India's ABM hits target missile, but when will it be operational?

WASHINGTON, March 10 (UPI) -- India took another step Friday toward joining the elite club of nations that have developed their own anti-ballistic interceptor systems. But it has a long way to go yet.

The Indian Ministry of Defense announced in a statement that it had successfully carried out the third test firing of a Prithvi Air Defense anti-ballistic missile interceptor in the past three years. The test was carried out at the usual Integrated Test Range at Wheeler Island in Orissa state in eastern India. The designated target was a Dhanush missile fired over the Bay of Bengal from a ship at sea, the statement said. The PAD interceptor shot it down.

"The mission-control room burst into raptures as the radar display indicated the interception and destruction of the decoy enemy missile by the interceptor," the Ministry of Defense said.

The test "achieved all the mission objectives. The two-stage interceptor missile fitted with advanced systems hit the target enemy missile at 75 kilometers (47 miles) altitude," the statement said.

The Ministry of Defense said the target Dhanush missile had been adapted to "mimic" the performance of a potential enemy intermediate-range ballistic missile, presumably of the kind that Pakistan has. The Dhanush rose to a height of 120 kilometers, or 75 miles, and was fired 100 kilometers, 62 miles, out to sea from the Orissa coast, it said.

"The interceptor missile was launched from a mobile launcher located on Wheeler Island Launch Complex," the statement said.

The Defense Ministry statement said the successful test "once again demonstrated the robustness of the Indian Ballistic Missile Defense system."

India's Defense Research and Development Organization has "already conducted two interception trials, first in exo-atmospheric region at 48 kilometers (30 miles) altitude on Nov. 27, 2006, and second in endo-atmospheric region at 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) using an Advanced Air Defense missile on Dec. 6, 2007," it said.

India is developing the PAD missile for high-altitude interception, and the Advanced Air Defense missile for lower-altitude interception, the Ministry of Defense said.

The statement claimed that India was already "the fourth country to have successfully developed an anti-ballistic missile system, after the United States, Russia and Israel."

However, as we have repeatedly documented in these columns, the DRDO and the Indian defense-industrial sector in general have an extremely poor record in being able to follow up and convert extremely promising prototypes into reliable weapons systems that can be mass produced and then deployed en masse in robust operational conditions.

India's highly successful BrahMos cruise missile program relies on imported Russian technology and a great deal of Russian technological cooperation in the joint venture. The day before the highly publicized Prithvi ABM test, another BrahMos supersonic cruise missile was successfully tested over India's Rajasthan desert. Unlike the Prithvi PAD, reliable versions of the BrahMos cruise missile have already been deployed with the Indian army and navy, and work is far advanced on an air-launched cruise missile version as well.

The DRDO and the Ministry of Defense have still to show that they can make that jump with the PAD as well.