Pakistan Unveils New Fatah-4 Cruise Missile
Pakistan has unveiled the Fatah-4, the newest addition to the Pakistan Army’s Fatah family. The Fatah Weapon System missile family consists of a wide variety of munitions ranging from Guided Rockets to Ballistic Missiles and Cruise missiles. As the name suggests Fatah-IV is the fourth distinctive member of Army’s Fatah family, where early 3 examples of Fatah family are ballistic weapons, Fatah-4 meanwhile is a Cruise Missile (likely derived from either the Babur/Harbah Family).
All of the systems offered under the Fatah are conventional in nature with payload’s consisting of unitary, cluster warhead etc. Fatah 4 too is conventional in nature and its unveiling marks the clearest indication yet that the Pakistan Army is moving toward a dedicated conventional rocket and missile force designed for precision long-range strikes. Operationalization of Fatah family of weapons will allow Pakistani Army to conduct tactical strikes without involving Army’s Strategic Forces Command (ASFC), This would be a significant shift from the Pakistan Army’s strategy where it has only reserved its ASFC arsenal of Ballistic and Cruise missiles largely for Nuclear deterrent roles.
With a projected range of up to 750 km+ while carrying a warhead of 330kg, Fatah-4 represents a Low Cost Long Range conventional strike capability, offering low-altitude, terrain-hugging flight for survivability against air defenses. The Missile flies at a speed of 0.7 mach, 50m above ground level while adopting terrain hugging flight path to mask its signature. Additionally the missile has a accuracy of <5m, even much lesser when fitted with a EO/IR seeker.
Fatah-4 is also likely able to use modern technologies from Pakistan’s Harbah program such as the high end Dual mode seeker or single mode seeker developed for Harbah AShM, that use either Radar, EO/IR or both. These seekers can be easily adopted for ground attack role. Furthermore the seeker incorporates AI into the EO/IR module, which would enable the Missile to use image scene matching tech to correctly identify its target in GPS Contested environments.