The Electronic Jammer
"Interesting. I think your plan is workable." Major General Islam nodded. To him, any plan that might bring down a few Indian Su-30s was workable. He badly needed a few Su-30 wrecks to puncture the Indian myth.
"Since they're so interested in the dam, we'll teach them a lesson. Mind you, I cannot guarantee the dam comes through unscathed. Mangla is too close to the border. The Adampur runway is in fact only 200 kilometres away, Halwara only 300. Whatever we do, it will be hard to ensure the dam isn't hit. Its only protection is itself. I do not believe the Indians yet have a bomb capable of destroying it."
"I know that. Water levels are under control. Some downstream populations have been evacuated. The Prime Minister is, in any case, prepared for the worst. Even if their wretched plan succeeds, all they can collect is the world's condemnation. What I want to know is when your people can fight."
"My men are at Mianwali running operational training with the new Chinese Su-27s.1 I need to wait until my young pilots are familiar with engagements at long range against an aircraft of this class. By the time your SAMs are in position, we should be about ready."
"It's such a short window. Are you sure?"
"Of course there's a problem. In peacetime I'd insist on six full months. We're in wartime. The focus has to be the long-distance break-from-radar drill. No leisure to dissect details on the ground. I'm hoping for results in half the time. But you should know: this small batch of Chinese Su-27s differs significantly from the Indian Su-30. The Su-30MKI in particular has a markedly better radar; not every tangential break from the radar beam will succeed. We don't know precisely at what range that manoeuvre is effective. The risk is very high."2
"Mm. I know how it is."
The major general kept nodding. He had been a fighter pilot himself not long ago and he knew how dangerous a tickle-the-tiger move of this kind was. Too far out and the escorting Su-30s would not bother. Too close and there was no escaping the AESA's track. Sami had to admit the gap between the Thunder and the Su-30 at long range remained substantial.
"The Indians will mount another large strike on the dam soon. They cannot send those furtive MiG-27s a second time. I don't know the exact mix they'll go with, but by common sense the Su-30 package will include several aircraft carrying anti-radiation missiles. So even if we lure them into the deep mountains west of Kharian, your FD-2000 isn't absolutely safe. The window in which the radars are switched on must be very precisely controlled."
"I know. I will scatter the radars and missiles."
"The three-sided mountain bowl is the best place to hide them. Terrain like that defeats AWACS surveillance of the ground rather well. I'll take care of pulling the bandits in over your fire-control radar. There's one more thing." Sami began to bargain with his superior.
"Anything you want."
"Listen, my old friend. I expect India to throw everything at protecting their Su-30s from being shot down. So during the engagement you must be in the air, in command."
"What's the worry?" The major general did not immediately catch Sami's drift.
"I worry they'll commit specialised technical platforms to suppress ground communications. So when the moment comes, you must be aboard an AWACS, not in an underground command post."
"Understood. I'll go up with you out of Peshawar." Islam agreed without hesitation.
As Sami had anticipated, the Indian Air Force, after the MiG-27 attack had been turned back, was now actively preparing the next round under Air Chief Marshal Bifrata. He proposed, on Singh's instruction, to put up a major strike package and bring the Mangla Dam down completely. The dam was poorly defended against air attack and ground radars in the Gujrat sector were thin on the ground. The dam's true strength lay in its concrete itself. From the few historical attacks on dams in war, a fissure in the upstream face capable of breaking the structure required bombs of two tonnes or more. India's stockpile contained only general-purpose 500-kilogram weapons. Whether ten 500-kilogram bombs released simultaneously was equivalent to one 5-tonne bomb was another unknown,3 and even if the calculation worked, only the most capable Su-30s could carry ten such low-drag bombs at once.
Bifrata had never been entirely clear on the necessity of this strike. Singh had told him that its success or failure would set the timing for the army's ground operation. Bifrata, unlike Prasad in the army post, had no instinct for resisting a superior. He had decided to execute the order without question, committing the most advanced equipment available, including an A-50 AWACS and the recently completed conversion of a stand-off electronic-warfare aircraft. This was India's only platform of any real EW quality.4 He intended to position the aircraft, capable of all-band suppression of ground communications and radar, on the Indian side of the border, to protect the precious Su-30s from a SAM ambush. If the enemy's surveillance radar lit up, the converted jammer would immediately detect the emission and respond with targeted electronic deception, an effect substantially better than full-band noise. The Israeli specialists boasted they were familiar with the radar signatures of every Russian or Chinese SAM system in service, so the jamming would be precisely directed. By their estimate, the aircraft could push a surveillance radar's effective detection range down to a few tens of kilometres; the fire-control radars then had no chance to switch on at all and posed effectively no threat. The aircraft could not jam an aerial formation. That did not matter. Bifrata was reserving six Su-30MKIs as a dedicated escort, fully loaded with air-to-air weapons, whose sole task was to drive off the intercepting Pakistani fighters. With ground communications jammed, the Pakistanis would lose command and vectoring and amount to no threat. Plans laid, the chief of staff handed the operation in its entirety to No. 31 "Lion" Squadron. The squadron had a long pedigree, was well trained, but had not put down a single aircraft, in air or on the ground, since the war began. Now was the time to bring this card out and let it earn its keep.
1. Mianwali and the new Chinese Su-27s: The "Chinese Su-27s" are the J-11 airframes whose transfer Khalid Latif arranged in Chapter 52, flown into PAF service via the Combat Commanders' School pipeline. Mianwali is PAF Base M.M. Alam; an alternative training and dispersal field somewhat removed from the immediate front line, suitable for converting an experienced fighter community onto an unfamiliar airframe at speed. ↩
2. The tangential break (沿雷达波束切线方向): A standard counter-radar manoeuvre against a continuous-wave or pulse-Doppler tracking radar. The pilot turns to fly perpendicular to the radar's line of sight, so the closing-velocity component visible to the Doppler filter drops toward zero and the target is rejected as ground clutter or simply lost in the notch. The technique works well against a mechanically scanned set; against an AESA in a modern Russian export Su-30, where the radar's tracking algorithm has more rejection options and faster track-while-scan reacquisition, the manoeuvre is much less reliable. Sami's caution is well founded. ↩
3. Multiple bombs and dam structural attack: A real and unresolved engineering question of conventional dam strikes. The Möhne and Edersee raids of 1943 used a single very large purpose-designed bouncing weapon (the 4,200-kilogram Upkeep) to overcome the same problem; subsequent attempts against North Korean dams in 1953, with conventional iron bombs released in saturation, achieved breaches partly because of the local soil-and-rockfill construction rather than the gravity-concrete model. Mangla is concrete-faced earthfill on the main embankment, with a concrete spillway section; the engineering picture is therefore mixed, which is part of why the Indian Defence Ministry, as Makunda hinted in Chapter 51, wants the strike at all. ↩
4. The converted EW Su-30: The platform discussed in Chapter 33 (Singh and Amos) and in Chapter 52 (Rujadnahan briefing Singh): a single Su-30MKI fitted out by Israeli technicians with three large self-powered jamming pods. The novel will name the aircraft "Torch" in the next chapter; the platform's strengths and limitations are unpacked in Chapter 63. Important to note: this is not yet a Growler-class aircraft, only a barrage-jamming platform with limited deception ability. ↩