Indian missile defense: Many miles
to travel By Sudha
Ramachandran
BANGALORE - With a successful
missile-interception test last week, India has
taken a significant step toward joining an elite
club of countries that possess an incipient
missile defense capability. While the test
demonstrated India's technological capability and
has been acknowledged by even critics as a
considerable achievement, India is still a long
way from deploying an effective anti-missile
shield.
At 10:15am on November 27, a
modified Prithvi missile simulating
the
"adversary's missile" was launched from the
Interim Missile Test Range at Chandipur in the
eastern state of Orissa. Within 30 seconds, the
missile was picked up by monitoring radars.
Twenty seconds later an interceptor
missile - the medium-range and nuclear-capable
Prithvi II - was launched from Wheelers Island off
the Orissa coast. The target was then acquired and
destroyed in 30 seconds at a height of 48
kilometers. The missile interception was in the
exo-atmospheric zone (upper layer of the
atmosphere).
The Defense Ministry
described the test as "a significant milestone".
According to K Santhanam, a former technical
adviser in the Defense Research and Development
Organization (DRDO) and director of the Institute
of Defense Studies and Analyses, "The mid-air
interception is a breakthrough in terms of
experimental validation of the design." It was a
significant step in the technology-development
chain from design, development, testing,
validation and later production.
"The
technology is hard and you have to be working for
years," Robin Hughes, the deputy editor of Janes
Defence Weekly, was quoted as saying by the
Associated Press. "If they have done that in the
first test, it is an exceptional advance in
technology." The project for developing
missile-interception capability began three years
ago, according to the DRDO.
The successful
missile interception is a feather in the DRDO's
cap. And it couldn't have come at a better time.
Criticism of the organization's performance has
peaked in recent months, especially after the
failed test launch of the intermediate-range
Agni-III missile in July.
If the
interceptor missile can be transformed into a
viable defense system, India will be among the few
countries that have working missile shields. Only
the United States, Russia and Israel are capable
of this so far.
Encouraged by the
successful interception of a missile in the higher
atmospheric zone, DRDO scientists are planning
tests wherein incoming missiles will be
intercepted closer to the Earth's surface. Vijay
Kumar Saraswat, chief controller of the DRDO's
Missiles and Strategic Systems Division, has said
the DRDO is planning to carry out another missile
interception, this time in the endo-atmospheric
zone, in the next few months.
The decision
to intercept a missile at 48km (30 miles) in the
recent test was made in view of the likely threat
from intermediate-range ballistic missiles
(IRBMs), but India would have to have a mix of
exo-atmospheric and endo-atmospheric interception
capabilities to match short-reaction threats. To
this end, "India is developing a complete suite of
air-defense missiles to destroy all types of
hostile missiles," Saraswat said.
India
has demonstrated the technology to defend against
incoming ballistic missile threat. Another
half-dozen tests are required to validate it. It
will take another three to four years to develop a
full-fledged anti-missile shield, Saraswat said.
While admitting that a great deal of hard
work remains to be done before one successful
flight trial can be turned into fieldable system,
Santhanam told Hindustan Times that "all this
should happen within a reasonable time frame".
But given the DRDO's long record of delays
on critical projects - it is 23 years since the
Light Combat Aircraft project came into being and
the first fighter aircraft is yet to take off -
few expect a credible missile defense to be in
place any time soon. The DRDO's Integrated Guided
Missile Development Program has been described as
"a venture matchless for its repeated and
expensive failures". The low-altitude Trishul
surface-to-air missile has been abandoned and the
Akash surface-to-air missile and the Nag anti-tank
missile are nowhere near series production. A plan
to achieve 70% weapons indigenization has been a
dismal failure.
However, it is not just
questions over the DRDO's capacity to deliver soon
that is raising doubts over whether India should
be popping the champagne corks after last week's
successful test. Analysts doubt whether
ballistic-missile technology has reached that
level of maturity wherein any country can feel
relieved that a credible shield is in place.
Bharat Karnad, research professor at the
Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and author
of Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security: The
Realist Foundations of Strategy, told Asia
Times Online that a foolproof ballistic-missile
defense is difficult to realize because "physics
is against it ... There are all kinds of technical
reasons why it will be impossible for an incoming
missile to be intercepted inside the atmosphere,"
he said.
It is easier to intercept a
missile under controlled conditions, when you know
the parameters of the flight of the missile. "But
this is a far cry from a ballistic-missile defense
in battlefield conditions where one doesn't have
the parameters of the incoming missile. The
adversary is not going to feed you information
regarding from which direction the missile is
coming, the altitude or the kind of maneuvers it
can perform," Karnad pointed out.
Karnad
also drew attention to the fact that no missile
defense system, including the US Patriot PAC-3 or
the Israeli Arrow-2, has reached a technological
level where it can stop every missile that comes
in. Even these advanced systems have a kill
capability of only 60-70%. So, he asks, if 30-40%
of missiles will slip through, what's the point in
having this kind of defense? And an adversary is
not going to fire just one missile but will in all
likelihood launch a salvo of them.
There
is a danger that possession of a missile defense
system will instill a measure of false confidence
in the country that it can deal with all incoming
missiles when in fact it cannot. There is a danger
too that if India were to claim capability to
blunt missile attacks it would prompt an adversary
to seek to overcome the claimed shield by firing
more missiles.
There is also the cost
factor. The US has poured billions of dollars into
its missile-defense project. Can India afford to
invest so much in a system that is not foolproof?
And then there is the question of whether
such a system that is based on point defense, ie,
defense of specific cities, is compatible with the
principles of democracy. A missile defense system
will be deployed to protect the national capital,
New Delhi. This raises troubling questions. Why
should Delhi have a missile defense system when
other towns and villages do not? Because its
rulers live there? Should hundreds of billions of
dollars be invested in a system that will defend
at best a city or two?
With its successful
interception of a missile last week, India has
demonstrated that it has taken a step toward
building a missile defense. But it has many miles
to travel and several hurdles to cross before it
can feel relieved that it has a credible shield
against its adversaries' missiles.
Sudha Ramachandran is an
independent journalist/researcher based in
Bangalore.
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