While the US missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic have consistently made the news, few realize that other countries are equally interested in ballistic missile defense (BMD). Unsurprisingly, those are Japan, Israel and India (Russia to some extent).
And while Russia has the experience, expertise and technology to build some countermeasures, others do not. Therefore, when I read about Indian BMD, I wonder how Islamabad will react as they have a far smaller capacity to do so with most of their technology being Chinese or North Korean.
Buoyed by the successful testing of its fledgling ballistic missile defence, India is pushing ahead with an ambitious version of the star wars project capable of shooting down incoming ICBMs in the 5,000 km range. The phase-II of the BMD systems, likely to be deployed by 2014, will be an important part of India’s defence as both China and Pakistan possess nuclear capable missiles. Once the BMD is in place it will place India in a fairly exclusive club alongside US, Russia and Israel.
Even the possibility of effective BMD presents a major threat to Pakistan’s strategic weapons. Given that their warheads will be delivered by a combination of missiles and F16s, and that the Indian Air Force would likely intercept at least some of those planes, what are Pakistan’s options for countering India’s BMD program? They have neither the money or indigenous capabilities to develop their own, nor are they likely to find a country willing to sell them the technology. Even a partially successful Indian BMD program could have a major destabilizing effect on relations with Pakistan at a time when Pakistan is fighting for its very existence from internal threats.
Get the RSS
Comments to this entry
armchairanalyst
March 11, 2009
3:50 pm
I guess the U.S. shouldn't develop BMD because it might upset Russia? Nor should the Israelis because it might destabilize Iran?
Chirol
March 12, 2009
1:12 am
Sujan Dutta
March 12, 2009
7:02 pm
1) http://www.telegraphindia.com/1090311/jsp/frontpage/story_10656167.jsp
Great game around China’s Lanka yard (Please note the expandable map/graphic)
- Why the teardrop island is catching the eye of America and India
SUJAN DUTTA
New Delhi, March 10: The teardrop named Sri Lanka is threatening to light a fire in India’s backyard that New Delhi is hoping to douse by killing it with kindness.
The first steps of that policy has unfolded with a military-medical mission landing in Colombo this week in a first sortie by the Indian Air Force. More sorties are to be followed by a series of measures. The reconstruction package coincides with political pressures mounting from Tamil Nadu where Jayalalithaa went on a hunger strike demanding humanitarian intervention.
The demand is catching on during election time and has echoes in Washington where foreign secretary Shiv Shankar Menon met US secretary of state Hillary Clinton last night.
Lurking in the background of the measures that India is taking and the US is pushing for is an increasing presence of the Chinese who are developing roads, expanding a port and filling spaces vacated by India during the years of a hands-off policy before the Sri Lankan armed forces took the battle to the LTTE and cornered it in the island’s northeast where the militants’ territory is now confined to less than 100sqkm and is shrinking by the hour.
The demand for humanitarian intervention has been strengthened because aid agencies are saying that hundreds of thousands of non-combatants are caught between the guns of the Sri Lankan forces and the Tigers in two patches demarcated as no-fire zones. Each of these zones is roughly about 50sqkm, according to information exchanged by the Sri Lankan government with India.
In South Block, in the defence and external affairs ministries, officials are working on a package of measures that bear a resemblance to the kind of steps that India took in Afghanistan post-2001. Among these are an increase in the number of military-medical teams comprising field medical units. The first one is tasked to be deployed for a month.
Road rebuilding, de-mining, expansion of trade and economic ties, training and educational facilities are some of the other programmes on the agenda that New Delhi has set for a wider engagement with the Mahinda Rajapaksa government.
The US, meanwhile, is understood to have pushed for a more active engagement to evacuate civilians but there is little appreciation of where the evacuees can be taken to. The maritime great game over Sri Lanka is really unfolding around the evacuation of the civilians caught between guns and is not about them.
By landing an Indian military-medical team in Pulmoddai, 49km north of Trincomalee, the port in Sri Lanka’s east coast, India has probably put a foot into a situation where it foresees a landing of a number of foreign forces, benign or otherwise, while the US hovers in the background.
A British diplomat in New Delhi points out that western interest in Sri Lanka is currently driven by worries that the LTTE may attempt a terrorist strike in Europe or the US to draw attention to their plight in the face of the advance by Sri Lankan forces.
One strategic analyst in the Indian security establishment says there have been 14 bombings by the LTTE between November 13 and March 10 (including one in Matara today), more than half outside the LTTE’s traditional area of operations. The total number of LTTE workers (trained and semi-trained) is still estimated at 2000).
This still gives the LTTE a potential to strike at civilian targets. The US has a base in Diego Garcia, south of Sri Lanka, but its Pacific Command is not actively engaged in any large-scale land-based operation.
Analyst and writer Robert Kaplan foresees US policy in the latest Foreign Affairs journal as a mediator but the US “will have to do so not, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, as a land-based, in-your-face meddler, ...but as a sea-based balancer lurking just over the horizon. Sea power has always been less threatening than land power: as the cliche goes, navies make port visits, and armies invade”.
North of Diego Garcia is the Sri Lankan southern tip of Hambantota where the Chinese are upgrading a port as they are the port of Gwadar on Pakistan’s Makran Coast. (The offer was once made to India but New Delhi dragged its feet). The Chinese are also building or expanding three major roads in Sri Lanka — an expressway from the Katunayake Airport to Colombo, a 200-odd-km road from Ambapasa to Trincomalee and about 100km of road from Hambantota to another airport east of it.
Between Diego Garcia and Hambantota is the Sea Lane of Communication through which nearly 70 per cent of China’s oil imports pass. A refuelling station at Hambantota, for tankers and/or warships and/or other vessels give the Chinese a huge R&R (rest and recuperation) point in the vastness of the Indian Ocean before they take to the Straits of Malacca.
So much goes into the teardrop called Sri Lanka then that the civilians -- and no one knows for certain how many there are -- who weep are often lost sight of.
2) Swadeshi (meaning 'homegrown'/ed) missile vs Patriot
- Interceptor better than US system: Scientists
Sujan Dutta (published March 10/pl see archives in website www.telegraphindia.com section 'nation')
New Delhi, March 9: The missile-destroying interceptor India has tested is better than a US-made ballistic missile defence system whose capabilities have been presented by the Pentagon to India’s defence establishment, a senior Indian defence scientist said today.
The Defence Research and Development Organisation had successfully carried out its third test of a ground-based radar and control system and an interceptor to seek and destroy an incoming missile on March 6.
“This is a strategic system that needs to be developed in India.… It can’t be bought or borrowed. A (foreign-made) ballistic missile defence system (originally) developed for a threat profile different from India’s may not be suitable,” said V.K. Saraswat, director of the Prithvi Air Defence, the indigenous interceptor. “We need a system tailored to meet our own threat profile.”
Senior representatives of the Indian armed forces and the defence ministry have attended live demonstrations of the US-made Patriot Advanced Capability-III ballistic missile defence system at least twice — enough to indicate that India was seriously considering its acquisition and that the maker of the system, Raytheon Corporation, was just as serious about selling it to India. India is also examining Russian and Israeli ballistic missile defence systems.
“We do not want to talk about competition,” Saraswat said. “As far as we are concerned, we have been tasked to do a job, and that is what we are doing.”
Saraswat claimed India’s ballistic missile defence system was better than the US-made PAC-III. “The PAC-III is an outdated system. Our system is at least 25 per cent to 30 per cent superior to the PAC-III in range and capability. The PAC-III has only a 15km range,” Saraswat said.
Saraswat, who heads the DRDO missile development programme, said India would be able to complete tests of the ballistic missile defence system by 2010, but added that the speed of deployment was “not in our hands”.
A home-grown ballistic missile defence system could be cheaper than an imported one, but years of delay may increase lifecycle costs. However, its development could help the government drive a bargain with foreign makers and push costs of imports down. The Indian system would need up to five more tests, some of which would be outside the atmosphere and some within the atmosphere, and eventually lead to a defence system that would outclass any US, Russian or Israeli system of 200km range, Saraswat claimed.
Saraswat and director of missiles Sudhir Mishra showed a video clip of the March 6 interceptor missile test from Dhamra island near the Orissa coast. The interceptor destroyed a Dhanush — an “aggressor” missile launched from a naval ship.
The interceptor, launched within 120 seconds after a ground-based radar detected the incoming missile, homed in on the target and destroyed it through an explosion when it was within nine metres of it.
In a real-time scenario, salvos of interceptors would be launched against an attacking missile instead of just one.
INPUTS FROM G.S. MUDUR
Sujan Dutta
March 12, 2009
7:04 pm