India’s National Air Defence
In his analysis, Colonel Ajai Shukla writes that “experts regard India’s current air defence set-up as weak, with numerous gaps that a skilled adversary would exploit. Besides the shortage of fighter aircraft, India’s radar network – which should ideally detect PAF fighters as soon as they take off from their bases – has insufficient range and gaps in coverage”.
The IAF’s Soviet-era and Russian-origin SAMs, such as the Pechora SAM-3 and the OSA-AK SAM-8, have inadequate ranges of under 35 kilometres. By 2021, when the S-400 enters service, India’s air defence will be improving. The IAF will by then have its full compliment of 272 Sukhoi-30MKIs,
and the first Rafale squadron and two Tejas squadrons would have entered service.
Simultaneously, the capable Indo-Israeli medium range SAM (MR-SAM) – with a detection range of 150 kilometres, a strike range of 70 kilometres and a far higher hit probability than current missiles – would be getting inducted in significant numbers. The IAF, which funded 90 per cent of the MR-SAM’s development cost of Rs 10,075 crore has ordered 18 such units.
Meanwhile the Akash SAM, developed by the Defence R&D Organisation and built by Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL) is also being inducted into service in numbers. The Akash has a range of just 25 kilometres, but there is a project to upgrade that.
National air defence includes multiple layers of surveillance sensors and strike capabilities – both defensive and offensive. The most offensive air defence option, and one to which the IAF would allocate most aircraft at the start of a campaign, is to knock out enemy fighters on the ground. This requires IAF strike aircraft to penetrate deep into enemy territory after jamming enemy radars, drop cluster bombs to destroy enemy aircraft and immobilise runways with deep penetration bombs.
The Israeli Air Force had knocked out almost the entire Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian air forces on Day One of the 1967 Six–Day War, but this is unlikely in the India-Pakistan context. Therefore, the IAF’s air defence plan must also cater for retaliatory strikes by PAF fighters.
Multiple layers of sensors detect incoming fighter strikes. Amongst the most reliable, surprisingly, is a chain of “mobile observation posts” (MOPs) all along the border – each one a single human with a radio set, trained to identify and report enemy aircraft flying across the border.
Behind the MOPs, a chain of surveillance radars looks into enemy airspace to detect aircraft activity. Looking even deeper are Airborne Early Warning Command and Control (AEWC&C) systems, like the IAF’s three Phalcon systems, mounted on Russian Il-76 transport aircraft (photo above). From on high, where the earth’s curvature does not obscure visibility, they detect even lowflying aircraft at ranges of 400 kilometres and direct IAF fighters precisely onto them.
All these air defence elements are networked through data and voice communication channels to an autonomous “integrated air command and control system” (IACCS), which also links with civilian air traffic control radars.