‘Shaking heavens’: IAF chief on mock war

NEW DELHI: More than 1,100 aircraft – half of them fighter jets — have logged over 6,000 flight hours in three days during the Indian Air Force’s largest exercise in the past three decades, with Air Chief Marshal Birender Singh “Tony” Dhanoa saying on Monday that Pakistan was closely watching the operation that is “shaking the heavens and splitting the Earth”.

As the concentration of the IAF’S deployed assets in the largest-of-its-kind exercise, Gaganshakti-2018, moves from the western sector to the eastern front “in less than 48 hours,” Dhanoa said all training activities in the force would remain suspended till the two-phase air manoeuvres end on April 22. It is in war-time that militaries shelve all training activities.

“We are flying a lot of sorties and dropping a lot of bombs. So in that sense — borrowing a phrase from a Rand monograph - I would say we really are shaking the heavens and splitting the Earth,” Dhanoa said in his first public comments on the exercise in which every wartime drill is being rehearsed.

United States-based think tank Rand Corporation had in 2011 published a document titled Shaking the Heavens and Splitting the Earth: Chinese Air Force Employment Concepts in the 21st Century. The Gaganshakti-2018 exercise seeks to test the IAF’S readiness and stamina for a twofront war with China and Pakistan.

“I wouldn’t like to comment on the two-front aspect… But every single platform in the IAF’S inventory is being exercised and we are carrying out surge operations – highest tempo operations where fighters and other platforms have clocked more sorties in three days than they normally would in over a month,” said Dhanoa, a decorated fighter pilot, in an interview.

From deep strikes to air dominance and long-range maritime strikes off the west coast to air defence, the IAF is practising every manoeuvre in the book in its preparation for a short and

intense war. “India has not witnessed anything at this scale since Operation Brass Tacks in 1987. Weapon delivery scores for air-to-ground munitions were exceptional, both by day and night, and pilots have done a wonderful job in overcoming fatigue during surge operations,” the IAF chief said. Conducted in 1987, Operation Brass Tacks was India’s largest peacetime military exercise that sent shock waves through Pakistan. Once again, the western neighbour appears to have been rattled by the sheer scale and complexity of Gaganshakti-2018, despite being notified about the first phase of the exercise in the western sector.