Posted on 10/10/2015 8:40:31 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
NEW DELHI: In what could be a game-changing arms acquisition, India is planning to acquire the new-generation Russian S-400 Triumf air defence missile systems that can destroy incoming hostile aircraft, stealth fighters, missiles and drones at ranges of up to 400-km.
Sources say the defence acquisitions council (DAC), chaired by Manohar Parrikar, will "soon" take up the proposal moved by the IAF to purchase around a dozen S-400 long-range systems from Russia.
"The project is at an initial stage at present. But it will be a government-to-government contract when it is finalized, with the S-400 systems being inducted over several years," said a defence ministry source.
The procurement proposal comes ahead of Parrikar's impending visit to Russia, which will be followed by the Modi-Putin summit in Moscow in December. It also comes around a year after China sealed a $3 billion deal with Russia for acquisition of six S-400 batteries.
China is slated to get the S-400 batteries, which is designated `SA-21 Growler' by NATO and rivals the anti-ballistic missile capabilities of the US Patriot PAC-3 system, from 2017 onwards.
Countries locked in territorial disputes with China in the East and South China Seas, ranging from Japan and Taiwan to Vietnam and the Philippines, are all worried at the prospect of the People's Liberation Army getting such a force-multiplier to dominate the airspace. India obviously is also wary of China acquiring such a military capability, even if it is defensive in nature, since it can make all the difference during a conflict.
The S-400 basically has three kinds of missiles, with different capabilities, that can fly at supersonic and hypersonic speeds to intercept all kinds of targets at ranges from 120 to 400-km. Russian experts even proclaim the S-400 surface-to-air missile (SAM) system can "radar lock and shoot down" stealth fifth-generation fighters like the American F-35 jets.
India, on its part, is now belatedly trying to plug the gaping holes in its airspace surveillance and defence network with progressive induction of a wide array of sensors and weapons.
With both IAF, tasked with the country's air defence, and Army saddled with increasingly obsolete air defence weapons, the ongoing induction of the indigenous 25-km range Akash area defence system has come as a major relief for them.
Induction of the Israeli Spyder low-level quick-reaction missile systems, with a 15-km range, is now planned from 2016-2017 onwards. The project was stuck since the Tatra trucks -- on which the missile systems were to be mounted - had got enmeshed in corruption scandals. The contract was recently amended to replace the Tatra trucks with Tata trucks.
Deliveries of the medium-range SAM systems jointly developed by Israeli Aerospace Industries and DRDO, with an interception range of 70-km, will also begin from 2016-2017.
Along with induction of these weapons, IAF is also now expanding its fully-automated surveillance network called IACCS (integrated air command and control system) to the entire country, with the cabinet committee on security recently approving another Rs 8,000 crore for the project. Eventually, the Army and Navy's Akash Teer and Triguna air defence networks will be integrated with the IACCS.
You gotta see a stealth fighter before you can destroy it.
The F-22 has the radar signature of what, a bumble bee?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gozk4sCU45c
The Facts Ma’am, just the facts...
Generates a lot of Jobs don’t it...
Interesting...
Roosevelt di the same thing prior to the elections in 1940, the New Deal had no push left and he needed something to get rid of the Isolationists (led by Lindberg) and the Lucrative arms business for Russia and Britain...
Lend_lease and the goods flow, people work and then the next strep is easy, if we get in they will need a whole bunch of stuff. Ye$$$$
Ignore the warnings, Pearl Harbor ( a few martyrs died for The Cause) and we are in...
Mo way he is not elected and re-elected, although he was not as popular as many would have you think
The Indians want this to protect themselves from the Pakistanis F-16’s
Isn’t the F-22 program on maintenance only?
Aspect angle, and radar technology dependent. Russians are very good at radar. Even a jury rigged Russian radar knocked down a F117 by on-the-job trainee operators.
NO stealth is 100% unless it is never in the area. With Obutthole, that may well be the case.
That and Shillary shared all the tech details with the “right” folks...
For example, some months back someone had stated that stealthy ships are a waste of time as the wake created as the ship moves through water can be picked up by radar. What the person didn't understand is that the ship itself can be (easily) picked up by radar - leave alone the wake - but the aim is to make the ship appear much smaller and more benign (eg like a shipping boat).
For aircraft, stealth also does not make them 'invisible.' Good radars can pick them up, but they simply cannot process fast enough/well enough to separate them from background clutter. However, with time the processing gets better and better (and at a faster rate than stealth is improving).
The real enemy of stealthy airplanes is not the radar or missiles, but rather improved computing and processing ability. The missiles have always been good enough to shoot them down, and the radars good enough to pick them up, but the last of effective clarified processing has not been good enough to separate signal from noise.
I would say that the only plane that would survive, unsupported, near an advanced IADS (eg the one around Shanghai) would be the Raptor. It is stealthy enough, flies high enough, fast enough and with SDBs can launch far enough, that the S-300 based system around Shanghai would not be successful. Any other stealth system (currently known) would require either cruise missiles to take out key radar nodes, or require jamming support (many people don't know that planes with jammers accompanies stealth strikes in the past by F117s and the B2), or both.
As for the F-35 ...it would definitely need other assets to sanitized the airspace before it could operate in an advanced IADS
Stealth tech makes an aircraft ‘invisible’ to radar for a longer time, but once the aircraft gets close enough, the radar does pick it up.
Maybe it does have the radar sig of a bumble bee, but the fact the bumble bee is moving at 600 mph kind of gives it away.
Unless Odungo ships a few F-22’s to his Paki Muslim brothers.
Accompanies = accompanied
Thanks for the most informative post of the day.
China is slated to get the S-400 batteries, which is designated `SA-21 Growler' by NATO and rivals the anti-ballistic missile capabilities of the US Patriot PAC-3 system, from 2017 onwards.
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