The approval accorded by the
Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) of India’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) on
September 28, 2020 for commencing the process of bulk acquisition worth Rs.970
crore of the Smart Anti-Airfield Weapon (SAAW) clears the decks for private-sector
industrial vendor selection to take off, with the MoD-owned Bharat Dynamics Ltd
already being nominated as the prime industrial contractor-cum-systems
integrator. Among the private-sector entities expected to selected is the
Kalyani Group, which has a joint manufacturing industrial partnership with
Israel’s RAFAEL Advanced Systems Ltd.
The SAAW is a joint
India-Israel project to co-develop a multi-role, air-launched, standoff gliding
precision-guided munition (PGM) which, for all intents and purposes, will be
India’s first operational precision-guided directed-energy weapon (DEW). It may
be recalled that in the night of September 6, 2007 in the desert at Al Kibar,
130km (81 miles) from the Iraqi border and 30km from the northern Syrian
provincial city Deir el-Zor, a fleet of ten IDF-AF F-15Is conducted OP
Orchard, which involved the destruction of a heavy-water reactor then under
construction with North Korean expertise and Iranian funding. In that raid, the
IDF-AF had used a RAFAEL-developed precision-guided, standoff DEW to shut
down Syria’s ground-based passive air-defence sensors (also known as passive
surveillance systems, or PSS)—a move that would go on to be the optimum model
for future surgical air-strikes.
Israel offered to co-develop a
variant of this DEW with India on July 7, 2008 during an official meeting in
Pune with the DRDO. This was followed by two additional meetings held in Delhi
with senior DRDO and Indian Air Force (IAF) officials in August and September
2007. The joint R & D project (headed by the DRDO’s Hyderabad-based
Research Centre Imarat) officially began in mid-2010 and series-production of
this DEW will commence later this year.
This air-launched,
fire-and-forget, expendable DEW, whose main role is to render electronic
targets useless, makes use of the airframe of RAFAEL’s Spice 250 PGM. It is a
non-kinetic alternative to traditional explosive weapons that use the energy of
motion to defeat their targets. During a mission, this missile will navigate a
pre-programmed flight plan (using fibre-optic gyros) and at pre-set
coordinates an internal active phased-array microwave emitter
will emit bursts of selective high-frequency radio wave strikes against up
to six different targets (like PSS sensors and ground-based EW jammers) during
a single mission. The EMP-like field that will be generated will shut
down all hostile electronics. Thus, the whole idea behind such a weapon is to
be able to destroy an enemy’s command, control, communication and computing,
surveillance and intelligence (C4SI) capabilities without doing any damage to
the people or traditional infrastructure in and around it. In other words, it
can eliminate a hierarchical air-defence network’s effectiveness by destroying
the electronics within it alone, via a microwave pulse, without kinetically
attacking the network itself.
For the IAF, this air-launched
DEW will be a ‘first day of war’ standoff weapon that can be launched outside
an enemy’s area-denial/anti-access capabilities, and fly a route over known
C4SI facilities (especially PSS sensors and EW jamming systems), zapping them along its way, before destroying itself at the
end of its mission. Because of its stealthy design, long-range and expendability,
it will fly where no other manned airborne assets could and because it does not
blow anything up, its use does not necessarily give away the fact that the
enemy is under direct attack in the first place. In that sense, it is also a
psychological weapon, capable of at least partially blinding an enemy’s
ground-based early warning sensors like PSS systems and EW jammers before it
even knows that a larger-scale air-attack is coming.
The IAF plans to arm its
upgraded Jaguar IS/DARIN-3 interdictors and the yet-to-be-delivered Super Su-30MKI
H-MRCAs with this DEW. Unguided test-launches of the SAAW from a Jaguar IS were
first conducted at Pokhran in May 2015 to validate the weapons release/pylon
ejection mechanisms, while the first powered test-flight was conducted on
December 23, 2016.
Both the IAF and Indian Navy have a stated requirement for
more than 1,500 SAAWs, which will be employed for suppression of enemy
air-defence (SEAD) networks, while for the destruction of enemy air-defence
(DEAD) systems, use will be made of the DRDO-developed RUDRAM-1 supersonic anti-radiation missiles.
The reason why the upgraded Jaguar
IS/DARIN-3 interdictors and the yet-to-be-delivered Super Su-30MKI H-MRCAs will
be the first platforms to be armed with SAAW is that these two platforms are
also the first to make use of the indigenously developed digital map
generators, which provide highly accurate en-route navigation while employing
terrain-masking/terrain-avoidance flight profiles, which are necessary
pre-requisites when trying to surprise the adversary, especially when the
adversary has a hierarchical, in-depth, ground-based air-defence network.
For instance, China’s PLAAF
operates LR-SAMs like the HQ-9/FD-2000, S-300PMU-series and S-400, which in
turn are protected by the HQ-22 MR-SAM and HQ-17 E-SHORADS Regiments, the
FD-2000 CIWS for terminal air-defence, and the YLC-20 PSS and CHL-805 jamming
stations.
On
the other hand, the PLAGF makes use of HQ-16/LY-80 MR-SAMs, FM-3000 E-SHORADS
and HQ-7 SHORADS.
