Chandigarh: The Indian Air Force (IAF) is likely to imminently rename itself as the Indian Air and Space Force or IASF, in a move that has appalled a cross-section of senior veterans.
A slew of news reports quoting senior IAF officials disclosed on December 11 that this re-christening proposal was at an ‘advanced’ stage with the Ministry of Defence, following Defence Minister Rajnath Singh’s ‘exhortations’ at a routine memorial lecture last year, that the force needed to become an aerospace force to safeguard India from future challenges.
Delivering the 37th Air Chief Marshal P.C. Lal Memorial Lecture at New Delhi in May 2022, Singh had declared that the exploitation of space by India’s adversaries for military use, would have an ‘adverse’ effect and one which the country needed to ‘identify and be fully prepared’ to counter. “As students of military affairs and geopolitics, it is our duty to keep anticipating the nature of future wars,” Singh had stated, adding that space was one area that presented the IAF and the military in general, an impending challenge.
The IAF declined to comment on its planned name change.
A ‘firman’
But official sources in the service said there was a ‘growing need’ for the IAF to ‘take ownership of space’ and declare as much in its identity. They also said that the name-change idea had emanated internally as, in an era of competitive claims, the IAF was anxious to better project its intended enhanced capabilities in the space realm.
The IAFs name change, however, would be its third after its founding in October 1932 by the British Colonial administration in Karachi as an auxiliary force of the Royal Air Force (RAF) with six officers and 19 Havai Sepoys or air soldiers. Thereafter, in recognition of its valiant service in WW2 King George VI conferred on it the prefix Royal” on March 12, 1945, rendering it the RIAF. And, in 1950, when India became a republic, the Royal prefix was dropped and it reverted to being simply the IAF and has continued to be so for nearly four generations since, and to the rest of the world as a formidable, albeit familiar fighting force.
“The IAF’s top brass seem to have taken Singh’s generic observation on the military exploitation of space as a firman (order) from the government and furiously activated the proposal to change its name to include space,” said a three-star IAF veteran. It’s quite amazing the depths the service will plumb in order to ‘please’ the country’s political establishment, he fulminated, declining to be named, as he feared his pension payments would be stopped as ‘punishment’ for airing adverse views.
‘Already an aerospace force’
“The IAF is already an aerospace force, and should continue as the IAF, irrespective of the technological advances it absorbs,” said defence analyst Air Marshal V.K. ‘Jimmy’ Bhatia, one of a handful of India’s military officers who agreed to be identified. But if the government or the IAF, or even both, were hell bent on the renaming it could, at best, be re-baptised as the Indian Aerospace Force, he declared. But to rename it as the IASF would be somewhat excessive and needless, added the IAF’s most decorated fighter pilot.
Without elaborating excessively upon the IAF’s fledgling space-related capabilities, which were proliferating incrementally, numerous other considerations need evaluating with regard to its projected name-change. For, other than its overall futility which, in no way, would be a value-addition to the IAFs present standing or operational capability, was the overall cost entailed in such a makeover endeavour.
And though it was admittedly difficult, if not impossible to assess this – and it was highly unlikely if either the MoD or even the IAF for that matter, had even an approximate expenditure in mind – it’s instructive to defer to South African intellectual property rights lawyer Darren Oliver for this purpose.
This innovative attorney had evolved a calculative method or abacus in 2018, when the ruler of Swaziland decided to rename his country as Eswantini, and estimated that the expense incurred in such an undertaking would approximate over $60 million. Oliver’s involved formula, too convoluted to explicate, gained momentary salience in India recently during the G20 summit in September, when there was talk of renaming the country Bharat.
Costs and ‘mere declaration’
At the time financial analysts had pegged the price of this prospective name-change to Bharat at around Rs 14,304 crore. And whilst the price of renaming the IAF would be nowhere as steep, recasting its propositioned IASF moniker, and possibly even a new ensign to supplant the one unveiled in early October, on hundreds of its platforms, bases and innumerable other assets and properties, would be ‘considerable’ in times of enduring fiscal penury and when frugality and force modernisation was the guiding mantra.
Furthermore, changes in uniform badges and letterheads, in addition to myriad other areas, would only add to the cost of what some veterans called a mere ‘dalliance’ or uncalled-for ‘window-dressing’ that had seemingly become the custom in the armed forces in recent years.
“Merely declaring itself to be a space power does not necessarily make the IAF one,” said a former Ministry of Defence official, also requesting anonymity. It has to significantly prove its credentials, he tersely added.
Other unnamed veterans concurred that the IAF was no commercial enterprise that needed to ‘rebrand’ itself in order to endear itself to its principals or customers. One two-star officer even stated that such ‘marketing gimmicks were best suited to a business and certainly not the military. Another speculated that the IAF’s re-branding could, in future, also result in the other two services seeking a name change as their future operational capabilities burgeoned into newer sphere with advanced in technology. There was no end to such absurdity, he remonstrated.
Successive Air Chief Marshals had, in recent years, stressed the importance of the IAF developing offensive and defensive space capabilities, resulting in the creation of a token tri-service Defence Space Agency (DSA) in 2019 headquartered in Bangalore, that also incorporated within itself the Defence Imagery Processing and Analysis Centre in Delhi and the Defence Satellite Control Centre in Bhopal.
Speaking at a seminar in Delhi earlier this year, Air Chief Marshal V.R. Chaudhuri declared that defence minister Singh had ‘categorically stated’ that it was time for the IAF to become an ‘aerospace power’ And, with ‘on-demand launch’ of satellites and spacecraft by private and military stakeholders becoming the norm, space had emerged as the ‘ultimate high ground’ for the IAF.
Hence, the IAF had opted to take the path of least development via plans to first proclaim itself a space power through a name-change, and then to secure that capability. The IAF appears to be simply playing at being aspiring boastful achievers.