New Delhi: India’s integrated air defence and counter-unmanned aerial systems (UAS) grid came into action Wednesday night and took down several Pakistani armed drones, loitering munitions and missiles that were targeting 15 military installations, including IAF bases in Pathankot and Srinagar.
Sources in the defence and security establishment told ThePrint that the S-400 and multiple units of Akash, besides other surface-to-air missile systems, several integrated counter-UAS systems including hand-held, spoofing and jamming, thwarted Pakistan’s escalatory military action.
Pakistan had not sent in any aircraft for the attack but did send in a large number of drones and missiles, they said.
An official statement by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said that Pakistan attempted to engage a number of military targets in Northern and Western India.
The targets, it said, included Awantipura, Srinagar, Jammu, Pathankot, Amritsar, Kapurthala, Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Adampur, Bhatinda, Chandigarh, Nal, Phalodi, Uttarlai, and Bhuj, using drones and missiles.
The Integrated Air Command & Control System (IACCS) of the Indian Air Force (IAF), which functions through an integrated chain of radars, picked up movement in air from Pakistan and flying towards India, the sources.
The information was relayed to various air defence units, which engaged the incoming projectiles based on the assigned targets, preventing any direct hit on any Indian military installations.
“The debris of these attacks is now being recovered from a number of locations that prove the Pakistani attacks,” the MoD statement said.
The sources said that the primary targets of the Pakistan missiles and drones were the air force stations in some of these locations and radar stations in some. Ever since the launch of Operation Sindoor, the air defence systems were put on high alert along the western sector, they added.
In retaliation to Pakistan, India launched kamikaze drones to target Pakistani military installations. The Indian defence ministry said that it “has been reliably learnt that an Air Defence system at Lahore has been neutralised”.
This meant that the Indian kamikaze drones managed to reach Lahore, beating Pakistani air defences.
Pakistan’s Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) has claimed that locations where Indians carried out attacks, which they claim were neutralized except in Lahore, were Attock, Gujranwala, Chakwal, Rawalpindi, Bahawalpur, Miano, Chor and near Karachi. Pakistan has also announced that four Army personnel were injured in the attack in Lahore.
All targets were air defence radars and air defence weapons systems, including the Chinese HQ-9B, the sources said.
(Edited by Tony Rai)