Mission Sudarshan Chakra
NEW DELHI: Mission Sudarshan Chakra will entail building a multi-layered integrated air and missile defence shield, with an overlapping network of early-warning and tracking sensors, robust command and control posts, reliable land and sea-based batteries of advanced interceptor missiles and other weapons. The defence shield will, of course, also require effective use of space-based assets for early-warning and tracking threats. Announcing the launch of the ambitious `Mission Sudarshan Chakra’ just three months after cross-border military hostilities with Pakistan, PM Narendra Modi on Friday said all important places in India, including strategic areas as well as civilian ones like hospitals, railways and centres of faith, will be given `complete security cover’ under it by 2035.This indigenously-developed national air and missile defence shield, which will also be integrated with potent counter-offensive weapons, will progressively be expanded, strengthened and modernised with “great intensity” in the coming 10 years, with a system in place to work out strategies to cater for futuristic warfare needs.“Every citizen of the country should feel safe. Whatever technology comes to attack us, our technology should prove to be better than that,” the PM said, adding that the country will move forward towards developing the “powerful weapon system for targeted precise action” like Lord Krishna’s Sudarshan Chakra in the battle of Mahabharata. This announcement comes soon after Pakistan Army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir was reported to have recklessly threatened to destroy any dam India builds to impede water flow to his country, while also warning of a nuclear Armageddon.While Modi did not spell out any details, the plan to erect a defence shield, akin to Israel’s `Iron Dome’ (which only has to protect a very small country) and the proposed `Golden Dome’ of the US, will take a lot of doing along with huge funding.The PM’s remarks that Mission Sudarshan Chakra will not only neutralise the enemy’s attack, but will also hit back at the adversary “many times more”, points at the impending expansion of India’s conventional (non-nuclear) arsenal of ballistic and cruise missiles. These new missiles will include the induction of the new 500-km range quasi-ballistic missile Pralay and the 1,000-km range subsonic long-range land-attack cruise missile. The increase in strike range of the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile from 450-km to 800-km is also on the anvil.The building blocks for the robust air and missile defence shield are already in place. India’s existing integrated multi-layered air defence network, with a mix of Indian and foreign surface-to-air missile systems, had thwarted waves of Turkish drones and Chinese missiles during Operation Sindoor from May 7-10.Last week, Air Chief Marshal A P Singh had also declared that the IAF’s Russian-origin S-400 air defence system had shot down at least five Pakistani fighters and a large special mission aircraft — the last at a distance of 300-km — during the hostilities.Officials say the PM’s announcement is connected to the ongoing development of the indigenous long-range surface-to-air missile (LR-SAM) system, being developed by DRDO under the ambitious Project Kusha, which will have interceptor missiles to hit hostile targets at 150-km, 250-km and 350-km ranges. Phase-1 of this air defence system should be ready by 2028-29, as was first reported by TOI.There could also now be a green signal for the operational deployment of Phase-1 of the indigenous two-tier ballistic missile defence (BMD), which as per DRDO is designed to track and destroy enemy ballistic missiles in the 2,000-km range class, at different altitudes both inside (endo) and outside (exo) the earth’s atmosphere for “a higher kill probability”.In July last year, India had also successfully flight-tested an endo-atmospheric interceptor missile under Phase-II of the BMD system, with the defence ministry proclaiming it demonstrated the indigenous capability to defend against hostile nuclear-capable missiles in the 5000-km range class.
