Amid the ongoing Operation Sindoor against Pakistan, the Defence Ministry is going to take up Rs 10,000 crore proposal to buy three sophisticated spy planes to help Indian Air Force get a clear air-to-ground picture to carry out precision strikes against enemy ground targets like radar stations, air defence units and other mobile objects.
The Rs 10,000 crore project for Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition, and Reconnaissance (I-STAR) is expected to be taken up for clearance at a high-level defence ministry meeting scheduled for the fourth week of June, defence officials told ANI.
The ISTAR provides air-to-ground surveillance to the forces, helping them carry out precision strikes. The spy aircraft project being developed by the Defence Research and Development includes the acquisition of three aircraft through an open tender from foreign manufacturers, including Boeing and Bombardier. The onboard systems on the aircraft would be completely indigenous, as the DRDO’s Centre for Airborne Systems has already successfully developed them, they said. The systems have already been proven and developed by CABS, and they will need to be integrated with the three aircraft, which will be acquired and modified for this purpose, they said. The development of an ISTAR system would also add India to a select club of nations with such a capability, including the US, UK, Israel and a few others. ISTAR thus provides dynamic and time-sensitive targeting capability and contributes significantly to meeting the nation’s security goals.
It will help limit the scale and complexity of undetected hostile threats. It has multi-spectral surveillance capability to detect, locate and monitor irregular forces. The I-STAR system shall be used for carrying out intelligence gathering, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting by day and night from standoff ranges. The ISTAR systems are operated at high altitudes from large stand-off ranges and will be used for intelligence processing, exploitation, dissemination and generation of the common operating picture. The ISTAR aircraft will be a system comprising airborne and ground segments.
