Thanks to India’s present-day crop of ruling politicians being afflicted with an incurable strand of the hand-foot-and-mouth disease, the Indian Navy (IN) now is being made to pay a heavy price in terms of capability losses at a time when the tempo of its annual exercises with its international partners is steadily increasing.
Selex Galileo till October 2012 was hopeful of winning a contract for participating in the ‘deep-upgrade and service life-extension’ of the IN’s AgustaWestland Sea King Mk.42B and Kamov Ka-28PL ASW helicopters. Along with Rosoboronexport, it had earlier submitted an industrial participation proposal for the mid-life upgrade of 10 Kamov Ka-28PL anti-submarine warfare (ASW) helicopters. Selex Galileo had proposed to install the ATOS-LW combat management system on the Ka-28PL with Selex ES’ Osprey AESA-MMR, which is a low probability of intercept (LPI) radar with high gain and low sidelobes. Field evaluation trials (FET) of the Ka-28PL with ATOS-LW system were concluded successfully. Selex Galileo was also selected—following exhaustive and thorough evaluations on a global scale being conducted by the IN—to supply the Osprey for 14 Sea King Mk42B helicopters which were to be upgraded as multi-role platforms for use as both over-the-horizon target acquisition and airborne early warning. In addition to this, Selex Galileo had in 2012 signed a contract with the IN to supply ESM suites for six Tu-142M LRMR/ASW aircraft.
Leonardo-Finmeccanica’s UK-based Selex ES subsidiary has developed the X-band Osprey, an AESA-MMR that electronically scans 360 degrees without using a “spinning” slotted-array antenna. It is the world’s first lightweight e-scan system with no moving parts. The first Osprey has already flown on the first of 16 AW-101 Merlin helicopters destined for SAR duties with the Royal Norwegian Air Force. The Osprey has secured two more customers in the US for fixed-wing applications, starting with Northrop Grumman’s MQ-8C Fire Scout VTOL UAV. The Osprey’s programmable signals processor (PSP) also incorporates algorithms from the Vixen air-to-air and PicoSAR air-to-ground AESA-based radars. It is easier to mount, having air-cooling and no pressurised waveguides. On the Norwegian AW-101, three antennae are separately located in the nose and on either side of the helicopter. Space requirements are minimal, and with no need for a belly-mounted radome, the helicopter’s ground clearance is maximised for challenging rescue landings on rough terrain. The antenna distribution is via a multi-array interface, while the radar’s other two black boxes are the receiver/exciter and the PSP. Two- and four-antenna configurations are also possible. Each antenna weighs 11.3kg and contains 256 Gallium Arsenide transmit/receive modules. Each antenna provides 120-degree coverage. The radar feeds are handled by a centralised set of processing boxes, which can manage up to four radar panels (although only three are needed to provide 360-degree coverage). Besides the functional and performance improvements offered by AESA technology, perhaps the key advantage of Osprey is that its arrays can be mounted higher on an aircraft's fuselage than traditional mechanically-scanned radars. This is particularly advantageous for use on helicopters where mechanical radars normally have to be mounted on the underside of the fuselage in order to be able to rotate to provide 360-degree coverage. This puts the radar in harm’s way in case of a hard landing and also puts major size limitations on the size of the array due to ground clearance restrictions. Using multiple fixed arrays sidesteps this issue, while the lack of moving parts greatly improves reliability and dramatically reduces maintenance requirements.
Meanwhile, the charts below clearly illustrate the sheer amount of cooperative R & D work that goes into the development of AESA-MMR technologies, from which various civil and military families of AESA-MMRs are developed for surface-to-air, air-to-air and air-to-surface applications, thereby ensuring economies of scale and guaranteeting the total R & D project amortisation costs.
Adoption of a piecemeal approach like that of the Defence Research & Development Organisation’s (DRDO) Bengaluru-based Electronics and Radar Development Establishment (LRDE) will not get anyone anywhere and will only lead to the utter wastage of the Indian taxpayer’s money. For instance, one cannot focus exclusively on developing AESA-MMRs like the AESAR-FCR while at the same time trying to develop the XtraVision (XV)-2004 naval MMR with slotted-array antenna.
It will also be interesting to see how exactly the Indian Air Force (IAF) succeeds in obtaining financial allocations for in-country product-support activities concerning the NO-36 Byelka AESA-MMR of the FGFA, the IAI/ELTA Systems ELM-2052 AESA-MMR for the Tejas Mk.2 light MRCA (the Ruskies too are offering Phazatron JSC's ZHUK-AE FGA-35 AESA-MMR for this platform) and the THALES-supplied RBE-2 AESA-MMR for the Rafale M-MRCA.
For, till to date, no air force in the world has ever attempted to accomplish a feat that calls for the procurement of three different types of AESA-MMRs from three different OEMs for three different types of MRCAs. Well, it actually ought to be four if one includes the AESA-MMR version of the RLSU-30MK NO-11M ‘Bars’ that is destined for the Super Su-30MKI.
Meanwhile, the IAF is close to deciding on the type of air-mobile rapid intervention/light strike vehicles that are required for the Garud special operations forces. About 80 such vehicles, armed with 12.7mm heavy machine-guns and lightweight ATGMs (like the laser-guided LAHAT), are required for undertaking combat search-and-rescue (CSAR) operations inside hostile territory during wartime.
The IAF has shortlisted Polaris Defense MRZR-4 ultra-light ATV and Oshkosh Defense S-ATV, both of which can be carried underslung by either the Mi-17V-5 or the CH-47F Chinook. For CSAR operations, the IAF, depending on the mission profile, intends to use both the armed Mi-17V-5s and unarmed CH-47Fs, while the armed Rudra helicopter-gunships—64 of which are being procured by the IAF—will be acting as escorting pathfinders.
But there is a crucial difference between the Rudra for the Indian Army and that for the IAF. The former are to be armed with medium-range ATGMs, while the latter are not. In addition, as the slides below illustrate, the former have the DRDO-developed and BEL-built Tarang narrow-band radar warning receivers (RWR), while the latter have SaabTech-supplied wide-band RWRs. However, both variants have the same SaabTech-supplied MAWS sensors and laser warning receivers.
In another development, RAFAEL Advanced Defense Systems has commenced deliveries of 8,356 Spike-SR shoulder-fired ATGMs to the Indian Army’s SF (Para), Navy’s MARCOS and the IAF’s Garud SOF formations. Originally fitted with a tandem high-explosive anti-tank warhead to defeat armoured vehicles equipped with explosive reactive armour, the Spike-SR now comes with a new penetration blast-fragmentation warhead with a delay function. This has been designed for use in urban operations, with the high-explosive fragmentation warhead penetrating the bunker or structure before detonating with lethal blast effect. The standard Spike-SR had a maximum range of 1km, but this has since been increased to 1.5km to provide the operator with greater standoff capability. The Spike-SR weighs only 9.8kg, and the missile is fitted with an uncooled imaging infra-red seeker and auto-tracker, and thus operates in the fire-and-forget mode. Once fired, the launcher and its associated day sighting system are discarded.
To Be Concluded