Pakistan’s Global Industrial and Defence Solutions (GIDS) revealed its own family of screw-on precision-guidance kits (PGK) under the “Nishana” designation.
The Nishana PGK was designed to adapt to a wide variety of non-guided munitions – including mortar shells, artillery shells, rockets, and general purpose bombs (GPB) – into satellite-guided (GPS/GNSS) munitions.
This is done by replacing the munition’s standard fuzes with Nishana fuzes, which pair a new fuze with a GPS/GNSS-based guidance system and aerodynamic control surfaces. Otherwise, the conversion involves no other changes.
According to GIDS, the Nishana PGK allows militaries to convert their existing stocks of unguided munitions rapidly – be it surface-launched or airborne – into guided ones with relatively minimal additional conversion work.
Not only does this approach reduce upfront procurement costs, but it also eliminates the need to replace existing artillery guns, rocket launchers, and other launch platforms to enable precision-guided capability.
In a broad sense, the Nishana could be viewed as Pakistan’s analogous counterpart to the U.S. M1156, a PGK solution that converts 155 mm artillery shells into GPS-guided munitions. It offers an accuracy of within 30 m CEP.
The M1156 has been in production since 2013 and, according to an August 2024 U.S. State Department notification, costs approximately $12,727 per unit.
While markedly lower in price than a new-generation guided shell, such as the M982 Excalibur, PGKs like the M1156 (and, by extension, the Nishana) require trade-offs to control costs in terms of accuracy and range.
The M982 offers an accuracy of within 4-5 m CEP and a range of 40-57 km, or even 70 km when fired from a 58-calibre Extended Range Cannon Artilery (ERCA) gun.
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