On April 11, 2023, the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) General Anil Chauhan at the Indian Def-Space Symposium said that the very nature of warfare is on the cusp of major transformation and what is being witnessed is the militarization of space and steady progress towards weaponisation.
The event was organised by the Indian Space Association (ISPA) in association with Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). The venue for this event is DRDO Bhawan, in New Delhi.
According to Lt, Gen A.K. Bhatt, the Director General of the ISPA, the event is part of deliberations under Mission Def-Space under with 75 challenges have been identified for the development of the industry.
At the event, he said, “The aim for all of us should be towards developing dual-use platforms with a special focus towards incorporating cutting-edge technology and expanding our NAVIC (Navigation with Indian Constellation) constellation along with providing agile space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and ensuring satellite assisted secure communications.”
Space is being used to enhance combat capabilities in the land, sea, cyber and air domains. he said.
Referring to the development of kinetic weapons resulting in a war of space into a reality, General Chauhan gave examples of recent tests by China and Russia and stressed India’s need to develop such weapons, both offensive and defensive means in this domain.
General Chauhan also stressed the need to explore the field of miniaturing satellites and reusable launch platforms to mitigate cost, and challenges and accelerate the pace of India’s space-based capabilities.
“The population of the space domain and the emergence of the dynamic threat environment to our space assets also demands that we enhance our space situational awareness and capabilities.
There is also a requirement to safeguard our assets with counter-space capabilities. We must build resilience and redundancy in space-based infrastructures,” he said.
The DRDO Chief Samir V Kamat said that they have started increasing their focus on the very critical space domains with a focus on space-based surveillance, space situational awareness and protect space-based assets.
“We are now looking at working very closely with the industry as well as the academia right from the development stage and have started DRDO industry-academia centres of excellence in about 15 institutions mostly within the country,” he said.
At the Defence Expo in October 2022, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched Mission Def-space which is an ambitious effort to develop innovative solutions for the three services in the space domain through industry and start-ups.
Lt. General Bhatt explained that the creation of the Defence Space Challenge was an outcome of the Ministry of Defence, the three services and Defence Space Agency (DSA) coordinating with the industry and seeing what the industry can do in the future of the armed forces.
The interaction went on for several months and was then vetted by ISRO and DRDO to create 75 challenges which cover all requirements upstream, midstream and downstream. The challenges are being implemented in batches and the process is underway.
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