600km & Low-Altitude Flight: Inside Pakistan’s Taimoor Air-Launched Cruise Missile Plus Pro

On 03 January, Pakistan’s Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR) announced that the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) test-fired the Taimoor air-launched cruise missile (ALCM).

According to the ISPR, the Taimoor ALCM “is capable of engaging enemy land and sea targets with high precision at a range of 600 kilometres, carrying a conventional warhead.” In addition, the ISPR highlighted the Taimoor ALCM’s ability to fly at “very low altitudes” to circumvent enemy air defence systems.

Video footage released by the ISPR showed that the Taimoor ALCM was launched from a PAF Mirage 3 ROSE (Retrofit of Strike Element) aircraft, which had been the primary carrier of the PAF’s ALCMs (i.e., the Ra’ad) and stand-off weapon (SOW) systems (i.e., H-2 and H-4) until the mid-to-late-2010s.

• Pakistan Air Force’s Shift to Satellites, Jamming, and Standoff Weapons
• How a US Mistake Handed Pakistan’s Arms Market to China.
• The Blueprint for Pakistan’s Future-Proof Air Defence System.

For a time, this model worked in that NESCOM only needed to focus on producing cruise missiles at low scale because the use-cases for these systems were limited in scope. Pakistan could largely lean on the strength of its nuclear weapons to drive deterrence (i.e., “minimum credible deterrence.”).

However, this framework started cracking under pressure from 2016, when India began taking control of the escalation ladder, first by claiming to initiate cross-border “surgical strikes.” While these strikes could not be verified, the episode gave New Delhi the sense it can dictate the pace of escalation. Then, in 2019, India carried out a cross-border air strike which the PAF had responded to one day after, demonstrating its capacity to strike key Indian military targets and downing a MiG-21 in the process.