Pakistan Tests an Extended-Range Fatah-4 Cruise Missile: How Far Can It Now Reach?

BrahMos, the obvious Indian counterpart, is built on the opposite bet: a supersonic ramjet weapon with a 290 km baseline range; its extended-range version was estimated by Janes at 450 to 500 km in October 2023. The Fatah-4 is subsonic and flies 750 km, so it trades speed for reach: a defender gets far longer to react but must first find a 7.5 m object hugging the ground at 50 m. On cost, a February 2024 approval reported by PTI covered more than 200 BrahMos for the Indian Navy at about Rs 19,000 crore; Pakistan has published no Fatah-4 price, and Quwa’s argument that a shared Babur airframe lowers unit cost is an inference, not a figure.

India’s closer analogue is its own subsonic land-attack weapon, the Indigenous Technology Cruise Missile from the Nirbhay programme, which DRDO flew from Chandipur on 18 April 2024 in a sea-skimming profile, News On AIR reported; DRDO has published no range for it. The Fatah-II guided rocket Pakistan fired at India in May 2025 is a 400 km, 7.5 m weapon with a 365 kg warhead and 50 m accuracy, Janes reported; the Fatah-4 nearly doubles that reach and, on the Rocket Force’s own claim, tightens accuracy tenfold.

The Fatah-4 is a conventional ground-launched cruise missile operated by Pakistan‘s Army Rocket Force Command rather than by the nuclear-armed strategic forces. Its official range is 750 km, the distance ISPR stated for the 30 September 2025 launch; the extended-range version tested on 6 October 2026 has no published range. ISPR says it flies low along the terrain to evade missile defences. Quwa lists 7.5 m length, 0.5 m diameter, 1,530 kg, a Mach 0.7 cruise speed, a 330 kg blast-fragmentation warhead and 5 m claimed accuracy, and traces the design to NESCOM’s Babur cruise missile.

Even the 750 km baseline covers New Delhi, about 430 km from Lahore, and most of northern and western India; a 1,000 km-class version would add Mumbai, roughly 880 km from Karachi. The command that owns the weapon is itself new. Shehbaz Sharif announced it on the eve of Independence Day in August 2025, saying “On this occasion, today, I announce the formation of the Army Rocket Force Command”, PTI reported. Nuclear-capable missiles stay under a separate strategic command, Arab News noted.

The reason is May 2025. During the four days of fighting that followed India’s Operation Sindoor strikes, Pakistan’s foreign ministry said its forces used “Fatah series missiles F1 and F2” alongside drones and long-range artillery. India says much of that was stopped. ThePrint reported that an S-400 battery was credited with intercepting a Fatah-II near Sirsa in Haryana on 10 May, although no official has confirmed which interceptor fired, and Air Chief Marshal A.P. Singh later credited S-400s with six Pakistani aircraft, a claim Pakistan rejects and that, Janes noted, came with no visual evidence. Rawalpindi drew a lesson either way. Guided rockets that climb into S-400 coverage are a poor way to hit India; a cruise missile at 50 m stays below the radar horizon until its final minutes, and because it is explicitly conventional it gives the Army a response short of the nuclear threshold. Saudi Arabia, which signed a mutual defence agreement with Islamabad in September 2025, will notice too; that pact has so far produced words rather than troops.