Cheap Cruise Missiles? Inside Pakistan’s Strategic Shift to Jet-Powered Attack Drones – Quwa

Pakistan’s defence business lately took the wraps off two new jet-powered one-way assault drones – the Woot-Tech HiMark-25 and the “Baaz Delta” by International Industrial Defence Options (GIDS).

These new munitions are, at their core, comparatively low-cost cruise missiles created by integrating loitering-munition platforms with miniature turbojet engines. Comparable weapons have already been utilized by Russia in Ukraine (Geran-3 and Geran-5), whereas others are getting into manufacturing in Western Europe (MBDA One-Approach Effector or OWE).

The intent behind these jet-powered one-way assault drones (OWAD) or OWEs is to offer a long-range, precision-strike possibility that’s scalable sufficient to deploy in numbers and provision quickly at decrease prices, at the very least in comparison with bigger, conventional cruise missiles just like the Babur-series and even precision-guided surface-to-surface missiles (SSM) just like the Fatah-1 or 2.

The 2 methods replicate Pakistan’s persevering with funding in asymmetrical strike applied sciences, constructing on earlier reveals of Shahed-style and a number of other different loitering munition platforms.

As well as, the product reveals construct on an earlier Market Intelligence (MINT) evaluation by Quwa (from November 2025) that recognized Pakistan as having all of the groundwork to pursue OWE improvement. 

In that evaluation, this writer acknowledged: Pakistan is, maybe extra unintentionally than systematically, creating methods that would, in idea, readily turn into OWEs. Nonetheless, it doesn’t seem {that a} cohesive technique is in place to combine these methods for the OWE function.”

In the identical evaluation, this writer discovered that, on the time, Pakistan probably didn’t clearly or distinctly categorize OWEs as a requirement, resulting in a scarcity of tri-services coordination and siloed work that would inadvertently overlap with such munitions (however not correctly concentrate on leveraging their benefits).

Nonetheless, at this time the Pakistani defence business is actively shifting into the jet-powered one-way assault drone/loitering munition (OWE) market. It additionally stands to cause that these applications are pushed by Pakistani necessities, that are more and more drawing on new intelligence-driven concentrating on methods (e.g., satellites and imaging intelligence, digital intelligence or ELINT, and conventional measures like joint air-and-surface/maritime radar feeds). 

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Woot-Tech HiMark-25(TJ)

The primary of those new OWEs is the HiMark-25(TJ), a turbojet-powered variant of the HiMark-25 propeller-driven loitering munition.

Business sources informed Quwa that the HiMark-25(TJ) provides a spread of 250 km, with a cruising pace of 240 km/h and a splash pace of 320 km/h. It provides 60 minutes of endurance and a flight ceiling of 15,000 ft.