Indian Army inducts second cruise missile unit close to Pakistan border

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Providing it a swift strike capability along the border with Pakistan, the Indian Army on Sunday inducted its second BrahMos supersonic cruise missile regiment in the western sector.

It also successfully conducted a test of the 290-km range missile to validate the unit's operationalisation.

"In conformity and pursuit of operational and strategic surface to surface missile capability development, the second BrahMos unit of Indian Army has been operationalised somewhere in western sector," an army spokesperson said in a release here.

"The Indian Army unit successfully launched BrahMos missile and destroyed the preselected target in the field firing ranges in Rajasthan on Sunday," he added.

BrahMos has the capability of attacking surface targets by flying as low as 10 metres above the ground. It can reach a speed of Mach 2.8 or close to three times the speed of sound.

The BrahMos has been developed as a joint venture between the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) of India and the Federal State Unitary Enterprise NPO Mashinostroyenia (NPOM) of Russia under BrahMos Aerospace.

The missile is named after two rivers, the Brahmaputra and the Moskva.