BY : TOI

The government on Thursday cleared a gigantic Rs 10,000-crore project with Israel to develop an advanced medium-range surface-to-air (MR-SAM) missile system capable of detecting and destroying hostile aircraft, missiles and spy drones at a range of 70 km.

The project, approved by Cabinet Committee on Security, will provide IAF with nine advanced air defence squa-drons, each with two MR-SAM firing units, for "protection of vital and strategic ground assets and area air defence".
The project is crucial because, as highlighted by TOI earlier, there are still "many gaping holes" in India’s radar network and the armed forces only have near-obsolete air defence units like Russian-origin Pechora, OSA-AK and Igla missile systems.

Sources said the MR-SAM project is actually an extension of the ongoing DRDO-Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) project, launched in January 2006 at a cost of $480 million, to develop a supersonic 60-km Barak-NG (new-generation) missile defence system for Navy.

"The Barak MR-SAM for IAF will have an even longer range, with the capability to engage multiple targets up to 70 km. Each of the 18 firing units will have a command-and-control centre, an acquisition radar, a guidance radar and three launchers with eight missiles each," said a source.

It was even claimed the MR-SAM system, which will take four-five years to develop, will be "even more capable" than the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 terminal air defence missile system, which the US has been aggressively hawking to India for some years.

But the armed forces are wary of associating the name ‘Barak’ with the new project due to allegations of kickbacks being paid in the original Rs 1,160-crore procurement deal, signed in October 2000, for Barak-I systems for Navy.
The CBI had last year registered a case in the Barak-I deal, naming former defence minister George Fernandes, his party associates Jaya Jaitly and R K Jain, and alleged middle-man Suresh Nanda as the accused.

Much to the Navy’s dismay, former Navy chief Admiral Sushil Kumar was also named in the FIR. "The Bofors controversy in the 1980s badly hit the Army’s artillery modernisation programme, from which it is still to recover. The same should not happen with Barak, which is a superb system," said a senior officer.

Be that as it may, the new DRDO-IAI project is yet another indicator that Indo-Israeli strategic ties are zooming full-steam ahead, with India buying Israeli military equipment worth a whopping $1.6 billion just in 2006 alone.
To further augment air defence capabilities, IAF is also on course to procure 18 Spyder quick-reaction low-level missile systems from Israel, worth over Rs 1,800 crore.

India, incidentally, also acquired the advanced "Green Pine" early-warning fire-control radar from Israel, which can detect and track incoming missiles from around 500 km away, five years ago. Interestingly, the long-range tracking radar was based on the Green Pine radar, which forms an integral part of the Israeli Arrow-2 BMD system.