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 NG-ARM supersonic 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.
