Parting shot: Manportable Anti-Tank Guided Missile

The DRDO's Manportable Anti-Tank Guided Missile (MPATGM). (Janes/Kapil Kajal)

India's Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has designed and developed a “third-generation fire-and-forget” missile for special forces and infantry battalions of the Indian Army called Manportable Anti-Tank Guided Missile (MPATGM).

The MPATGM missile weighs 14.5 kg and has a length of 1,340 mm and a diameter of 120 mm. The MPATGM is intended to replace the MILAN system of France and the Konkurs system of Russia in service with the Indian Army.

According to the DRDO, the missile's command launch unit (CLU) – consisting of a target acquisition system and a command control unit – weighs 14.25 kg. The fire-and-forget missile is equipped with a midwave infrared direct-drive seeker and fired in lock-on-before-launch mode.

The missile can engage a target in direct- or top-attack approaches. The missile is integrated with the DRDO's anti-armour tandem warhead system. In a tandem warhead system configuration, two shaped charges – namely the main shaped charge and the precursor shaped charge – are mounted in the same missile and are initiated one after the other with a predefined time delay of the order of microseconds.

Both these shaped charges are mounted at a certain distance from each other, keeping in view the warhead system constraints. “It is necessary to protect the second charge [main shaped charge] from the blast effects of the first charge [precursor shaped charge] during the time delay between the initiations of two shaped charges,” the DRDO said.