Pak upgraded JF-17 no match for Indian S-400 and Rafale air strike power

The S-400 system is not only about shooting enemy planes from the skies. It is about giving trans-border visibility up to a depth of nearly 300 kilometres into the enemy plain territory.

Updated on: Feb 8, 2022, 11:11:14 IST

By Shishir Gupta

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After Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan returned from China, the acquisition of 50 JF-17 Block III fighters by Islamabad is being pitched to take on India’s S-400 air defence system due to its stealth characteristics. This is nothing but domestic chauvinism on part of Pakistan which is totally devoid of facts.

With Rafale and S-400 under its belt, the Indian Air Force is by far the most advanced air force in the sub-continent and has the capability to even challenge China.

The airframe of block III single-engine JF 17 fighter is said to be built with composite material to give its stealth features required to evade the air defence system of the adversary and target high-value assets. Even the indigenous Tejas fighter has 45 per cent composite material but does that mean that it can take on two S-400 systems which the Chinese PLA have deployed across Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh respectively? The JF-17 is powered by the same Russian RD 33 engine, which is used by Indian MiG-29 air defence fighters and often suffer maintenance/spare parts issues.

The S-400 system is not only about shooting enemy planes from the skies. It denies the PAF Trans frontier visibility by pushing his AWACS and Strategic Recce Systems (F 16 with DB 110 Recce Pod) back. This means that Pakistan Air Force cannot fly its airborne early warning systems and deep penetration radars as the S-400 missiles will take them down in the event of hostilities. As a result of which the Pakistani JF -17 fighters will be fighting without the support of AWACS and dated Chinese radars. The only exception to this scenario is high mountain terrain which is present only in union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.

The Indian Air Force has a multi-layered defence network and does not only rely on the S-400 system. It has front time fighters like Rafale, which have top of the line AESA radar and is armed with the deadliest Meteor 140-160km range beyond visual range air to air missile. This means that JF-17 will not even know when it got obliterated from the skies. The IAF has a 70km range medium range surface to air missile (MRSAM), the digital Pechora and Akash surface to air missiles to take on the enemy. Further, the S-400 system is always complemented by close-in weapon systems (CIWS) like Russian Pantsir or American Phalanx to take on the stand-alone missiles fired at the air defence network. Finally, the S-400 is not a static system but a dynamic weapon system that can be relocatable.

However, the clincher is the very fact that the Pakistan Air Force itself is not very confident about JF-17 fighter as compared to the American F-16. Not a single JF-17 crossed the Line of Control (LoC) or even launched a weapon during the Pakistani unsuccessful raid in the Rajouri-Mendhar sector on February 27, 2019, the day after Indian Air Force terminated the Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist training camp at Balakot in retaliation to the Pulwama terror strike.

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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