© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
A day after India hit terror bases in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) under Operation Sindoor, its defence systems thwarted Pakistan’s attempted attacks on military targets in northern and western India on Thursday (May 8).
India also targeted multiple air defence systems in Pakistan on Thursday and successfully hit one in Lahore. It is understood that the latest Israeli HAROPs, a type of unmanned combat aerial vehicle, were used.
Here is what to know.
1. An advanced loitering munition
HAROP is a kind of loitering munition. This category of weapons is named so because they loiter in the air close to the designated target. They cause destruction by crashing into their targets with the explosive payload that they carry, earning names such as “suicide drones” and “kamikaze drones”.
Usually, loiter munitions carry a camera which is nose-mounted and can be used by the operator to see the area of operation and choose targets. These munitions also have variants which can be recovered and reused in case they are not used for any strike. This is new compared to how older precision-guided weapons were traditionally used, because they required the exact location of the targets before launch.
Loitering munitions are also used for surveillance of targets, and can carry out precision strikes autonomously or otherwise. The Indian armed forces, in the last few years, have been procuring a range of drones, including loitering munitions.
2. Israeli-made
Pakistan’s Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) also claimed that India had used HAROPs. Defence manufacturer Israeli Aerospace Industries (IAI) described it as the “King of the Battlefield”.
“Combining the characteristics of a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) and a missile, HAROP remains a formidable loitering munition equipped to hunt high-value targets like unmanned surface vessels, command posts, supply depots, tanks, and air defense systems,” its website said.
HAROP has a nine-hour endurance to seek targets in a designated area, locate and identify them, plan an attack route, and then pursue the strike from any direction at a shallow or steep dive, the website added. The system can also overcome challenges in communication with its immunity to Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) jamming.
It is launched from canisters mounted on trucks or naval vessels and can be deployed from diverse terrains and environments.
The IAI said it was the first to develop loitering munitions. “In the 1980s, IAI introduced the HARPY – initially dubbed as a ‘Kamikaze Drone,’ a definition that often misrepresents such a versatile weapon system,” its website said.
These ‘fire and forget’ missiles could be launched without prior intelligence towards the target’s location, stay in the air and then zero in on the target. The newer HAROP, which evolved from the HARPY, carries an electro-optical sensor instead of the Radio Frequency (RF) seeker of the HARPY.
“Once the wide-area scan spots an activity, the electro-optical sensor is quickly pointed in this direction to identify and acquire the target. Once a positive acquisition is made, the loitering sensor transforms into a guided weapon, ready to attack the target it has just revealed,” the website said. It claimed that hundreds of battle-tested HAROP loitering munitions have proved highly effective in combat, “delivering 98% of mission success.”
