By IANS,
New Delhi : The Indian Air Force (IAF) is planning to leapfrog into network-centric operations within this decade to beat its adversaries in battle scenario mind games, a senior officer said Friday.
“There is going to be a shift in paradigm in the way we operate, in what we are used to during most part of the century. We will take better part of a decade,” IAF Assistant Chief (Space) Air Vice Marshal M. Matheswaran told reporters here.
The IAF will showcase the modernisation process it is going through to put in place a networked air force in its Jan 26 Republic Day parade tableau, which will depict a Sukhoi Su-30 fighter jet integrated into the communication system of an airborne early warning and control system (AWACS) that the IAF had acquired last year.
Matheswaran said the IAF would, during the course of this modernisation process, “leapfrog” from a second generation system to fourth generation network-centricity as it did not carry a “legacy baggage” unlike the US Air Force, which would not be able to ignore its existing Link-16 military tactical data exchange system.
“We will be jump-starting into the fourth generation directly. We will be leapfrogging into the fourth generation. We do not carry any baggage and there is no legacy philosophy and hence we are not slowed down by this unlike the US Air Force, which cannot ignore its Link-16 and move into another system leaving it behind. We are doing it more or less from scratch,” he said.
Network centricity, riding on a robust communication platform to interlink commanders and foot soldiers, enables quicker decisions by ensuring comprehensive battlefield situational awareness.
Matheswaran said the IAF had launched in early 2009 a pilot project to study how its network-centric operations systems would work. “We have completed about 75 percent of the project and we will complete it by the middle of this year,” he said.
Matheswaran said the IAF will soon complete its Integrated Air Command and Control System (IACCS) under which all the air force’s air defence radars and aerial radars will be fully networked. Only last year, he pointed out, the IAF had launched the Air Force Net communication network, which would be the backbone of the IACCS.
Moreover, the air force was in the process of upgrading all its fighter jets to integrate the new communication systems in place to make them network-centric compliant.
“All operational aircraft in the IAF from the second half of this decade to the next four decades will be network-centric operations-capable,” he said.
However, older aircraft like the Soviet-era MiG-21 and MiG-27 that were in the process of being phased out would not go through the upgrade for network centricity, Matheswaran said.
Apart from the two MiG variants, the IAF has in its fighter fleet Sukhoi SU-30 frontline jets, Mirage-2000s, Jaguars and MiG-29s.
The tender process for buying 126 medium multi-role combat aircraft is in its final stages and the jets are likely to be inducted from the second half of this decade in a deal that is worth $10 billion.