Man and War: Brahmos 2: Development Path
Brahmos 2: Development Path
Do a search on ‘Brahmos’ and you will get to know that it is a cruise-missile jointly developed by India and Russia, that it is ‘universal supersonic cruise missile’ and many believe it’s potency lies in its supersonic speed which makes it difficult to intercept. All this is a kind of feel-good news stories given by reporters who have a lot many other things to cover and we will not get into criticising them. We will talk about Brahmos and its future.
Brahmos cruise missile, though one of its kind in Asia, has a very severe limitation – its range. At a mere officially-quoted range of 280-300km, and 120 km in lo-lo-lo trajectory (a flying path in which missile always flies close of ground/sea) it is difficult to use the missile from sea-based systems to land targets without getting dangerously close to the enemy.
Speculations are rife about development of Brahmos-2, a hypersonic cruise missile (mach 7) with a range of about 1000km. This range will undoubtedly gives an upper hand to the navy and army over at least Pakistan because cruise missiles are relatively cheaper than ballistic missiles and can be used for carrying conventional war heads; this essentially translates to having a very high lethality without the fear of involving nuclear weapons. However, we must not be jumping with joy because firstly Brahmos was hugely successful because Indians had got the technical know-how about propulsion and guidance from Russia, this will not be the case for Brahmos 2 because Russia is a signer in MTCR which limits transferring missiles having range greater than 300km to other countries.
What might be the development of path of Brahmos 2 or, to quote President Kalam - Brahmos Mark-II? Assuming Brahmos 2 will indeed have the capabilities of flying at hypersonic speeds then at this point of time India does not have any system capable of cruising at this speed either in military or civil domain. Development of hypersonic plane Avatar is in progress by ISRO which will, technically speaking, give India the capability of developing a hypersonic cruise missile but ISRO is a civilian agency and as such does not have anything to do with defence organizations and it is not advisable to make ISRO serve a dual purpose because of two reasons:
1. ISRO is gradually making an entry into commercial satellite launch market and a majority of countries will stop using ISRO’s services, even though cheaper, for the fear of funding India’s defence establishments. In fact, many analysts feel that USA should dissuade other countries from using ISRO’s launch vehicles even now (page 18,
http://www.npec-web.org/Essays/060207SpeierICBM.pdf).
2. ISRO will stop getting any assistance or special materials for the construction of its satellites, which will gravely limit India’s civilian satellite usage including weather-prediction.
Given these facts, it will be fair to assume that Indian government will dare not transfer the technology from civil agency to military agency. Unlike what was done in 1980s when ISRO’s SLV was converted into missile, because ISRO’s stakes were very low at that time. Having said this, there are many covert methods of transferring technology such as, at the very basic level, transferring ISRO scientists to DRDO.
Coming back to the development path Brahmos 2 might take, reports suggest that Avatar will make its test flight around December, 2008. Moving ahead from December, 2008 I feel that another 10 years will go in development of Brahmos 2 (given the dubious track record of DRDO this is a very optimistic estimate) because I wonder if Russia will ever agree to providing technology which will breach MTCR, such technology if at all transferred will be done undercover. And then from test-flight to induction into armed forces again may take 5-6 years (as it did in case of Brahmos).
Given the scenario, we are still about 16 years away from having a hypersonic cruise missile, it is likely that many other countries would have acquired cruise missiles by that time, India too may have joined the group of developed countries and Delhi Police may start accepting credit cards for taking bribes!
Posted by Vinay Pandey at 10:52 AM
)
