Asia Defense | Security | South Asia

BrahMos Advances West: The UAE, Russia, and the Next Phase of India’s Defense Export

The BrahMos has more potential buyers than ever, but India’s defense export ecosystem is still a work in progress.

The jointly developed India-Russia BrahMos supersonic missile might find yet another buyer in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). After emerging as a popular choice among Southeast Asian states grappling with limited defense budgets and China’s expanding maritime assertiveness, the BrahMos missile might expand its footprint into West Asia. Reportedly, India is in talks with the UAE to export its frontline defense technologies, including the BrahMos supersonic missile and the Akashteer air defense command-and-control system. 

The UAE’s decision to move toward the BrahMos missile system comes at an important juncture, as the recent Iran conflict has exposed the region’s evolving security challenges. That reinforces the case for more diverse defense cooperation.

The Iran War demonstrated potential gaps in the UAE’s deterrence capabilities. Despite fielding one of West Asia’s most sophisticated advanced air and missile defense networks – including THAAD, the MIM-104 Patriot, and the KM-SAM – Abu Dhabi’s long-range conventional precision strike options are limited, relying primarily on the Black Shaheen. 

While it offers comparable precision-strike capability to BrahMos, the Black Shaheen is a subsonic missile that cruises at around Mach 0.8 and is primarily designed for land-attack missions. Apart from the Black Shaheen, the U.S.-supplied ATACMS, which Abu Dhabi operates, is a short-range ballistic missile again designed primarily for high-value precision land attack.  The UAE currently lacks a supersonic precision-strike missile capable of engaging both maritime and land targets. 

Acquiring the BrahMos would endow the UAE with a credible anti-access and area-denial (A2/AD) capability against both surface combatants and land targets, thereby strengthening its conventional deterrence posture across maritime and land theaters.

The susceptibility of the UAE’s airbases has been demonstrated in the Iran conflict, as Iranian strikes damaged facilities at Al Dhafra and Al Minhad air bases. The BrahMos would also provide an additional conventional strike option. This would allow the UAE to sustain offensive capabilities even if air operations were damaged, thereby reducing dependence on combat aircraft to ensure conventional deterrence and precise strike missions.

Besides the UAE, Russia, co-developer of the BrahMos, is reportedly considering inducting the missile onto its naval platforms despite possessing an extensive arsenal of indigenous cruise missiles, including the P-800 Oniks, Kalibr, and Kh-35. For the last two decades, Russia had little incentive to induct the BrahMos, as it already fielded a sophisticated arsenal of indigenous missiles. However, the Ukraine war has significantly depleted Russia’s missile inventory, creating the need to replenish stocks swiftly and expand production. The BrahMos could supplement Russia’s missile arsenal, given its well-demonstrated effectiveness against warships and maritime defense targets. 

Initially, the BrahMos program was primarily intended as a joint export program with India. The missile was designed around India’s requirements, made to be compatible with Indian warships, aircraft, and indigenous software. But since then, the missile has undergone a significant transformation from the original P-800 Oniks-derived design. It now has a much longer range, indigenous Indian guidance systems, navigation, software, seeker technology, and multiple-platform integration. 

Originally, the range of the BrahMos missile was capped at approximately 290 kilometers, to remain below the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) Category I threshold (300 km/500kg payload). As Russia was already a member of the MTCR, this limitation avoided complications that might have arisen from the transfer of Category I missile technology to India, a non-MTCR member state at the time. But........

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