From Janes
India plans air force boost among major challenges
By Rahul Bedi JDW Correspondent
New Delhi
The Indian Air Force (IAF) faces a crisis of depleting assets over the next decade, threatening its expanding operational challenges that include conventional and nuclear warfare, regional power projection and energy security and domestic counter-insurgency operations.
To transform itself from a tactical, status-quo force into a strategic one, to meet extended challenges, the IAF plans by 2025 to operate 35 combat and some nine support squadrons, including one comprising six Ilyushin Il-78 air-to-air refuellers bought in 2001 for INR8 billion to provide its fighters with enhanced endurance.
Senior officers said the IAF’s platform capability will be further augmented by net-centric warfare, secure communication, electronic warfare and an aerospace command to implement the air force’s evolving joint warfighting doctrine. This includes offensive counter-air operations to suppress enemy air defences, offensive air defence and counter surface forces campaign, planned jointly with land combat forces and launched in tandem with them.
Largely with Israeli help, the IAF plans to exploit the proposed Aerospace Command to develop a mobile ground-based imagery receiving and processing terminal for use by the army and the navy.
Through a complex web of locally developed satellites and launch vehicles and with sensors provided by Israel Aircraft Industries and Israel’s Elta Electronics, the IAF also aims to use the Aerospace Command to accurately target a varied range of indigenously designed, nuclear capable ballistic missiles.
“The IAF aims to achieve lethality through a combination of importing fighters and by selectively upgrading existing platforms and rendering them all capable of delivering beyond-visual-range missiles and precision-guided munitions (PGMs),” ACM Tyagi told JDW. The air chief also insists that maintaining numerical superiority in fighters is a priority for the IAF since “enhanced technological capability can never adequately make up for numbers
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