The Final Frontier||July 2022

Air Cmde K.A. Muthana (retd)

For me, and I know for my leadership in the administration, there are no more important areas to prioritize than missile warning…

Frank Kendall, Secretary of the Air Force, DoD, USA

This is a sequel to the two of my earlier articles that appeared in the October 2021 and February 2022 editions of FORCE. The former contained measures needed to fix capability gaps in the future fixed wing fleet of Indian Air Force. The latter covered the need for an AI enabled quantum secure combat cloud that would make flexible theaterisation possible. The present article delves into a domain that is crucial for air defence: Space.

Capability in Space

It is with huge relief that one notices progressive liberation of space activity in India. For decades it was in the bear-grip of government-controlled agencies which shunned interaction with the military under the pretext of threat of sanctions by Western suppliers. There was little realisation that it was due to sanctions that a couple of great innovations took place, as in the LCA programme.

As a result of such throttling, we are at the tail end of the race in the second space age where exploitation of space for national security. Now that enthusiastic players from the private sector are being allowed in, there is hope for faster progress in the field. Space debris situation is only going to get worse. Countries and companies are scrambling to launch before regulation is brought in.

Space assets are being used to support operations across the spectrum of combat like command, control, computing, communications, data transfer, cyber activities, intelligence gathering, surveillance, reconnaissance, targeting etc. While we may be using existing assets for many of these functions, defence against hypersonic weapons needs attention. If China was to launch a DF-17 at a priority target in India today, there is very little chance that it would be even detected before impact, let alone intercepted. Since hypersonic by very definition is atmospheric flight, existing ballistic missile detection radars will be of little use because a Hypersonic Glide Vehicle (HGV) will spend very little time above the atmosphere. And Hypersonic Cruise Missiles (HCM) will anyway be at relatively lo