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FETURE/REPORT |
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Special Report |
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Games DRDO Plays |
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False claims on the BMD programme are detrimental to India’s
security |
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By Pravin Sawhney |
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all claims and empty boasts seem to have become the hallmark of the Defence
Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). The proclivity of the Director
General, DRDO, Dr V.K. Saraswat and his team to exaggerate its achievements
would be amusing to discerning people. Unfortunately, this amusement has grave
national security implications and Dr Saraswat, a ballistic missile expert with
the indigenous Prithvi ballistic missile being his crowning glory, should know
this better than most.
As the director general, DRDO, he is leading the nation’s home-grown Ballistic
Missile Defence (BMD) programme. The claims made by him about the recently
tested-fired Dhanush and Prithvi II ballistic missiles on March 11 and the BMD
Endo-atmospheric interceptor test on March 6 are exaggerated beyond imagination.
These should have been put into perspective by the Indian defence correspondents
and experts, not only for domestic but international consumption as well,
because the Pakistani establishment, while ignoring DRDO’s claims on Prithvi,
utilises the boasts about the BMD to its strategic advantage.
Making use of Saraswat’s chest-thumping, Pakistan is going ahead full throttle
to more than match India’s humble BMD technological achievements; if at all, the
programme is decades away from fruition. According to US intelligence, while
ahead of India in ballistic missiles capabilities since 2001, General
Headquarters, Rawalpindi continues to increase its inventory of nuclear weapons’
land vector by citing India’s BMD claims as a destabilising factor. This writer
had first-hand experience of this a few months ago. During the alumni meet at
the Cooperative Monitoring Centre (Sandia National Laboratory) at Albuquerque,
US in October 2010, a former director of Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division,
Brigadier Feroz Khan argued that India’s growing BMD capability had forced
Pakistan to build more ballistic missiles.
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Given its unbridled inventory, it is a matter of time before the Pakistan Army
will alter its war-fighting doctrine to align it with the Chinese People’s
Liberation Army thinking. While supplementing air power, the difference between
combat aircraft and ballistic missiles will narrow down to tighter control of
the latter. This will upset the Indian Air Force combat numbers superiority over
the Pakistan Air Force and force the Indian Army to review its operational level
pro-active strategy, referred to as the Cold Start doctrine in the media,
against the Pakistan Army. Given such implications, the defence minister needs
to restrain Saraswat and the DRDO from making irresponsible statements.
Apparently after the recent claims on the BMD project, defence minister A.K.
Antony has expressed his displeasure to Saraswat.
Prithvi and Dhanush
A brief history and technological limitations of the indigenous Prithvi
ballistic missile are in order. The development of surface-to-surface Prithvi
ballistic missile was sanctioned by the government in 1983 under the Integrated
Guided Missiles Development Programme. As Prithvi was an offshoot of ISRO’s
civilian Space Launch Vehicle (SLV), its development commenced without the
General Staff Qualitative Requirements (GSQR) — technical requirements given by
the user, that is, defence services, to the research organisation — implying
that the defence services were neither consulted nor were they interested
(ballistic missiles were still unknown to them) in the programme. As happens
with most indigenous programmes, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi personally goaded
the army in 1988 to accept Prithvi in order to encourage the indigenous product.
Considering the Prime Minister had intervened regarding a weapon system, it was
easy for the DRDO to arm-twist the other two services, the navy and the air
force to seek the missile with a few minor and not design changes to suit its
medium of operations.
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January 2012
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