BREAKING: IAF internal report revealed the so called Balakot Strike did not go as per plan
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KARACHI: Indian Air Force internal report revealed the Balakot Strike did not go as per plane.
The Indian Air Forcehas finally admitted that its so-called ‘surgical’ airstrike on Balakot did not go according to plan.
An IAF report on ‘lessons learnt’ – covered by *The Hindustan Times* and other Indian news outlets – has acknowledged that changes in software made by Indian technicians to integrate new weapon systems with the Mirage 2000 aircraft used to carry out the strike ‘did not completely work’.
The report follows the Indian external affairs minister’s admission that no Pakistani citizens or military personnel were killed or injured in the action. It also appears to support the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s assessment that the precision-guided munitions (PGMs) used in the strike were incorrectly programmed to fly precisely into their targets.
The IAF report criticised the indigenous skills IAF uses to integrate new weapons systems onto the aircraft it uses. “The Balakot experience underlines integration of new weapons with platforms should be done by the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) despite the cost involved,” *The Hindustan Times* quoted a senior official aware of the assessment as saying.
It admitted that that the entire weapons package carried by the IAF jets used in the airstrike ‘was not delivered’, possibly due to changes in software made to integrate new weapon systems with the jets.
“One PGM did not leave the Mirage 2000 aircraft because it is a 35-year old legacy aircraft and there was drift in the inertial navigation system,” *The Indian Express* quoted sources as saying. “It meant that there was a mismatch between the location seen by the PGM and the aircraft at the point of the delivery of the PGM, which led to it not being fired from the aircraft.”
The IAF report also pointed out that the IAF could have carried out better ‘weapon-to-target matching’ – the IAF used Israeli-made SPICE 2000 precision-guided penetration bombs over a fragmentation weapon, which flattens structures.
