India is taking yet another step to becoming “atmanirbhar” in the field of defence. The Indian Air Force [IAF] and the Indian Navy have tied up with the Defence Research Development Organisation [DRDO] for the CHAFF technology to shield warships and aircraft against missile attacks. India is only the second country after the United States to develop this technology.
The development assumes significance as India focuses on boosting its defence capabilities. China has increased its budget and has in its arsenal anti-ship ballistice missiles like the DF-21. In times like today, the CHAFF technology is what India needs if it wants to protect its warships and aircraft from hostile radar threats.
What is CHAFF?
CHAFF is a critical defence technology that is used to protect fighter jets and naval ships from hostile radar threats.
The significance of this technology lies in the fact that very little quantity of chaff material deployed in the air acts as a decoy to deflect the enemy’s missiles and ensures the safety of the fighter aircraft or naval ships. CHAFF creates a metal particle cloud around the jet or the ship and deflects missiles from it, reports The Hindustan Times.
“In today’s electronic warfare, survivability of fighter aircraft is of prime concern because of advancement in modern radar threats,” the defence ministry had said while inducting CHAFF, adding that the technology was needed to protect fighter aircraft.
What is chaff made of?
Chaff may be made of thin metallised glass or plastic rods, or thin metal foil or wire — achieving something of a resemblance with the chopped hay and straw used for fodder with which it shares its name — and are designed to mimic the wavelength of the frequency used by the enemy radar. They are used in the form of cartridges that are “packed with large quantities of chaff of different sizes”, according to the DRDO, reports News18.
How does the technology work?
CHAFF is a part of a Counter Measure Dispensing System [CMDS], which employs passive jamming against infra-red and radar threats. While flares are designed to protect against incoming heat-seeking missiles by creating a diversion with a higher heat signature that lures away the missile, CHAFF is designed to thwart radar-enabled weapons.
According to the DRDO, chaff and flares belong to the class of “passive” expendable countermeasures [ECMs] that seek to deceive hostile systems by “employing confusion reflectors” via either chemical or mechanical means. There are also ‘active’ ECMs, which work by “transmitting electromagnetic energy" like noise jamming or deceptive jamming.
DRDO says chaff is an “electronic equivalent to ‘smoke’”, which electromagnetic energy “to confuse or deceive an enemy system".
According to the Federation of American Scientists, non-profit policy research and advocacy organisation, “when injected into the aircraft slipstream, the chaff packages burst open… to form a radar-reflective cloud called a chaff corridor”. What happens as a result of the dropping of chaff is they “so confuse radars that they are unable to locate the real targets within the chaff cloud”.
Chaff “appears on enemy radar screens either as a blot masking the real target or as hundreds of false targets around the real one”, said DRDO.
What has DRDO developed so far?
Defence Laboratory Jodhpur [DLJ], a DRDO laboratory, has indigenously developed three variants of this critical technology – Short-Range Chaff Rocket [SRCR], Medium-Range Chaff Rocket [MRCR] and Long-Range Chaff Rocket (LRCR). It has collaborated with the Pune-based High Energy Materials Research Laboratory [HEMRL] for the project.
The DRDO has also developed advanced CHAFF cartridge-118/I for the IAF, having major advantages over the CHAFF technology available worldwide in terms of its better efficacy against higher frequency radar threats in modern warfare. After successfully extensive user trials, the IAF assessed the performance of indigenous chaff cartridge-118/I satisfactory and started the process of induction into Indian Air Force, reports HT.
The CHAFF technology to protect Indian Navy vessels against missile attacks was developed last April.
Explained: How the CHAFF technology developed by DRDO will protect India’s warships and fighter jets
CHAFF is a critical defence technology that can deflect enemy missiles. The Indian Air Force and Indian Navy have tied up with DRDO to acquire it
