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Editor’s Note
Pakistan’s Hangor-class submarines could alter the underwater balance in the Indian Ocean, particularly if deployed into the Bay of Bengal. Their potential nuclear role adds another layer of concern for India. The author argues for urgent investment in underwater surveillance, manned and unmanned systems, and integrated space-cyber intelligence. The larger message is clear: India can no longer afford delays in expanding its conventional and nuclear submarine fleets.
In the past couple of months, much has been written about the commissioning in China of the first of the Chinese-built conventional attack submarines (usually designated SSK) on April 30 this year for the Pakistan Navy (PN). It reached its home port, Karachi, on June 11, having visited Colombo en route with an escorting flotilla.
Hangor-Class Submarine Overview
The basic design is called the Yuan Type 039 A, and its evolved export variant is the S-26. The genealogy of the Yuan class itself traces back to the Soviet/Russian conventional boats of the 877/636 Classes. Much of the world knows them by the NATO “reporting name” as Kilo-class. In fact, the Indian Navy (IN) purchased 10 of the type Project 877-EKM variant from the mid-1980s, which were named the Sindhughosh class after the first submarine. A few of the class have been decommissioned over the years. The aim of this article is not to go into the contractual or build history and plans of the PN’s Hangor class, except to say that the contract between Pakistan and China was signed in 2015 and, of course, a few years of discussion must have preceded that.
What’s in A Name?
The choice of name for the class is of interest to Indian readers. It was the first PNS Hangor (of French origin, Daphne-class) that torpedoed the Indian frigate INS Khukri off the coast of Gujarat during the night of 09 December 1971. The IN frigate’s dynamic and brave skipper, Captain Mahendra Nath Mulla, went down with his ship. He occupies an iconic position in the folklore and enduring memory of the Indian Navy.
Likewise, on the Pakistani side, not only is the class-of-ship name Hangor, but the fifth submarine of the class is to be commissioned as PNS Tasnim after its then-skipper, Commander Ahmad Tasnim. This would also be the initial of the final four to be built at the Karachi Shipyard and Engineering Works (KSEW). The first four have been/are being built in China.
Pakistan’s Submarine Arm Development
Setting the symbolism of the class name aside, there are a few noteworthy aspects of PN’s emphasis on its submarine arm that are important for understanding such projects.
Their quest for this capability started in 1958, although the need for one submarine was part of their 1953 -1958 Plan. After some scouting around, including for Sweden’s Draken class, they leased the former USS Diablo from the US as PNS Ghazi. This submarine is well known as the boat that was sunk/sank off Visakhapatnam on 03 December 1971 (as per IN’s official account) on the eve of the Indo-Pak war breaking out. She had also been deployed in the 1965 war.
Of note, the IN had started proposals for submarine acquisition much earlier in its first plan of 1947-48. Its quest met with rebuffs as well as some hope from Britain and France, but fruition was possible only after an agreement was reached with the Soviet Union to purchase the Project 641 variant, which NATO code-named the Foxtrot (or F) class. Twenty years after the first proposal in 1947, INS Kursura was commissioned at Riga on 08 December 1967.
In 1971, the PN deployed the Ghazi at long range off our East coast in the Bay of Bengal, having sailed from Karachi several days earlier. Her deployment was expected. Of course, it had the option to enter East Pakistani harbours for turnaround if required later in the war. At that stage, war planners in Rawalpindi and Karachi would not have expected such a swift and complete loss of its eastern half leading to the birth of Bangladesh after its own civil war and liberation struggle from March that year.
This article will return to the Bay of Bengal in today’s context a little later.
A PN Lead in Some Areas?
After this war, the PN could be said to be a little ahead of the IN in the matter of submarines as well as anti-submarine warfare in three ways:
First, it began acquiring three French Atlantique maritime patrol aircraft (MPA) in 1973. These were capable not only of long-range ASW but, with the Exocet missiles on board, of anti-ship attacks as well.
Second, they were quite astute in buying a fourth Daphne (in 1975), this one from Portugal, which was experiencing financial trouble. Notably, they acquired three Agosta 90B boats from France, two of which were licensed-built at KSEW, similar to how IN purchased two Type 209 German SSKs and built two at Mazagon Docks Ltd (MDL). The Agostas were equipped with Exocet underwater-launched SM-39 anti-ship missiles, and for its time, this was an early and astute step taken by the Pakistan Navy.
Third, they took an early step around 2008-09 to begin retrofitting their Agostas with Air-Independent Propulsion (AIP) systems at the KSEW. They took a considerable operational risk because, in sequence, at least one of their boats would be out of service for a long time for the retrofit of the imported French MESMA AIP, at a time when their submarine force levels were low as it is.
How Could Hangors Matter for Pakistan and for India?
First, a few general considerations and reiteration of fundamentals are important. This is partly because of misconceptions that span terms such as sea control, sea denial, naval power projection, and even naval presence. It is also because submarine operations need to be examined not only through their operational history over the past 112 years since the start of the First World War in 1914, but also in light of changes in maritime warfare.
Sea control is an enabling condition for naval operations and functions in a state of conflict – or when conflict is imminent – where a nation and its forces need to use the sea for military operations and to keep maritime trade going in the face of challenges. The stress is on the need to use the sea for one’s own purposes.
On the other hand, sea denial is an enabling condition when one side does not need to use the sea but sees strategic, operational, and tactical advantages in denying the adversary access to that space. Neither condition, just like a favourable air situation in air warfare or battlefield exploitation on land, is absolutely one-sided. These enablers are also limited in time and space.
The third tasking often undertaken by navies has been power projection, which can be understood as military actions that directly apply pressure on land through strikes from multiple dimensions, primarily from the sea. This could be via air, missile, and drone strikes, including submarine-launched missiles; or amphibious assaults or raids; or special operations. At its most strategically significant spectrum is the nuclear- strike capability of nuclear or conventional submarines firing ballistic or even cruise missiles with nuclear warheads. A commensurate degree of sea control is a necessary condition for effective power projection.
Sea control and sea denial should not be mistaken for strategy or linked to a pecking order, with sea control as “prestigious” and befitting a larger navy, or linked in illogical binaries to platforms, e.g., “carriers are for sea control and submarines are for sea denial.”
A relatively recent misconception, born perhaps of older ones, is that manned, conventional and expensive assets are somehow better for sea control, while cheaper, more numerous unmanned craft are great for sea denial. The history of naval operations demonstrates many examples of forces moving from sea control (“to use the sea”) to sea denial (“to deny the enemy use of the sea”) or the other way around in different theatres and in different phases of a campaign or conflict.
Space prevents one from explaining via illustrations here, but the Mediterranean theatre in WW2 illustrates how the fort and fleet of both the western Allies and the Axis fought under conditions of competitive sea control until sometime in 1944.
The Battle of the Coral Sea (May 1942) demonstrated that Japanese carriers, submarines, and shore-based aircraft, as well as troops, fought for sea control as an enabler. The US-led coalition used a largely similar spread of forces and dimensions in countering them by denying the Japanese the ability and determination to land troops on the Papua Peninsula, thereby, to an extent, stemming the tide, even though their losses were higher in some ways of bean-counting. A month later, in the Battle of Midway in June 1942, a similar spread of forces, on a larger scale, fought hard over two to three days. Japan wanted to occupy Midway for military purposes (power projection). The Americans needed to retain the island as a vital base for further military operations and SLOC protection. Both sides needed to use the sea; hence, the condition required was competitive sea control.
Of essence is that, in terms of tactical actions and competence, forces often have to perform similar tasks to achieve varying degrees of sea control and/or sea denial. Secondly, these conditions are essentially platform agnostic. Importantly, submarines, due to their continuing improvements in endurance, operating range, stealth, connectivity, ordnance variety, and magazine capacity, can and will be used with greater flexibility in the years to come.
Space does not permit longer explanations and examples of the many ways in which submarines, manned and unmanned, large and small, nuclear and conventionally propelled, could play a role at a time when surface and air domain awareness is improving, with corresponding benefits and disadvantages depending on circumstances.
Submarines of many navies today are almost as well networked with their national and maritime domain awareness (MDA) as surface and airborne units, thanks to trailing-wire antennas, but with the added advantage of a much greater ability to maintain stealth because they remain submerged for much longer.
On the point of fundamentals, one may also flag that stealthy, submerged submarines add to the value “presence” provides to naval missions. Presence as a virtue of surface ships is, of course, well understood. In some cases, presence can be coercive, as when it creates silent pressure. With surface ships, this is overt and obvious, but with the caveat that a sudden outbreak of conflict (i.e., the “shooting” starts or is imminent) may disadvantage ships and aircraft thus deployed.
That is the reason why this author coined an obvious oxymoron: that submarines have great value because of the uncertainty and pressure they can create through the virtue of “covert presence,” which cannot be replicated by surface forces. A submarine missing from an adversary’s bases creates positional uncertainty from the moment it is not seen in ISR reports.
Back to Hangors
That brings us back to the Hangors! It should not surprise us that a senior Pakistan Navy officer mentioned, while the Hangor and accompanying ships were in Colombo in mid-June 2026, that the PN could maintain a submarine presence in the Bay of Bengal. It got a fair bit of media attention not only in India but also elsewhere.
Examples from the very early days of submarine warfare in the First World War (1914-1918) show that the “legs” they had were surprisingly long even when navies thought they would be useful for limited, close-coast warfare and scouting before the war broke out. Notably, the Germans deployed their U-boats at long ranges, including off the Atlantic coast, with no base support other than some resupply by cleverly coordinated supply ships, captured ships and from a few “milch cow” U-boats they had built.
In World War II, the German, Japanese, and American navies deployed at even longer distances, for more days (with considerable hardship to crews) and on various missions. After all, Netaji Subhash took a perilous passage on a German U-boat from European waters and transferred several weeks later at sea to a Japanese Navy submarine which took him to SE Asia where he continued leading the Indian National Army.
Fascinating accounts exist of the “odyssey”, including one by a serving naval officer.
Deploying in the Bay of Bengal
From the PN point of view, deployments in the Bay at some distance from bases like Karachi are operationally and tactically possible, especially with the addition of AIP, which, despite the distance to, say, a central point in the Bay, may still permit some endurance for a Hangor. Pakistan is cultivating friends around the Bay who may provide permission for port visits during peacetime, and friends like China and perhaps others may assist with domain awareness.
Strategic Rationale?
Strategically, they may have more things on their minds. There are media reports, globally as well as within India, that Indian ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) may operate from so-called “bastions” somewhere within the Bay on deterrent patrols. Such reports would be speculative, because deterrent patrol areas for any nation’s SSBNs would be a very closely held secret.
Besides, as this author has written elsewhere, the term “bastion”, used in forts on land, is a Western term somewhat incorrectly applied to Soviet SSBN patrol areas. The nature of maritime geography does not provide for bastions. Oceans and seas are relatively permeable, and in non-conflict conditions, the high seas are open for all. So, it can be expected that navies may deploy a range of manned-unmanned assets, including conventional and nuclear submarines, to shadow someone else’s SSBNs. After all, Japanese and NATO conventional boats and maritime patrol aircraft were regularly deployed to try and “mark” Soviet SSBNs. Likewise, the Soviets would try to track NATO SSBNs, but this task was a little more difficult because their deterrent patrols were likely in relatively open, dispersed ocean areas.
These tasks, termed Strategic Offensive and Strategic Defensive Anti-Submarine Warfare (SOASW and SDASW), constitute an important national naval effort.
Hangors as Part of Pakistan’s Nuclear Architecture?
For a long time, the PN has strived to create a tube-launched nuclear-tipped cruise missile capability as part of its own triad. Although definite information is not available, it is very likely that the HN-3 “Babur” can carry nuclear warheads. Torpedo tubes are usually 533mm (21 inches) in diameter, and that is not a small size for fitting a warhead, considering that 155mm (6-inch) artillery shells can also be adapted to carry a small nuclear warhead. The implications of equipping SSKs with nuclear cruise missiles are elaborated in a Policy Brief written for the Asia Pacific Leadership Network, 7 May 2026 (APLN, Seoul).
The eight Hangors could pose concerns, and to counter this, India would need an extensive set of capabilities: underwater awareness; manned and unmanned submarines; intelligence fusion that includes space and cyber dimensions; and the ability to exert pressure on PN’s boats and unmanned underwater vehicles. Daunting, but necessary.
Submarines of various types remain a bulwark of naval ability for sea control, sea denial, power projection and covert presence. There is little justification for further delays in building Indian conventional and nuclear attack submarines and investing in a variety of USVs. This is not only to counter Hangors or any other adversarial submarines, but to enable sustained robust outcomes across the IOR and even beyond. An axiom for submariners goes, Run Silent Run Deep but can be suffixed to “Ruin the Enemy,” as little else can.
RAdm Sudarshan Y Shrikhande, AVSM, IN (Retd), PhD
RAdm Shrikhande is a 1979 graduate of the National Defence Academy. His qualifications include a Master's in Weapon and Sonar Engineering from the Soviet Naval War College, (1985-88); MSc Indian Staff College (1995), MPhil from the Indian Naval War College and highest distinction from the US Naval War College (2003) and a PhD from Mumbai University (June 2025) for his thesis on sea-based nuclear deterrence for nuclear deterrence stability for India.
He has commanded three IN Ships, Nishank, Kora, and Rajput, after a long tenure as the anti-submarine warfare officer aboard a destroyer. He has also served as the executive officer of INS Delhi. He has been defence attaché in Australia and four other South Pacific nations. Ashore, he has held a variety of operational and training assignments, including serving as an instructor at AW School; Commander, War Room, NHQ; Director, INTEG; and as an inaugural selectee member of the IN Strategy and Operations Council from 2008 to 2011. In flag rank, he served as Chief of Naval Intelligence, Chief of Staff, SNC, Joint HQ staff duties, and as Flag Officer, Doctrines and Concepts, in the Nuclear Forces Command.
In retirement since 2016, he is a visiting professor at several institutions, including NDC, CDM, Staff and War colleges, spanning strategy, operational art, RMA, Arthashastra, the Peloponnesian War, Indo-Pacific geopolitics, leadership and ethics, and Atmanirbharta/Self-Reliance in defence production. He has participated in Track 2 discussions with some countries, attended various national/international conferences and workshops, and written for national and international journals. He was the inaugural editor-in-chief of the Indian Naval Despatch from 2020-May 2026 and a regular contributor to the USNI Proceedings magazine since 2018. He is a visiting professor at the Naval War College, Goa; an Honorary Senior Fellow with ANCORS, Wollongong University, NSW, as well as having been the inaugural Maitri Fellow in 2024 with them; a Distinguished Fellow at the Australia-India Institute, University of Melbourne and, from June 2026, a visiting professor of practice with IIT Bombay.
