India can easily decide the required intensity of war it wishes to fight (it has!), plot its duration (which it has!) and build up the requisite inventory of spares and logistics.

I doubt India will try to test these theories, given both sides have nuclear weapons.

Kargil war is a good example of how these things happen. Pakistani airforce was in a worse state than today, but India didnt attack Pakistan. Any war between these countries will be mainly a ground war with airforces playing their respective roles.

I dont think producing an aeroplane and few other components will give India a carte blanche.

And by the way every time there has been a war it was started by Pakistan from 65 to 71 and than Kargil. I wonder how India than planned the intensity and duration.

Zariya, you are contradicting yourself, but perhaps you dont realise it. If Babri (say a rough approximation of Babur) does exist in 1998, then wouldnt the design be already further along by the time Tomahawks come? And secondly, what makes you or anyone think that a Tomahawk is easy to reverse engineer? With a background in product development, I can assure you that while it can provide some insight, it would be unrealistic to expect the TH becoming a Pak missile or Pak being able to reverse engineer the same. Please tell me, how many other missiles have your ppl reverse engineered? Have they reverse engineered the APG-66 radar in your F-16s? Or the INS on F-16s? So why would you think that far more compact systems would be easy, especially from a crash site, from a system that is designed to self destruct critical components?

Based on a reading of my Janes & Brasseys collection, I would still say this is a PRC LACM. Janes report on PRC 2000, has a picture of the Hong Niao-1 in flight, its blurry but does bear resemblance to this Babur. Several PRC missiles bear a resemblance, but most importantly, the PRC LACM program is well existent and developed and has a variety of warheads, powerplants and other subsystem necessary to make this kind of device.

I am not implying that Babur is an exact copy of a Tomahawk. Pakistani’s could have salvaged something from the crashed Tomahawks but it’s also perfectly reasonable to assume that they didn’t get anything out of them.

My point remains that Babur missile had been in development in late 1990’s. China must have helped Pakistan through the development phase, but what I don’t agree with is the notion that Babur is a copy of a secret Chinese missile which China has never tested itself.

We can see many pictures and videos of Babur missile, I would appreciate if some one can post some clear pictures of a similar Chinese missile, which they claim Babur is a copy of.