Ajay Banerjee
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, March 22
India and Pakistan are now locked in a ‘digital war’ or what is known as ‘psychological operations’ in military parlance. Several Twitter handles from Pakistan have tweeted pictures of four missiles lying in military-style warehouse saying these were supposedly recovered from the Indian Air Force (IAF) MiG 21 that went down on February 27. These missiles had not been ‘fired’ by the pilot Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, the Twitter handles claimed.
Sources in the IAF said this is nothing but false propaganda. Four missiles are shown in the picture — there are two each of the R-73 and R-77. Of these four, two have clearly been fired. A missile has four parts in single casing. These are the seeker, the warhead, the motor and the controls. The seeker mostly does not get destroyed as modern technology means the warhead detonates. In the picture tweeted by the Pakistan-based handles, the seeker is visible but the warhead is not, indicating that the missile had been fired from MiG 21.
An officer said the fact that they had taken so many days to piece together this image when entire wreckage of crashed MiG 21 Bison was more or less was in one place (earlier pictures of crash show it) means either they imported these missiles from China or missiles had fired and wreckage had been located from elsewhere.
R-73 and R-77 are Russian-made missiles fired from fighter jets to engage in mid-air combat. China uses the same missiles source from Russia. India on its part has already shown an ‘AMRAAM’ (a missile) casing with serial numbers to prove that it was an American-supplied missile, Pakistan has put out only reconstructed wreckage of two missiles and are not showing their batch numbers.
The fact that IAF has the wreckage of the “AMRAAM’ shows the Pakistan was using the US built F-16 fighter jets.
from The Tribune https://ift.tt/2FuIekw
via Today’s News Headlines
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