Project Kusha Explained: India’s New Long-Range Air Defence System

A missile lifted off from Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Island on 23 July 2026, climbed out over the Bay of Bengal and killed an electronic target that had been programmed to behave like something fast and very high up. Project Kusha had flown for the first time. Rajnath Singh called it a giant leap and pointed out that the number of countries able to build a long-range surface-to-air missile system from scratch is small.

Four months before that, in late March, the Defence Acquisition Council had signed off on buying five more squadrons of the Russian S-400 — one item inside a procurement package worth roughly ₹2.38 lakh crore. Analysts have put the eventual S-400 contract somewhere close to ₹1 lakh crore on its own.

Neither decision is odd in isolation. Read next to each other, they say something about how the Indian system actually thinks about air defence, and it is not the clean self-reliance story most of the coverage settled on within about six hours of the launch.

What follows is the architecture first, because almost nobody explains it, and then the nine questions the programme still has to answer.

How Project Kusha Actually Works

Project Kusha is not simply a missile. It is a chain, and the missile is the last link in it.. Formally it is the Extended Range Air Defence System — ERADS — and the Ministry of Defence made the point indirectly when it described the July trial: what was validated was the missile, the radar, the launcher and the command-and-control system working together as one unit. Integration is the hard part. Rocketry is not.

The sequence looks roughly like this.

Detection. A long-range surveillance radar sweeps a wide volume of airspace looking for anything that should not be there. At this stage the system does not care much about precision — it wants to know that something exists, roughly where, roughly how fast.

Tracking. A multi-function fire control radar takes over and builds a proper track file. This is where the gallium nitride AESA arrays DRDO has been developing matter. GaN transmit-receive modules put more power through a smaller aperture and run cooler than the older gallium arsenide generation, which translates into detection range and resistance to jamming. The radars for Kusha have come out of the DRDO ecosystem alongside Indian industry partners rather than being bought in.

Command and control. A battle management centre does threat evaluation and weapon assignment — deciding what is dangerous, what is a decoy, which battery shoots, which interceptor variant is right for the geometry, and whether the target is already being handled by somebody else. This node also talks upward into the Integrated Air Command and Control System, which is where Kusha, the S-400, MRSAM, Akash and the gun layers stop being separate systems and start being one picture.

Launch. Canisterised missiles ride on high-mobility transporter-erector-launchers and go out vertically. Vertical launch buys 360-degree coverage without slewing a launcher, and canisters mean the round is sealed from the factory and needs no field maintenance.

Mid-course guidance. For most of a 150 km or 250 km flight the missile is flying on inertial navigation, taking course corrections over a datalink from the ground. The datalink is the least glamorous component in the whole system and one of the most attackable.

Terminal homing. Close in, the missile goes autonomous on its own seeker. The published design uses an active radar seeker, with an imaging infrared option reported for the longer variants — useful against a target that is jamming the radar band, since heat is harder to spoof.

Intercept. The three interceptors share a common kill vehicle. What changes between M1, M2 and M3 is the booster stack underneath it.

One more piece sits outside the battery entirely, and it decides whether the long-range variants mean anything at all: external sensors. Airborne early warning aircraft, satellite cueing, and the datalink fabric joining them. More on that in question seven, because it is where the whole concept either works or quietly does not.

Project Kusha M1, M2 and M3: What Has Flown and What Has Not

Nearly every headline about Project Kusha in July used the 400 km figure. Nothing that has flown belongs to that variant.

Variant	Intended range	Status	Key point
M1	Around 150 km	In development, flight-tested	The only variant that has flown. Uses a dual-pulse solid motor for terminal energy.
M2	Around 250 km	In development, not yet flown	The middle layer. First flight is the next milestone that matters.
M3	350–400 km	Planned	The variant behind every “400 km” headline. Aimed at AEW&C aircraft, tankers and jammers.

There is also a naming trap that catches even specialist readers. LR-SAM is already the label attached to the naval Barak-8 built with Israel. Kusha gets called LR-SAM too. Different programme, different missile, similar acronym.

1. What really happened on 23 July?

The test was conducted against an electronic target simulating a high-speed, high-altitude aerial threat, and it was a successful interception. That is the official record and there is no reason to argue with it.

What it should not be confused with is a combat interception against a manoeuvring aircraft or a live representative threat. A maiden flight test is there to establish that the missile leaves the canister cleanly, the radar holds the track, the datalink stays up, the control surfaces do what the software tells them and the command chain issues the right instruction in the right second. Kusha did those things.

There is a ladder here that Indian defence reporting tends to compress. Developmental flight tests, then integrated trials with the complete weapon system, then user trials run by the service that will actually operate the thing, then induction. Kusha is on the second rung. DRDO had already closed out early developmental work on the M1 — including the dual-pulse solid rocket motor that gives the interceptor energy left over in the endgame — before this shot went up.

User evaluation is the stage where Indian missile programmes historically slow down, and it has not started.

2. Why buy five more S-400 squadrons if Kusha is coming?

If Kusha is cheaper, sovereign and arriving before the decade is out, the March clearance for five more Russian squadrons looks like a contradiction. It is not, quite. It is a hedge, and the reasoning behind it is unglamorous enough that nobody says it on the record.

Project Kusha will not be in squadron service in numbers before the early 2030s. Something has to hold the line until then. The S-400 has a combat history now, or at least a claimed one, from the May 2025 exchanges. Its 40N6 interceptor reaches further than anything India will field domestically for years. And there is a payments dimension that rarely makes it into defence copy — India runs a large trade imbalance with Russia, dollar settlement is awkward under current sanctions conditions, and there is an incentive to convert some of that exposure into hardware rather than let it sit.

Moscow, for its part, has no particular reason to feel threatened by Kusha. India will be operating S-400s deep into the 2040s, and those regiments will need spares, software support and replenishment rounds that come from exactly one place. The Ukraine war already showed that this dependency is not theoretical: availability rates on Russian-origin platforms across the Indian inventory took a hit when supply chains got pulled into a war.

The talk of technology transfer and S-500-adjacent cooperation deserves the same scepticism it has always deserved. Licence production of the Su-30MKI did not stop that fleet’s serviceability from being hostage to a factory in somebody else’s country. Whether the S-500 conversation is a real offer or a negotiating position ahead of the next contract is not something open sources can settle.

3. Which numbers are proven, and which are still claims?

The specification sheet doing the rounds is impressive. Mach 5.5 terminal velocity, dual active radar and imaging infrared seekers, GaN AESA arrays, single-shot kill probability north of eighty per cent.

Those figures come from open-source reporting and programme briefings. They are not outputs of a completed user trial, because there has not been one. They may well turn out to be accurate — DRDO’s seeker and radar work has improved considerably over the last decade and there is nothing physically implausible in the list. But an article that prints them flat, without attribution, is borrowing credibility the programme has not finished earning.

The indigenous content claim sits in the same bucket. Bharat Electronics and Bharat Dynamics are the named industrial partners and the system is described as developed by DRDO labs with Indian industry. Where that claim gets tested is further down the supply chain: seeker components, transmit-receive modules, gallium nitride substrates, specialist propellants. Those are the layers where “indigenous” has quietly meant “assembled here” before.

4. Will it actually be in service by 2030?

The Cabinet Committee on Security cleared Project Kusha in May 2022. Acceptance of Necessity for five Indian Air Force squadrons followed in September 2023, at roughly ₹21,700 crore. The first M1 flight was widely expected in late 2025. It happened in July 2026.

A slip of a few quarters is not much, and by DRDO standards this programme is moving briskly. It is still worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over, because the institutional record is what it is. Akash took the better part of two decades from sanction to meaningful induction. Trishul was eventually abandoned. The Comptroller and Auditor General has flagged optimistic timelines across the missile portfolio more than once, and the Standing Committee on Defence has done the same.

So the widely reported 2028–2030 induction window is best read as stated intent rather than a delivery schedule. The Army has now registered interest alongside the Air Force, and a vertically launched naval variant is under discussion. That is a vote of confidence in the design and simultaneously a fresh source of requirement creep, which is how a lot of Indian programmes have got heavy in the past.

5. Does the cost comparison with the S-400 hold up?

The line everybody repeats is that five Kusha squadrons at about ₹21,700 crore compare rather well against a similar count of S-400 units, and that individual interceptors run ₹40–50 crore against something closer to ₹100 crore for the Russian rounds.

Handle that comparison carefully. One side of it is a signed contract, largely delivered, that bundles missiles, launchers, radars, training, infrastructure and years of sustainment. The other is a pre-development sanction figure attached to a system that has not completed user trials. Development programmes land on their first number roughly never, in any country, including the ones with better records than India’s.

The metric that would actually settle the argument is cost per successful engagement across a twenty-year service life, replenishment rounds and mid-life upgrades included. Nobody has that number for Kusha. Nobody can have it yet.

What is genuinely cheaper from day one is not the hardware. It is the freedom to fire it without asking anybody.

6. Does Kusha answer the problem Operation Sindoor exposed?

The May 2025 exchanges with Pakistan get cited constantly as validation for long-range air defence. The more uncomfortable lesson was about arithmetic.

What came at Indian airspace in volume was not fifth-generation fighters. It was drones and loitering munitions — cheap, expendable, arriving faster than any high-end interceptor inventory can absorb without going broke. Putting a ₹40 crore missile into a twenty-thousand-dollar quadcopter is a tactical win and a strategic loss if you have to do it four hundred times.

Kusha does not fix that and was never meant to. Akashteer, QRSAM, VSHORADS, legacy gun systems and the directed-energy work DRDO has been demonstrating are what sit at that end of the exchange ratio. Layered defence is not a slogan about owning missiles of several different sizes. It is a cost-management structure, and in a drone-heavy fight the layer that decides the outcome is the cheapest one, not the longest-ranged.

7. Who is going to see 400 km for it?

An engagement at 350 or 400 km is not a ground-radar engagement. The earth curves. A ground array simply cannot see a target at that distance unless the target is obligingly flying very high, and the aircraft Kusha M3 is meant to kill — AEW&C platforms, tankers, standoff jammers — are exactly the ones that will be sitting behind their own front line.

Something has to be airborne and looking outward. That means early warning aircraft, tankers standing off behind them, satellite cueing feeding the picture down, and a datalink architecture that survives being jammed. India’s airborne early warning fleet is thin: a handful of Phalcon platforms, the indigenous Netra, and the Netra Mk-2 aircraft still working their way through the pipeline.

Pakistan, meanwhile, is pursuing China’s PL-17, an air-to-air missile credited with reach in the same 400 km class, and its entire purpose is to push those support aircraft further back from the fight.

That is the quiet counter to Project Kusha, and it does not involve shooting at Kusha at all. Blind the sensors and the advertised envelope becomes a paper figure. Which is why the AEW&C and space-based ISR orders over the next two years tell you more about whether the M3 is real than any missile test will.

8. Can the batteries survive being shot at?

Long-range surface-to-air systems have had a rough decade wherever they have been used seriously. Russian batteries in Ukraine have been picked apart by standoff weapons. Iranian S-300s were neutralised early in Israeli strikes. India’s own operations reportedly went after Pakistani air defence radars during Sindoor.

A Project Kusha battery is large, emitting, expensive and politically valuable — which is another way of saying it is a priority target from the first hour. Its survival has less to do with how far the missiles fly and more to do with emplacement and displacement times, mobility over Indian terrain, emission discipline, and whether the programme has bought enough decoys and spare radar sets to absorb a first exchange and keep shooting.

None of that shows up in a range figure. It is also the part of the programme least discussed in public, which may be deliberate and may be because nobody has asked.

9. Is five squadrons anywhere near enough?

Coverage of Project Kusha rarely names what it is meant to defend against, which makes the capability claims hard to size.

On the western front, Pakistan already operates HQ-9P and HQ-16 batteries and has been offered the HQ-19, built for high-altitude ballistic threats. It is pursuing the J-35A and long-range Chinese air-to-air missiles. On the northern front, China fields HQ-9B, HQ-22 and the S-400 itself, sitting on top of a ballistic missile inventory of a completely different order of magnitude.

Now do the arithmetic on coverage. Five Kusha squadrons. Five S-400 regiments under the 2018 contract — four delivered as of mid-2026, with the fifth expected around November. Possibly five more after that. Set against a frontier running several thousand kilometres across two fronts, plus the cities, refineries, ports and nuclear installations that Mission Sudarshan Chakra promises to cover.

Sudarshan Chakra, announced from the Red Fort in August 2025, targets nationwide coverage by 2035 in two phases with an interim milestone around 2030. The scale comparison is the fastest way to test the ambition. Israel’s layered shield covers roughly 22,000 square kilometres and it strains under rocket salvoes fired from a few dozen kilometres away. India is 3.29 million square kilometres. The American Golden Dome concept, over a comparable landmass, carries cost estimates in the hundreds of billions of dollars and a timeline nobody in Washington treats as fixed.

That does not make Sudarshan Chakra unserious. It does mean the realistic version is a network of defended zones around assets the state has decided it cannot lose — which is a very different promise from the one the public is currently hearing. Long-range SAMs are point-defence assets with impressive reach. They are not a dome, whatever the branding suggests.

The markers worth watching

The next twenty-four months will generate better evidence than any of the current commentary, including this piece.

• M1 integrated flight tests and the start of IAF user evaluation — the first genuine performance data anyone outside the programme will see.
• First flight of the M2, and whether the M3 timeline holds or quietly moves right.
• Whether the second S-400 contract is actually signed, at what value, and how quickly — the clearest available read on how much Delhi trusts its own schedule.
• The BEL and BDL production ramp, including the dedicated lines coming up in the Uttar Pradesh defence corridor.
• AEW&C and satellite ISR orders, which decide whether long-range interception is real or notional.
• Whether the indigenous content claim survives scrutiny at the level of seekers, TR modules, GaN substrates and propellants.

Kusha is further along than most of DRDO’s missile efforts were at the same age, and the industrial base sitting behind it is broader than it has ever been. The question that keeps resurfacing is not really whether the missile works. It is whether a country that has just cleared five more squadrons of somebody else’s air defence system genuinely believes its own will arrive in time — and the answer to that one is buried inside a contract that has not been signed yet.

Frequently asked questions

What is Project Kusha?

Project Kusha, formally the Extended Range Air Defence System (ERADS), is DRDO’s indigenous long-range surface-to-air missile programme. It combines interceptor missiles, surveillance and fire-control radars, launchers and a command-and-control centre, and is designed to engage fighter aircraft, cruise missiles, drones and large support aircraft as the outermost layer of India’s air defence network.

When was the first Project Kusha missile tested?

The maiden flight test took place on 23 July 2026 from Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Island off the Odisha coast, against an electronic target simulating a high-speed, high-altitude aerial threat. The Ministry of Defence confirmed the target was intercepted and that the trial validated the missile, radar, launcher and command-and-control chain working as one system.

What is the range of the Project Kusha missile?

Three interceptors are planned. The M1 engages out to roughly 150 km, the M2 to around 250 km, and the M3 to between 350 and 400 km. Only the M1 has flown so far, so the widely quoted 400 km figure refers to a variant still on the drawing board.

Is Project Kusha better than the S-400?

Not on current evidence. The S-400 is a mature, fielded system whose longest-range interceptor is already in service. Kusha’s advantages are sovereignty, lifecycle control, freedom from export politics and lower projected cost — things that pay off over decades rather than in the next engagement.

How much does Project Kusha cost?

Acceptance of Necessity for five Indian Air Force squadrons was granted in September 2023 at approximately ₹21,700 crore. Later phases, additional squadrons and any Army or naval variants would add substantially to that.

Will Project Kusha replace the S-400 in Indian service?

No. India’s S-400 regiments are expected to remain in service well into the 2040s, and the Defence Acquisition Council cleared the purchase of five more squadrons in March 2026. Kusha is intended to operate alongside them, integrated through the Integrated Air Command and Control System.

How does Project Kusha fit into Mission Sudarshan Chakra?

Kusha is meant to form the long-range outer layer of the shield announced in August 2025, sitting above MRSAM, Akash and Akash-NG, with very short range systems, guns and counter-drone weapons below them. Sudarshan Chakra targets phased nationwide coverage by 2035.

External authority links

• Press Information Bureau — official MoD release on the Kusha flight test
• DRDO — programme description and annual report
• Ministry of Defence — DAC decisions and Acceptance of Necessity notices
• Comptroller and Auditor General of India — audit reports on DRDO timelines and cost overruns
• SIPRI Arms Transfers Database — independent data on India’s import dependence
• IISS Military Balance — orders of battle for India, China and Pakistan
• Lok Sabha Standing Committee on Defence — committee reports on DRDO and capital acquisition