Months after Sindoor, India plans its own 'Iron Dome'

NEW DELHI: Announcing the launch of an ambitious ' Mission Sudarshan Chakra ' just three months after cross-border military hostilities with Pakistan, PM Narendra Modi Friday said all important places in India, including strategic areas as well as civilian ones like hospitals, railways and centres of faith, will be given "complete security cover" under it by 2035.

This indigenously developed national air and missile defence shield, which will also be integrated with potent counter-offensive weapons, will progressively be expanded, strengthened and modernised with "great intensity" in the coming 10 years, with a system in place to work out strategies to cater to futuristic warfare needs.

"Every citizen of the country should feel safe. Whatever technology comes to attack us, our technology should prove to be better than that," the PM said, adding that the country will move forward towards developing the "powerful weapon system for targeted precise action" like Lord Krishna's Sudarshan Chakra in the battle of Mahabharata.

This announcement comes soon after Pakistan army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir was reported to have threatened to destroy any dam India builds to impede water flow to his country, while also warning of a nuclear armageddon.

While Modi did not spell out details, the plan to erect a defence shield, akin to Israel's 'Iron Dome' and the proposed 'Golden Dome' of the US, will take a lot of doing along with huge funding.

It will entail building a multi-layered integrated air and missile defence shield around identified locations, with an overlapping network of early-warning and tracking sensors, robust command and control posts, reliable land and sea-based batteries of advanced interceptor missiles and other weapons. This will, of course, also require effective use of space-based assets for early-warning and tracking threats, if not for actual warfare.

The PM's remarks that Mission Sudarshan Chakra will not only neutralise the enemy's attack but will also hit back at the adversary "many times more", points at the impending expansion of India's conventional (non-nuclear) arsenal of ballistic and cruise missiles. These new missiles will include the induction of the 500km range quasi-ballistic missile Pralay and 1,000km range subsonic long-range land-attack cruise missile. The increase in strike range of the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile from 450km to 800km is also on the anvil.

The building blocks for the robust air and missile defence shield are already in place. India's existing integrated multi-layered air defence network, with a mix of Indian and foreign surface-to-air missile systems, had thwarted waves of Turkish drones and Chinese missiles during Op Sindoor.