FIGHTING FIT, FUTURE-READY

With air power influencing every facet of contemporary warfare, one of the areas the IAF must concentrate on is acquiring offensive capability as speedily as possible

- AIR VICE MARSHAL ARJUN SUBRAMANIAM (RETD)

An Indian Air Force MiG-25, then billed as the world’s fastest and highest-flying fighter-reconnaissance aircraft, and a spy plane of the Aviation Research Centre (ARC), picked up several high-value targets during the Kargil conflict of June 1999. The aerial photos guided IAF fighter pilots and the Army’s Bofors gunners onto targets and contributed significantly to the success of the subsequent infantry assaults against features such as Tiger Hill.

Two months later, as a Pakistan Navy Atlantique reconnaissance plane snooped into the airspace over India’s Rann of Kutch in Gujarat, an IAF MiG-21 Bis shot it down in what could be considered the first instance of active coercion by the IAF in a no-war-no-peace situation. Three years later, at the height of Operation Parakram—launched following the attack on the Parliament by Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorists— IAF Mirages attacked two heights in Neelum-Gurez, about 800m inside Indian territory that had been stealthily occupied by Pakistan’s SSG commandos. No ground action was required to evict the intruders.

The last sensational attack on India’s security forces by jihadis was the Pulwama attack in 2019. The hitback by India was sharp with a punitive air strike on the jihadi nursery at Balakot in February 2019, followed by a short and fiercely contested dogfight between the IAF and PAF fighter planes over the Jammu and Kashmir skies. The Army’s Special Forces had earlier carried out shallow strikes on terrorist camps in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir in 2016 after the Uri terrorist attacks. The coercive impact of air power and special forces capability has since deterred Pakistan’s deep state from launching any major jihadi strikes on Indian territory.