India will add 2 more aircraft to strengthen AWACS capabilities

Armed with deep penetration and long-range radars, AWACS control the battle theatre in times of hostilities by providing advance information about movement of air assets of the adversary.

Updated on: May 1, 2019, 09:32:15 IST

Hindustan Times, New Delhi | By Shishir Gupta

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A day before the February 26 air strike by India on a Jaish-e-Mohammed training facility in Balakot in Pakistan, the country’s defence ministry moved the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) for acquisition of two more PHALCON airborne warning and control systems (AWACS) aircraft from Israel to match Pakistan’s growing capabilities, according to people familiar with the matter.

The deal is worth around $ 2 billion, with the radar mounted on Russian platform.

With the air strike, and the dogfight between Indian and Pakistani jets the day after, highlighting the importance of aerial supremacy, the Indian Air Force plans to approach the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) after the new government takes over in late May, for the purchase of 21 upgraded MiG-29 air defence fighters from Russia to arrest the growing shortfall in fighter squadrons. This deal is expected to be worth around ₹4,500 crore. Russia has completely switched to Su-30 platforms and MiG 29 fighters have been lying mothballed with MiG-MAPO corporation.

Four people directly involved in the process said that the need for PHALCON AWACS was felt as Pakistan has seven of them in service as compared to five in service with IAF. After the Balakot strike, the requirement was felt more acutely with Islamabad deploying two AWACS round-the-clock in the north and the south, while India had AWACS up for only 12 hours a day along its northern and western borders. Both sides put AWACS to good use during the February 27 air skirmish in the Nowshera sector of Jammu.

Armed with deep penetration and long-range radars, AWACS control the battle theatre in times of hostilities by providing advance information about movement of air assets of the adversary as well as directing air defence to prevent any breach of home air space.

According to the people cited above, Pakistan has three SAAB-2000 and four Shaanxi Y-8 turbo-prop airborne early warning systems; it reportedly lost two SAAB aircraft in a terrorist attack on PNS Mehran in Karachi on May 22-23, 2011. The SAAB radars provide a 270-degree coverage of the enemy positions but the platform has height restrictions due to turbo-prop engines.

In comparison, IAF has three Israeli built PHALCON AWACS and two more DRDO built early warning systems mounted on an Embraer jet platform. The Israeli aircraft is fitted with the top-of-the-line Green Pine radar system that can look into enemy territory up to a range of 300 to 500km . It is this aircraft that successfully directed the air operations against a package of 24 Pakistan Air Force fighters on February 27 in Nowshera, the people added.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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