Pakistan has publicly unveiled the Fatah-3, a road-mobile supersonic cruise missile that gives the country its first fielded system capable of striking targets at supersonic speeds.
The missile travels at speeds between Mach 3 and Mach 4 and can strike targets between 290 and 450 kilometres away, carrying a warhead weighing 240 to 400 kilograms.
It is worth noting that Mach 3 means a missile travels three times the speed of sound, while Mach 4 means it moves four times faster than sound.
It is mounted on a road-mobile twin-canister launcher, allowing it to reposition rapidly before and after a strike to reduce its vulnerability to enemy targeting.
Defence analysts have identified the Fatah-3 as a locally developed derivative of HD-1 missile of China, produced by Chinese manufacturer Guangdong Hongda for export markets.
Design and Chinese origins
HD-1 has been displayed at international defence exhibitions as a supersonic anti-ship and land-attack missile with well-documented performance specifications and export credentials.
Pakistan unveiled the Fatah-3 as a domestically produced system rather than a Chinese export, indicating a degree of local integration and production beyond simply relabelling imported hardware.
The extent of Pakistani localisation relative to the Chinese HD-1 baseline has not been officially disclosed by either Islamabad or Beijing in any public statement.
Deriving the Fatah-3 from the HD-1 allowed Pakistan to field supersonic cruise capability without independently developing the propulsion and guidance technology required from scratch.
A step forward for the Fatah family
The Fatah missile family has been one of the most prominent precision strike development programmes, establishing a road-mobile capability through several earlier variants in recent years.
Earlier Fatah variants were subsonic systems; the Fatah-3 moves the programme into the supersonic regime where Pakistan had not previously operated any fielded weapon system.
A missile travelling at Mach 3 to 4 reduces the time available for an enemy air defence battery to respond from several minutes to a matter of seconds.
That shorter reaction window requires adversaries to deploy more capable and more expensive interceptors, as well as radar systems with significantly faster target-tracking update rates.
Anti-ship and naval capability
The Fatah-3 is also designed for maritime strikes, using a sea-skimming low-altitude flight profile to attack enemy warships at close range over the water.
Sea-skimming flight compresses the radar detection range available to an enemy ship, since shipborne radars have limited ability to detect low-altitude targets at extended distances.
The combination of supersonic speed and sea-skimming approach is specifically designed to penetrate the layered air defence systems carried by modern naval surface combatants.
This naval dimension extends the precision strike options of Pakistan significantly beyond land-based targets and introduces a new threat to Indian Navy surface vessels operating regionally.
