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New Delhi: Few defence exports have attracted as much attention at home and abroad – or embodied as many geopolitical contradictions – as India’s BrahMos supersonic cruise missile.

 The Philippines has already acquired it, Indonesia has recently followed suit, and Vietnam is, according to Ministry of Defence (MoD) officials, poised to become BrahMos’s next export customer.

Beyond these countries, more than a dozen others, including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Brazil, Chile, South Africa and Malaysia, have all expressed interest in acquiring the BrahMos, underscoring its emergence as India’s flagship defence export and one of the world’s few commercially available supersonic cruise missiles.

Designed primarily for anti-ship and precision land-attack missions, the BrahMos is a two-stage missile system developed, produced and marketed by BrahMos Aerospace, an Indo-Russian joint venture based in New Delhi and named after India’s Brahmaputra and Russia’s Moskva rivers.

Capable of speeds of up to Mach 2.8–3.0 – nearly three times faster than most subsonic cruise missiles – the BrahMos has, depending on the variant, a range extending from 290 km to over 450 km and carries a conventional warhead of around 200–300 kg.

It is guided by an advanced inertial navigation system augmented by satellite navigation and an active radar seeker in the terminal phase, providing a low circular error probable (CEP). Its high-speed, low-altitude, sea-skimming flight profile and terminal manoeuvrability make it extremely difficult to detect, track and intercept.

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The missile can be launched from land, sea, air, and submarine platforms, making it one of the world’s most versatile and survivable precision-strike systems.

Supporting these capabilities is an equally impressive domestic manufacturing ecosystem, centred on BrahMos Aerospace facilities in Hyderabad and Nagpur and supported by specialised production units in Thiruvananthapuram, Pilani and the dedicated BrahMos production and integration complex commissioned in Lucknow in May 2025.

The Lucknow facility significantly expands manufacturing capacity, with a planned capability to produce 80–100 BrahMos missiles annually and provision for manufacturing up to 100–150 next-generation variants in the future. This expanding industrial base, involving more than 200 Indian companies supplying components for BrahMos, provides the scale and flexibility required to support both the Indian armed forces and a growing export market. 

But behind every export contract of the current 290-km BrahMos variant lies an intricate strategic, diplomatic and commercial conundrum – a geopolitical jalebi of intertwined interests, shared ownership, competing alliances and conflicting national objectives that is far more complex than the missile itself. Each overseas deal also prompts a series of questions that are rarely asked and hardly ever fully answered.

A Mobile Autonomous Launcher carrying BrahMos missile proceeds during rain-affected full-dress rehearsal for the Republic Day Parade, in New Delhi on January 23, 2026. Photo: PTI/Kamal Kishore.

Who actually owns the missile’s intellectual property rights (IPR)? Does........

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