The plan to land fighter aircrafts on a road <g data-gr-id="42">strip</g> – a highway with a Load Classification Number (LCN) even in low 30s – existed for a long time. The bottleneck was in coordinating with compartments within which the Indian armed forces and civilian administration functioned, says three people who should know. This is connected with the event of what this operational and tactical development of landing a Mirage-2000 on the Delhi-Agra expressway last week.
Former Vice Chief of Indian Air Force, Air Marshal (<g data-gr-id="54">retd</g>) <g data-gr-id="55">Pranob</g> Kumar Barbora, retired Air Marshal M <g data-gr-id="56">Matheswaran</g> who moved from IAF’s own hierarchy for two years before retirement to Integrated Defence Services headquarters as the deputy chief, and Air Officer Commanding in Chief, Southern Air Command, Air Marshal Sumit Mukherjee talked to Millennium Post. Mukherjee says the plans existed to use the state highways in places like Gujarat and Rajasthan for landing fighter aircrafts. These trial landing approaches have been tried earlier even in these states when the aircrafts have tended to overshoot the pathways.
Barbora, <g data-gr-id="50">Matheswaran</g> and Mukherjee say that IAF had taxiways of the same length as that of the runways. These taxiways could be used for landing aircrafts when the main runways were bombed out or when large “packets” of fighter aircrafts had to be flown simultaneously. Their benchmark: 1971 Indo-Pak war.
But there is a difference of opinion between the three about the value of these highway landings. While Barbora and <g data-gr-id="44">Matheswaran</g> believe all the wars that the subcontinent will see in the next couple of decades will be below the threshold of a nuclear war. Mukherjee believes, “There is a definitely a strategic angle to it.”
The reason this question arose is Cold War angle of the development of this capability first in a “small nation” like Sweden or the United States, where during Dwight Eisenhower presidency the <g data-gr-id="48">inter-state</g> highways were built for a war between then two superpowers under a nuclear shadow. Those were the days when nuclear war was considered winnable.
But both Barbora and <g data-gr-id="33">Matheswaran</g> believe that a sub-conventional war coupled with or without short conventional war. The necessity of having these contingency-based highway landings is nullified because of such technological developments like satellite surveillance, beyond visual range or stand-off range weaponry.
<g data-gr-id="43">Matheswaran</g> particularly believes that the nuclear deterrence in the subcontinental situation has matured enough that Mukherjee’s concept of a “strategic” necessity born out of nuclear emergency, may not occur. But none of them, talk of a situation where there is ‘no war’ at all.
As Mathswaran says, “Only the dead have seen the end of <g data-gr-id="47">war</g>.” <g data-gr-id="46">A mostly unknown</g> piece history tells us that <g data-gr-id="45">a 1100</g> yard length of Kolkata’s Red Road (now Indira Gandhi Sarani) was used by the British to take-off and land fighter aircrafts during the Second World War. Apparently the pilots enjoyed using the restaurants lining Chowinghee as their ‘Ready Room.’