India needs to rethink air defence

The Lebanon conflict has thrown up a number of important air defence issues. The conventional air defence target was mainly manned aircraft and helicopters. This has now been replaced by a variety of air-borne objects like rockets, SSMs, precision-guided munitions (PGMs) dropped by aircraft, cruise missiles, unmanned air vehicles, and so on. Though this has been known in defence circles for some time, no concrete practical structures has taken shape on the ground to tackle the threat. Hence we had the Israeli debacle. In this context it was very interesting to note that even during Aero India 2007, held in Bangalore recently, one could see companies advertising SAMs with ranges of 20-30 km to destroy combat aircraft and helicopters, while in the next stall the same company would showcase stand-off weapons like air-launched cruise missiles and PGMs, which could be launched from hundreds of kilometres away.

The radar cross-section of a non-stealthy conventional fighter aircraft with a full combat load and drop tanks is much bigger as compared to the radar cross-section of, say, a cruise missile. If some of these are made of composite material, the radar cross-section drastically reduces even further. We need modern ground-based air defence systems which will be with us for the next 20-30 years, to combat extremely low radar cross-section targets. The only aircraft which can operate with some semblance of success against modern ground-based air defences will be the exorbitantly expensive stealth aircraft like the US B-2 bombers, the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightening-II or the future Russian fifth generation stealth Sukhoi design (expected to be ready by 2009).

It is known that modern war machines of the developed nations projects their power through air. A lot of nations, even from the developing world, are following this trend. The contemporary air defence systems in the world composed of guns and missiles of the seventies and eighties cannot effectively tackle these types of targets. There is therefore a requirement to field a totally new family of air defence weapon systems to combat this threat.

A nation which does not have huge resources to buy exorbitantly expensive combat aircraft can invest a much lesser amount and still strike deep into enemy territory without putting their pilots at risk. At present there is no known operational anti-ballistic missile system which can counter a saturated attack with hundreds of rockets/missiles. For instance, Iran, with an antiquated air force and notional ground-based air defence system, has fielded thousands of rockets and missiles with cluster and multiple warheads, giving American and Israeli military planners sleepless nights.

Pakistan over the last couple of years has been acquiring large numbers of sophisticated SSMs, cruise missiles, stand-off air-to-ground bombs like the satellite guided US Longshot, the Joint Direct Attack Munition and the US advanced medium range air to air missiles. Apart from this, it is continually upgrading its air force by acquiring the latest model of America’s F-16 aircraft. It will acquire in the near future Chinese and Pak-designed multi-role JF-17 ‘Thunder’ aircraft. Coupled with this, it now has a ground-based air defence set-up, basically to combat aircraft type targets. Even our highly advertised multi-billion dollar acquisition of 126 multi-role combat aircraft may not be able to effectively tackle the cruise missiles, JDAMs and rockets in flight. Against the SSMs, we need good and effective ABMs to destroy them mid-course or during the terminal stage of their flight, whereas to destroy them in the boost phase may require aircraft or ground-based directed energy weapons or hyper-velocity missiles mounted on large and long endurance UAVs. Even after spending hundreds of billions of dollars, America with a defence budget of nearly $ 500 billion, is nowhere near perfecting these types of weapon.

At present, most of India’s ground-based air defences are obsolete. There are however modern ground-based air defence systems available in the world market like the Israeli Spyder and Defender, French MICA and Aster, Russian Tor-M1 and Pantsir, US Slamraam, Swiss Skyshield, and so on, which are capable of effectively engaging very small radar cross-section targets. This type of equipment is not available off the shelf. There is a huge lead time before equipment is trial-evaluated, selected, people trained to operate it and finally deployed within our armed forces. Only halting steps have so far been taken to acquire some of this equipment. However, if we do not rectify this state of affairs, we may be in for a bigger surprise from adversaries than Israel got from the Hezbollah.

The writer is a retired major general of the army air defence