I was watching The History of Tomahawk Cruise Missile on National Geographic Channel one day. In between the documentary they told a remarkable incident about the Tomahawk.

They said In First Gulf War, all the criuse missiles that were destined to Bhagdad had to travelled through the Desert Areas. The tomahawk Guidance system "TERECOM" faced serious problem to reach the target because most of the desert had flat areas (had flalt surfaces) and the TERECOM were not able to recognize the area it was passing through because no region had a distinguishable feature and as a result it's CEP (Circular Error Probability) were greatly enhanced. To fix this Problem, The Strategic Command then decided to Fly the Tomahawk across the Mountain regions of Kurdistan to Bhagdad and then missile achieved the required accuracy that every one wanted.

In the light of Above discussion, a question arises in the mind. Both Babur and Ra'ad uses the TERECOM while the later uses it mostly in its terminal phase. Now if we look at our borders with india, we see "Thar" desert acting as a Borderline in SINDH and in Punjab, The Khem Kharan Sector and other areas also had desert features. So Will Our Cruise Missile face the Same problem as Tomahawk faced it because both had similar Guidance System ?????

P.S. Complie your posts keeping only "TERECOM" in mind but not the GPS because it is 99% possible that USA will Block all Military related GPS signals to Pakistan in any future battle of Indo-Pak War.

currently, yes it is a mjor problem
but in the not to distant future the chinese "GPS" like system will be covering all of Asia
while transiting these areas, these missiles can use a combination of the TERECOM and Chinese GPS and still use that to finalize the approach

the system is not planned to be ready for at least a few more years, possibly more than 7 years

@ ISI2003 = 7 years and add another 3-4 years because China is Vast and it had to Cater its own needs first and also testing of system will also take 1 or 1.5 years so it will be 10-12 years Approx which in my Humble is not acceptable.

We can use commercial GPS signals although they might not be that accurate but combined with TERECOM it would act properly.

BTW one or two tomahawks fell in Baluchistan due to the same problem when Osama was bombed by clinton administration.

This should'nt be a problem, all you need is a transmitter bouncing beams at a 45 degree angle, the reciever then feeds the time differential to on board software which calculates the opposite height, the missile's actual height. I can imagine the developers have already accounted for this "problem" .

Its not about the height the problem is that tomahawks match photos in its computer to the terrain below but to tomahawks desert dunes look same and it cannot distinguish proper waypoints and it crashes.There should be a distinctive geographical feature after every few hundred km in order to define path.

I pretty sure tht Pakistan cruise missiles would also be fired from PAF aircraft not necessarily while staying in our own airspace, maybe from somewhere inside India.
So should'nt cause a problem.

can waterways (canals and rivers) be used as CM way points?
if possible, this will solve major part of this problem.

Doubt it, a major river divides Baghdad in half and that didn't help the Tomahawks a bit.

Its destination (or target map) might not have included the area where the river is located. The target is pin-pointed and not limited to the size of one large city.

I don't think that Babur would have a problem in Indo-Pak scenarios, because the Thar desert is not as flat as the ones in Iraq. Iraqi deserts are mostly flat, with mostly little or no elevation in ground, except for a few large dunes. Flat lands of Iraq look like this:

..no wonder its so hard to locate targets on this terrain.

this is why babur and raad have 2 other navigation systems one is a laser gyro based inertial navigation system the other is GPS the 3 systems work in conjunction with each another..

I think its TERCOM (Terrain Contour Matching), not TERECOM This in combination with an INS is called the TAINS system (Tercom-Aided Inertial Navigation System).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM

Not to be confused with TERPROM (Terrain Profile Matching) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERPROM

a simpler way is to record a flight from google earth, and match it with terrain :-)

I was wondering whether Babur is also capable of bombing a target with clusters before hitting another target with the actual bomb?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1eEHAs284Q...feature=related

For Tomahawk I think it is either a nuke warhead (W-80-0 thermonuclear 5-200 kT) or a conventional blast-fragmentation / penetrating warhead ( 450 kg / 1000 lb WDU-25/B blast-fragmentation or 340 kg / 750 lb WDU-36/B blast-fragmentation) or conventional payload (i.e. 166 BLU-97/B Combined Effects Bomblets), not a combination.

http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/m-109.html