NEW DELHI, 11 October 2003 — India, Israel and Russia yesterday signed a defense agreement under which New Delhi will be supplied with an early airborne warning system.
The tripartite deal to mount Israeli Phalcon surveillance radar on a Russian IL-76 platform was signed by Indian Defense Secretary Ajay Prasad with retired Maj. Gen. Yasi Ben Hanan, head of Sibat, the Israeli Defense Ministry’s licensing agency for the Phalcon, and Mikhail Denisov, the first deputy chairman of Russia’s State Committee for Military Technical Cooperation.
The deal, estimated at over $1 billion, is expected to give India’s military an edge over its archrival Pakistan.
India’s decision to purchase Phalcon from Israel — their biggest ever weapons deal —was finalized during Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s visit last month.
Under the memorandum of principles and order of cooperation signed yesterday, Israel will buy IL-76 aircraft from Uzbekistan and send the planes to Russia for the mounting of new high-powered engines. Following the necessary structural modifications, these aircraft will go to Israel for the mounting of state-of-the-art avionics and Phalcon radars. The complete AWACS system will then be delivered to India.
Price negotiations are still in progress.
While officials declined to give any time frame for delivery of these aircraft, Air Chief Marshall S. Krishnaswamy estimated that the first of these aircraft could be delivered within 36 months.
India is the first country after Israel to go in for Ilyushin-mounted Phalcon AWACS system. The United States uses the Boeing platform to mount its own Hawkeye airborne system. AWACS will give India the capability to detect aerial threats from distances ranging from 800 km to 2,000 km. AWACS will also serve as a platform to direct Indian combat jets to targets.
Pakistan has criticized what it calls India’s weapons shopping spree as dangerous for the subcontinent, where the two major powers have fought three wars since their independence from British colonial rule in 1947.
“We believe that such defense deals will upset the conventional military balance,” Pakistan’s Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said in Islamabad. He said the Phalcon deal is “worrying for us,” but said Pakistan was capable of defending itself. Ahmed said that during a recent visit to the United States Pakistan’s Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali raised the issue of “Israel and Russia’s defense deals with India.”
Israel’s deputy prime minister, Yosef Lapid, told Indian journalists last month that the system “will ensure that the skies of your area are under your surveillance in a very effective way.”
He said Israel had no animosity toward Pakistan, but “our good relations with India are to do with defense, and every country has the right to defend itself.”
Defense sources in Israel say the trilateral deal was delayed for more than a year while Russia tried to negotiate better terms and India sought assurances that there would be no-last minute objections from Moscow after the deal was signed.
The sources said India was mindful of an American veto that torpedoed a similar sale to China in 2000. Israel and China had agreed on the sale of one Phalcon-equipped plane worth $250 million, and China had the option of buying seven more.
