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The military exercise will be based on counter-terrorism and humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations. The planning conference for the exercise will be held next month. The exercise will take place at Umroi, Meghalaya. It is at the company level, meaning around 100-120 infantry troops from both sides will be participating.
The first official said, “After 1998, we had started working on creating strategic deterrence. It meant having an authentic nuclear weapon, reliable delivery capacity and a foolproof process to actualise any decision taken by the political leadership. Those were early days; since then, we have come a long way in all those aspects. There is hardly any similarity between then and now.”
The IAF has a long inventory of spares as it has aircraft procured from both Russian and European vendors. The large fleet essentially remain of Russian-origin, be it fighters, transporters or helicopters.
It is likely that there will be three to four helicopters in this consignment. But the deployment of Apache’s first squadron in Pathankot will take another month. India has purchased 22 Apache helicopters from the United States.
India is now a “major defence partner” of the US and the two countries are in talks on the “Industrial Security Annex” that will guide the sharing of technology with private entities. India has also been changing its defence procurement policy to assist defence manufacturing in India.
Due to several measures taken to enhance ease of doing business in exports by reforming export permission processes and developing a completely end-to-end online portal for receiving and processing authorisation permissions, the time taken for authorisation has reduced to less than 50 per cent of the time taken in 2017-18
The Agreement on Reciprocal Logistics Support (ARLS) is being seen as an important practical step that could be signed at the upcoming meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Vladimir Putin at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Russia in early September.
On civilian front, India will need at least additional 1,000 aircraft which means the country buying two aircraft per week in next few years and our industries must take advantage of such a situation by developing indigenous civil aircraft to ensure success of Government’s Regional Connectivity Schemes like UDAN, said Dr. Tyagi.
The defence minister has congratulated the user evaluation teams from the Indian Army and developer, state-funded Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), on successful completion of user trials. The Indian army says it requires at least 40,000 anti-tank guided missiles in the next two decades. The 1900 mm long missile has a lock-on-before-launch capability to a range of 4 km, the longest for any anti-tank missile in the world. US’ “Javelin” and Israel’s “Spike” lock-on-before-launch capability are limited to 2.5 km.
When asked about the possibility of India participating in the development of combat aircraft with Russia, Dhanoa said the Russian fifth-generation fighter was not being considered yet. “When it (Su-57) is already put into service with you, only then can we make a decision for ourselves. We are ready to consider it for acquisition after we see it in the case,” Dhanoa noted.
