Following the signature of a contract on October 5 that is valued valued at US$5.43 billion, the Indian Air Force (IAF) is all set to receive its initial five squadrons of the Almaz-Antey S-400 Triumf ADMS, with deliveries commencing in late 2020.
Plans call for eventually expanding this LR-SAM network into five Brigades in the following decade, and deploying them for the air-defence (against hostile manned combat aircraft, SRBMs, TBMs and LACMs) of major cities and industrial corridors located in western and central India.
The sector-wise command-and-control posts of each of these Brigades will be integrated with the IAF’s already-operational five nodes of the Integrated Air Command, Control & Communications System (IACCCS) at Barnala (Punjab), Wadsar (Gujarat), Aya Nagar (Delhi), Jodhpur (Rajasthan) and Ambala (Haryana).
Initially, the S-400 ADMS will come equipped with only the 380km-range 40N6E LR-SAMs, which were declared by Russia as being ready for series-production following a series of user-assisted successful test-firings last August.
In the following decade, the 40N6E LR-SAMs will be joined by the 77N6-N and the 77N6-NI LR-SAMs, having top speeds of 7km/second and also being the first LR-SAMs of Russian origin to possess INERT warheads, i.e. warheads that do not contain any explosives and instead, are ‘hittile’, meaning they will destroy inbound IRBMs or MRBMs by sheer force of impact. Both these missiles are still undergoing development.
The most revolutionary element of the 77N6-N and the 77N6-NI hypersonic LR-SAMs will be their on-board nose-mounted, Ka band millimeter-wave active phased-array radar seekers and their real-time discrimination algorithms required for fire-control and guidance of hit-to-kill interceptors. To this end, the radar seekers have been designed with a rigid mount and narrow beam to provide precise angle metric accuracy. The combination of metric accuracy, wide bandwidth, and high Doppler-resolution capabilities makes them excellent sensors for real-time discrimination, for they can provide extremely accurate identification-processing estimates of motion differences caused by mass imbalances on real and threat-like targets.
The 77N6-N and the 77N6-NI LR-SAMs will be new-generation replacements for the 1980s-era 9M82 and 9M83 LR-SAMs that had equipped the Almaz-Antey S-300VM and Antey-2500 strategic air-defence systems.
Since the IAF’s S-400 LR-SAMs will be high-value assets, they will require in-depth air-defence protection as well. For this, the IAF had ordered four squadrons of the RAFAEL-built SpyDer system back in 2013, but an amended contract had to be inked on August 3, 2015 following which deliveries commenced in February 2017 and were completed by August 2018.
Also to be enlisted are the services of close-in weapon system (CIWS), for which the IAF wants to procure 244 cannons along with 228 search/fire-control radars, and 204,000 programmable bullets.
