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Indigenous Solution
Series production of the WLR is expected to get underway by late 2009
By Prasun K. Sengupta
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Ask any professional soldier with combat experience and he will admit that to be on the receiving end of massed fire-assaults is one of the most incapacitating events in war. While fatal casualties are high and the uninjured suffer from imposed immobility on the battlefield, the psychological damage cannot be overstated. In addition, fear, stress and combat fatigue combine to reduce personal effectiveness significantly. Effective counter-battery fire-assaults are therefore the only way of reducing the effectiveness of hostile fire-assaults and this in turn can only be achieved by employing weapons locating radars (WLR) for identifying and locating the types and dispositions of the enemy’s deployed field artillery assets. Such self-propelled, motorised WLRs, especially the new-generation systems using C-band active phased-array radars, combine speed, accuracy and range with a multiple-targeting capability to provide the most effective wide-scan area coverage available. They also minimise the number of counter-battery rounds to be fired, are survivable against sophisticated hostile electronic warfare environments, and feature high levels of automation and reliability to minimise the expensive personnel requirements.
Small wonder then, that the Indian Army had by the late Eighties identified an operational requirement for such WLRs. However, at that time the Ministry of Defence-owned Defence Research & Development Organisation’s (DRDO) Bangalore-based Electronics Research & Development Establishment (LRDE), which was at that time developing the C-band ‘Rajendra’ active phased-array target engagement radar for the Akash E-SHORADS (see FORCE March 2008, pages 54-55), for reasons best known to itself, failed to take up the challenge of developing a WLR derivative of the ‘Rajendra’, even though it was more than obvious that developing a WLR derivative was the logical way to proceed. By 1993 the DRDL had completed developing the Rajendra’s technology demonstrator, whose rotating antenna contained 4,000 transmit/receive (T/R) modules containing monolithic microwave integrated circuitry and capable of electronic scanning in both azimuth and elevation. By early 1995, a variant of the ‘Rajendra’ incorporating 2,000 T/R modules and mounted on a BMP-1 armoured vehicle was ready for limited trials and evaluation at the DRDL’s fully instrumented range at Kolar, and at the guided-missiles firing range at Chandipur ITR. It was there that the DRDL, quite ‘surprisingly’, discovered during one of the routine test evaluation sessions involving flight-testing of the Akash E-SHORADS missiles that the ‘Rajendra’, when activated, was also picking up the flight trajectories of 155mm rounds that were being fired from Chandipur ITR by one of the Indian Army’s upgraded M-46H 155mm/45-cal towed howitzer prototypes (upgraded by Israel’s Soltam Systems) that was then being subjected to user-trials. Elated by this, an over-confident DRDO proudly claimed that it could develop the Rajendra’s WLR variant by 1997 if the MoD released the requisite R&D funds. Subsequently, Army HQ was directed by the MoD to firm up its projected WLR’s General Staff Qualitative Requirements (GSQR), which were released a year later after the army had conducted technical on-site evaluations of various foreign WLRs in the US, France, Russia and Ukraine. The GSQR called for the WLR to provide the precision, range, mobility and processing power needed in major conflicts and also be suitable for peacekeeping operations where its detection, precision and wide-angle and long-range surveillance capability that could be used to identify belligerents. The WLR’s command-and-control element was required to furnish ground furnishes commanders with enemy firing coordinates, weapon types and numbers, impact points and weapon density. These data were then required to be used by friendly field artillery command-and-control centres to estimate the enemy’s order of battle, determine unit locations and discern enemy tactics and intentions. The GSQR also mandated the following:
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