Defense

Pakistan extended the ban on its airspace for all Indian flights till June 28. The country had fully shut its airspace on the eastern border with India after the IAF carried out aerial airstrikes on a Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terror camp in Balakot on February 26.

If the Crystal Maze missiles had been launched along with the SPICE-2000 bombs, they would’ve provided a live video feed of the bombs hitting their targets. But they could not be launched from the six Mirage-2000 aircrafts that had crossed about 15-20 km inside Pakistan-occupied Kashmir on 26 February due to protocol.

The report quoted Air Marshal Raghunath Nambiar, the Commanding-in-Chief, Western Air Command confirmed the IAF’s fifth generation fighter program and stressed its importance by acknowledging that Chinese and Russian defence agencies have already begun developing their own prototypes.

The project to build advanced nuclear submarines designed for longrange underwater patrols and armed with conventional weapons has been granted over Rs 100 crore seed money by the government for the initial phase with officials predicting a development period that is expected to stretch beyond 2025.

“They did not come into our airspace. The main thing that you should look at is what the objective of the military operation was. Our objective was to strike in Balakot and we achieved it. Their objective was to strike our army bases but they could not do it,” said the Air Chief Marshal.

The latest deal being finalised by India under the foreign military sales programme of the US is for the acquisition of 10 more Poseidon-8I long-range maritime patrol aircraft for over $3 billion.
The other deals in the pipeline include 24 naval multi-role MH-60 ‘Romeo’ helicopters ($2.6 billion), the National Advanced Surface to Air Missile System-II for the missile shield over Delhi (almost $1 billion) and six more Apache attack helicopters ($930 million)

The Prime Minster’s Office (PMO) had asked the Niti Aayog to prepare a road map for “incentivising” domestic manufacturing of lightweight body armours (bulletproof jackets). The Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) has also finalised quality norms for body armours to be used by Indian forces, according to Saraswat. He said it has been agreed that future tendering of bulletproof jackets will be as per BIS norms.

After the meeting, Rawat tweeted, “I am happy to announce that the permission has been approved for opening the recruitment centre of Indian Coast Guard in Dehradun. This is a big opportunity for the youth of Uttarakhand, Himachal, and Haryana. I thank Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh.”

The Ministry of Home Affairs has approved the use of ‘sound cannon’, devices that can emit pain-inducing sound waves, on rampaging mobs in the Valley. The move follows criticism of pellet guns that have left several people with eye injuries. Known as Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), the sonic weapon was used for the first time in Pittsburgh, US, to control an agitated crowd during a G20 summit in 2009.

The 13 IAF personnel who flew to Mechuka advanced landing ground, around 29 kilometres from India-China border, returned in coffins at air force station at Jorhat in Assam on Thursday late evening, 18 days after Indian Air Force An 32 transport aircraft went missing on 3 June, prompting IAF to undertake the longest ever search in Arunachal Pradesh.