Today’s air wars are indeed perception affairs. Recall the first real media intensive air war portrayed during Gulf War-I and the perception impact of the destruction of airfields, oil facilities and vehicles on the ‘highway of death’. Air strikes need to be not only accurately effective but also must be ‘seen’ to be effective. It’s a means of ‘political signalling’ to tell the adversary that you better change your behaviour or else!

Group Captain Murli Menon (Retd)
Defence analyst

Notwithstanding her erudition, and Pentagon/CIA linkages, Christine Fair is no military expert. It was somewhat confounding, therefore, to hear her articulating the improbability of an Indian F-16 kill on May 27. Quite clearly, her judgement is coloured by vested interests back home, of commercial considerations of the US military-industrial complex, perhaps, though there’s no gainsaying that Americans would have, in any case, had a role in ascertaining the veracity of the IAF kill, with their general ‘look-through’ capability into the F-16 fleets of Pakistan Air Force, its numerical strength and health.

But Christine does have a point in averring that a holistic analysis by experts is in order to derive appropriate military lessons, more so because the battle damage assessment for the strike on the terror camp was non-existent and on-board recordings of Abhinandan Varthaman’s kill could not be obtained as his aircraft crashed inside Pakistani territory. After the strike, many western think tanks and experts went to town about likely errors in targeting by the Indian attacking aircraft with some highly suspect deductions.

The vagaries of an aerial engagement between the opposing fighter fleets is not something to be glossed over in the media by generalists who cannot fathom the intricacies of an air combat situation. An entire panoply of aspects, such as related radiotelephony and radar imageries authenticating relative positions of aircraft, are there in the engagement.

Given that unfortunately more authentic on-board technical inputs were not available both for the terror camp strike and Abhinandan’s kill, the IAF had to go by these other corroborative inputs from its own AWACS/AEW/IACCS and associated communications. There may well be several air situations during a hot air war wherein the ideal set of corroborative battle damage assessments or recorded evidence may not obtain. In the case of Abhinandan’s kill, the IAF Phalcon AWACS and radars integrated into the Integrated Air Defence Control System (IACCS) defence statedly monitored the disintegration of the F-16.

In the event of the Balakot air strike, the IAF purportedly had to go by signal intelligence inputs of cellphones in operation picked up by the National Technical Reasearch Organisation (NTRO) to deduce the number of casualties of Jaish terrorists in the camp and may be human intelligence inputs from friendly agencies across the border or from satellite inputs from suitably positioned assets of friendly nations. Most of these sources cannot be divulged for obvious reasons.

All these inputs would ultimately have constituted what is called a ‘mission debrief’ to tell the participants the degree to which their mission objectives had been achieved, including hits on ground targets and aerial kills. Own vulnerabilities that played out are also brought out clearly during a mission debrief. In the Abhinandan air battle, the ‘ blue on blue’ air situation of the fratricidal downing of the Mi-17 chopper over the Srinagar airfield would have added to the ‘ fog of war’ mix in the Kashmir skies that day.

Of course, no Su-30 fell prey to any PAF aerial weapon, as claimed. On the contrary, the Sukhois overcame the PAF’s AMRAAM (Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile) threat with credit by appropriate tactical action and proof of the missed missile debris was shown to the media. Also, no gun camera clips or radar recordings were produced by the PAF. Abhinandan being hit by a PAF AMRAAM is also unlikely as his prey, the PAF F-16, would have been in the line of fire for any other F-16 attacking him from his rear quarters. This further points to some other aerial weapon hitting Abhinandan’s MiG, possibly a Pak surface-to-air missile (SAM), as suggested by some observers. Further, the confused tweet by the DG, Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR), about ‘two’ Indian pilots being captured points to the second pilot being the unfortunate PAF F-16 flier.

Christine Fair’s opinion on the Spice 2000 bomb damage criteria may not be quite true. The Spice knows only one way of operating over the target: by going in through a clean hole on the concrete and then causing damage below it by what is known technically as ‘heave’ effect . The bomb does not differentiate between the Pentagon brick work, as she says, and the terror camp building in Balakot, which also, incidentally, was brick and mortar. Also, the PAF F-16s sport both the Pratt & Whitney 100 and General Electric engines. As many as 75 per cent of all F-16s have the GE engines.

I had occasion to meet a senior USAF functionary in New York after the Balakot operation and he told me how he had recently gone to Sargodha to train PAF pilots in the latest Block 60 F-16s, which most likely have the GE engines. The strike on the camp and Abhinandan’s kill do suffer from inadequate corroboratory on-board and associated evidence. Air Chief Marshal BS Dhanoa may be right in claiming that since details are still ‘classified’, he would not have attempted to win the ‘perception battle’.

But today’s air wars are indeed perception affairs. Recall the first real media intensive air war portrayed during Gulf War-I and the perception impact of the destruction of airfields, oil facilities and vehicles on the ‘highway of death’. Air strikes need to be not only accurately effective but also must be ‘seen’ to be effective. It’s, after all, a means of ‘political signalling’ to tell the adversary that you better change your behaviour or else..!

This brings us to the undeniably mandatory prerequisite of modern warfighting — no-nonsense and professional military leadership. The politician should get to do that much and no more and the overall national military objective has to carry the day, come hell or high water!