View From the Sky

Air Marshal G.S. Bedi (retd)

It’s the silver jubilee year of the Kargil conflict and lot of water has flown through Jhelum since then. There have been insightful interventions, both educating and impressive, to bring out just about everything perceivable related to the conflict. Be it intelligence issues, tactical wisdom, inter service cooperation, role of air power and so on, more than enough has been documented, discussed, analysed and dissected.

While no discussion or analysis is really enough in learning about warfare, repetitive recall of statistics and the obvious tends to become boring. Having taken active part in the conflict, the endeavour here is to reflect on certain personal memories and thoughts that shaped the events during the conflict and had significant influence on the outcomes—in my opinion. The whole account is presented in first person and spares the reader any statistical data, hence is devoid of any references too.

The silver jubilee of Kargil is being celebrated, and rightly so because it was a hard win. All is well that ends well, and of course beyond any doubt it ended well. However, invariably in the euphoria of celebrating the end state, what gets ignored or overshadowed is how it all began. More often than not, pertinent lessons lie more so in how it all began than how it ended. So, to begin with, let’s see here how it all began.

The Story

It was a normal day in the month of May 1999 in Srinagar where I was posted as the Flight Commander of the resident 51 Squadron. Sometime in the afternoon, the Chief Operations Officer (COO) of the base called the squadron to Base Operations Centre for a briefing where the Colonel (General Staff) from the 15 Corps was present with maps rolled in a bundle to tell us something. He began by saying that there were reports of some intrusions in one of the sectors and while it would take a few days to clear them off, the squadron should standby for air support if necessary. There was no panic or concern in his voice, not that he was hiding it or putting up a show but because, as it became clear later, the extent of intrusions had actually not dawned on anyone yet. The Colonel left and so did we to get on with the next flying detail. It was business as usual. Very soon the reality started to show and when the action began it sucked everything around like a whirlwind.

Srinagar and its satellite base Awantipore became the major launch bases owing to their proximity to the area of action and 15 Corps was responsible for operations. The first hurdle was to identify the peaks where the intruders had dug in. The Ground Liaison Officer put in lot of hard work in conjunction with the staff at Corps and briefed the pilots on various peaks of interest, mostly naming them by their trigonometric heights above sea level in metres, like 4590, 5353, 5770 etc. The famous names like Tiger Hill, Tololing emerged somewhat later. These peaks looked magnificent even on the map and each one could be easily differentiated from the others in their surroundings.

While on the ground, it seemed like a very easy task to locate these peaks from the air. However, it was a different story altogether when one looked at them from 25,000 feet in the air. They all looked the same—one no different from the one next to it, hence with no way to mark them individually as expected. It took considerable effort, time and improvisation to identify the targets of interest. From hand-held video cameras to the laser designated pods of Mirage 2000, it took everything at the disposal of the Indian Air Force (IAF) to finally locate the targets precisely.

While the efforts to locate the targets were underway, the other challenge that surfaced was how to address these targets at such altitude with the initially inducted aircraft MiG 21/23/27 at the bases mentioned above. The firing solutions offered by these aircraft did not cater for release of weapons for a target located mid-air. To paraphrase this expression, invariably the legacy aircraft’s firing system caters to two kinds of heights, one its height above mean sea level—that is altitude to calculate the kinetics of its own and that of the weapon system, and the other its height