750 km — Pakistan’s longest-range conventional cruise missile was revealed publicly on 12 August 2025, announcing a new, deep-strike capability for the Pakistan Army’s missile forces.
Technical profile: range, guidance, flight profile and accuracy
The Fatah-4 is a ground-launched cruise missile (GLCM) with a stated range of 750 km and a subsonic cruise speed of Mach 0.7. It is designed to fly a terrain-hugging, low-altitude profile with a minimum altitude of 50 m. Guidance is a multi-mode suite: GPS/GNSS-aided inertial navigation complemented by a Digital Scene Matching Area Correlator (DSMAC) for terminal precision. Quwa reports a claimed circular error probable (CEP) of 5 metres — the most precise in the Fatah family — enabling the weapon to be used against hardened point targets such as aircraft shelters, buried command bunkers, and reinforced radar installations.
Propulsion and survivability approach
The missile uses a miniature turbojet for sustained subsonic cruise, a propulsion choice the source links to favourable fuel efficiency at low-altitude cruise. The Fatah-4’s survivability is not premised on speed but on stealth by avoidance: low-altitude, terrain-following flight that exploits ground clutter and the curvature of the earth to delay detection by ground radars. Quwa explicitly contrasts this approach with the higher-speed profiles of the family’s other members and notes the terrain-hugging tactic is comparable to the U.S. Tomahawk, Russian Kalibr, and Chinese CJ-10.
Platform lineage: Babur heritage and naval derivative
The Fatah-4 is described as a conventional derivative of the Babur cruise missile platform, a programme Quwa characterises as one of Pakistan’s most mature. Babur-1 and Babur-2 are cited as strategic deterrent assets under the Strategic Plans Division (SPD); the Fatah-4 represents a conversion of that baseline for conventional use under the Army Rocket Force Command (ARFC). The article also notes a shared-platform relationship with the Pakistan Navy’s Harbah NG anti-ship cruise missile: both the Harbah NG and the Fatah-4 use the same core airframe, turbojet propulsion, and navigation architecture, a design approach that Quwa says allows NESCOM to sustain higher production volumes and reduce per-unit costs.
Operational role in the ARFC and doctrinal implications
Within the ARFC’s disclosed inventory, the Fatah-4 occupies the deepest-strike tier. Quwa states that the 750 km range enables the ARFC to hold targets at operational and strategic depth and that re-designating a Babur derivative under the Fatah family signals ARFC access to cruise-missile technology previously reserved for strategic forces. The report links the conventional conversion to a doctrinal thrust emphasising conventional strike depth, citing a post-Bunyan-un-Marsoos emphasis on addressing scenarios without crossing the nuclear threshold.
Readiness, public testing, and family context
The Fatah-4 was publicly revealed in August 2025 but, unlike the combat-proven Fatah-1 and the Fatah-2 — which had an ARFC training launch in April 2026 — the Fatah-4 has not been publicly test-fired. Quwa notes the engineering risk for a conventional Babur derivative is likely lower than for a clean-sheet design, given the Babur platform’s service history since the mid-2000s. The Fatah-4 forms part of a broader Fatah family that includes the Fatah-1 GMLRS (140 km), the Fatah-2 SSM (400 km), and the Fatah-3 supersonic cruise missile revealed in May 2026.
What this means for the Pakistan Army, Regional Air Defences, and NESCOM/GIDS
- Pakistan Army / ARFC: The ARFC gains a conventional deep-strike option that the source says expands scenarios addressable without nuclear escalation and places a longest-range conventional munition in the Army inventory.
- Regional air-defence planners: Quwa highlights that an adversary defending against the full Fatah family must provide high-altitude ballistic-missile defence, mid-altitude intercept capability for supersonic cruise threats, and low-altitude cruise-missile detection and engagement — a multi-axis problem no single architecture can optimise for simultaneously.
- NESCOM / GIDS and defence procurement: The shared Babur-derived baseline between land-attack and anti-ship variants is presented as a production and cost advantage, enabling higher volumes and lower per-unit costs while supporting both ARFC and naval requirements.
The revelation of the Fatah-4 places a long-range, precision conventional cruise missile at the core of the ARFC’s deepest-strike tier while leaving two observable milestones to confirm operational status: a public test-firing and visible operational integration under ARFC training and deployments. Until either appears, the Fatah-4 remains a declared capability built from a mature platform lineage but not yet demonstrated in public launches.
Source: Quwa — Fatah-4 Ground-Launched Cruise Missile (GLCM)
