS/GNSS-based guidance system and aerodynamic control surfaces. Otherwise, the conversion involves no other changes.
According to GIDS, the Nishana PGK allows militaries to convert their existing stocks of unguided munitions rapidly – be it surface-launched or airborne – into guided ones with relatively minimal additional conversion work.
Not only does this approach reduce upfront procurement costs, but it also eliminates the need to replace existing artillery guns, rocket launchers, and other launch platforms to enable precision-guided capability.
In a broad sense, the Nishana could be viewed as Pakistan’s analogous counterpart to the U.S. M1156, a PGK solution that converts 155 mm artillery shells into GPS-guided munitions. It offers an accuracy of within 30 m CEP.
The M1156 has been in production since 2013 and, according to an August 2024 U.S. State Department notification, costs approximately $12,727 per unit.
While markedly lower in price than a new-generation guided shell, such as the M982 Excalibur, PGKs like the M1156 (and, by extension, the Nishana) require trade-offs to control costs in terms of accuracy and range.
The M982 offers an accuracy of within 4-5 m CEP and a range of 40-57 km, or even 70 km when fired from a 58-calibre Extended Range Cannon Artilery (ERCA) gun.
Thus, the M928 is a markedly more capable munition, but it comes with a much higher price tag (e.g.,
$217,592+ per shell for India in 2025 or $177,859 per shell for the Spanish Army in 2023).
In effect, the M1156 and M982 play complementary roles in the wider guided artillery ‘stack’, so to speak – i.e., one serves as a high-performance munition for high-value targets (M982), while the other drives scale by adapting large volumes of existing or even new-build stocks while controlling costs.
Pakistan could be working towards a similar interplay between the Nishana PGK and its growing portfolio of purpose-built smart munitions.
GIDS did not disclose the Nishana PGK’s performance specifications; however, one can infer that its accuracy will likely be comparable to that of the M1156 – i.e., within 30 m CEP, especially as the sole guidance mechanism is GPS/INSS.
The TIPU is a new precision-guided 155 mm artillery shell developed by DynTek Engineering and marketed by Global Industrial and Defence Solutions (GIDS).
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For reference, another Pakistani-designed solution, the
DynTek Tipu guided artillery shell, achieves a 20 m CEP with GNSS/GPS-aided INS, while the semi-active laser-homing (SALH) variant achieves a 2 m CEP.
