India needs more satellites to counter China's surveillance edge: Think tank

The Centre for Air Power Studies (CAPS), a think tank, in an assessment post-Operation Sindoor, has suggested India needs to quickly expand its space-based surveillance network since Chinese surveillance satellite networks have greater reach, allowing more number of overhead passes.

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Air Vice Marshal Ashish Vohra (retd), Additional Director General, CAPS, has penned a paper ‘Op Sindoor’s Enduring Takeaway (The Ten Commandments)’. It has been posted on the CAPS website.

Air Marshal Vohra says “India needs to accelerate the proposed timelines for the launches of Space-based surveillance network (SBS-3) satellites to shorten the revisit times of satellites to approximately two hours”.

He cites the example of Chinese satellites saying they presently have a revisit time of approximately 30 minutes. India also needs to replace the old NavIC satellites with new satellites expeditiously, strengthen the ground segment and upgrade the NavIC services, he argues.

Commenting on the performance of Indian satellite systems during Operation Sindoor, Air Marshal Vohra says “Indian electro-optical and radar imaging, communications and positioning, navigation and timing satellites performed creditably and provided accurate targeting data and other support services for the air operations”.

However, he says commercial imagery data was used (Maxar, etc.) to beef up the layered targeting imagery provided by our domestic satellites or for battle damage assessment (BDA).

Making a comparison between India and Pakistan, he says the “military-technological edge of India vis-a-vis Pakistan was amply visible during Op Sindoor”. It needs to be further enhanced while making all endeavours to narrow down the ‘military-technological’ edge that China presently enjoys.

This needs to be achieved through a dedicated focus on the development of cutting-edge technologies like high-power jet engines, hypersonics, long-range precision weapons and Artificial Intelligence and their rapid induction into the Services.

“A holistic approach towards technology development must be fostered wherein failure must be accepted as a stepping stone to success,” he added.