PIERCING THE DARKNESS THROUGH NIGHT VISION DEVICES

From fighter pilots and tank crews to ground infantrymen and special forces troopers, all active personnel require latest generation helmet-mounted and handheld Night Vision Devices (NVDs) and Thermal Imagers (TIs) as per situational and operational requirements

- AMARTYA SINHA

On September 29, 2016, multiple teams of Indian Army parachute regiment commandos crossed the Line of Control (LoC) and destroyed a number of terrorist camps located deep inside Pakistani Occupied Kashmir (PoK). The teams moved deep inside enemy territory under the guise of darkness, successfully evading landmines, enemy machine gun posts and snipers positioned atop observation towers, and took positions within a few hundred metres from the targets before strafing them with machinegun fire and rocket launcher fire and slaying a large number of Islamic terrorists. The entire operation, starting with incursion and ending with extraction of special forces commando teams from the target areas, was just a matter of few hours. A similar operation preceded the 2016 surgical strikes, when Indian shock troops moved deep inside hostile territory under the cover of darkness on June 9, 2015 and eliminated dozens of NSCN-K terrorists in Myanmar.