Air Domain Awareness and Regional Security
First published on Chanakya Forum, Mon 16 Sep 2024.
The Indian Air Force, on the sidelines of ‘Tarang Shakti 2024,’ the largest multilateral exercise carried out in the country, also conducted a symposium on air domain awareness. The theme of the seminar was “Collaborative Approach to Facilitate Air Domain Awareness Towards Enhancing Regional Security.” With participants from over 27 countries comprising 50 delegates, spanning all the continents of the world, the symposium generated debate on an important issue that governs the sovereignty and security of the aerospace domain. The proliferation of drones or unmanned aerial systems, its cheap availability and usage by non-state actors that affords plausible deniability further exacerbates the problem. While sovereign airspace over national territories and airspace demarcated through promulgation of ADIZ (Air Defence Identification Zone) is invariably monitored round the clock, throughout the year, it is international airspace that needs to have the requisite freedom of operation for peaceful use. It is the vast swathes of airspace over trans-oceanic regions that are bereft of surveillance which pose challenges that require a collaborative and cooperative framework to ensure freedom of operation.
With increasing use of the near space region and the non-commercial airspace over the oceans for military operations with High Altitude Pseudo Satellites, (HAPS) the proliferation of hypersonic weapons and long range loiter munitions and ballistic and cruise missiles, the security paradigm for any nation becomes increasingly challenging. More often than not a parallel is drawn between Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) and Air Domain Awareness (ADA) because it is the airspace over the oceanic regions that requires surveillance. Collaborative arrangements exist between many countries, including India that has an Information Fusion Centre for the Indian Ocean Region (IFC – IOR) with representatives of Friendly Foreign Countries (FFCs) to share white shipping information. However, there is an essential difference between the two that needs to be understood because of the reaction times that differ vastly between the two for countering emerging threats or taking deterrent action. Technology through Automatic Identification System (AIS) and Automatic Dependent Surveillance – Broadcast (ADS-B) facilitates monitoring and surveillance of shipping vessels and commercial aircraft that are governed by regulations to have these transponders installed as a mandatory requirement. There is however nothing that regulates the use of, other than sovereign airspace for objects using the aerospace medium.
Read the full article – https://surakshitbharatabhiyan.org/air-domain-awareness-and-regional-security/
