There is none officially, only from sources. AFAIK, all we have done is bought 100 Spice kits to date. So it's quite unlikely we are using the kits on general purpose bombs.
Each costs as much as $400,000-$500,000, so you can expect it to be used against high value targets only, and on land those are mostly HQs. Otoh, a JDAM-ER costs less than 10% of the Spice.
Well since there is no official claim for the "penetrator" version, and given that you don't indulge in speculation, I'd say we drop the penetrator theory, specially when it arose after nearly a week of the strikes when the first satellite imagery came out.
And we only bought a handful of Popeyes as well.
Glad that you mentioned the Popeye/Crystal Maze. There is also some speculation that they were to be used to "provide video and bring down the buildings". I fail to comprehend how SPICE (which shares the TV/IIR seeker of Popeye), could not deliver the same results. IAF didn't have enough time to maintain LoS with whatever SOWs it could launch, so there was no possibility of retaining data-link for video or man-in-the-loop guidance to begin with. Secondly, the warhead is reportedly 150lbs (80kg), the same as in the alleged "penetrators".
Why is there a need to take action on opinions?
Btw, Spice comes in at an angle of 80 deg. It's unlikely to have the flight path as mentioned by all these "analysts".
Rightly said.
As far as I know, the impact angle has to be specified while generating the mission profile. I've seen videos of it hitting targets at angles ranging from 30 to 90 degrees. Here's a nice video from Rafael:
You know what is the best part of Doval Modi government new strategy is?
Pakistani Denials.
Why? We keep hitting Pakistan like stray dog and you people don't even squeal so no country in the world cares and we freely hit you at our choice..
Keep denying and gag families who have lost their sons working for rougue army which doesn't even acknowledge their shahadat that's best for us. Keep counting body bags...
Well if this strategy helps you sleep better at night, I'm happy for you. India is truly blessed to have an adversary who is arguably the best at covering up offensive strikes. From planting fake bomb craters in Balakot, to making the bodies disappear and changing the roofs by sunrise, to fooling the Americans regarding loss of an F-16, to hiding further losses of F-16s and destruction at Tarbela, to covering up blasts in hospitals...there is truly no parallel.
Yeah I know the 'simplest' explanation of the miss very well. What he fails to explain is that when bombs are dropped they are supposed to 'detonate' on the GPS location identified. They don't keep flying on and have terminal detonation at some other place. Even if elevation data had been entered wrong (BS since we have worked with satellite locaitons for decades), the bombs would have terminated at whatever elevation they found themselves in at that location. Example.
a) You feed in coordinates x, y . Instead of reaching x. y at 10 feet the bombs reach x, y at 15 feet. It will still detonate at 15 feet- it will not continue gliding to 200 meters away and terminate over there. This is a failsafe.
2) The shockwave kill shows the extreme skill of our military planners. If you don't have those skill sets that is generally your weakness.
Sir, it is your personal assumption that somehow PGMs keep track of the targets in microseconds and do not arm the warhead until they match exactly. I would recommend reading up on fuzing mechanisms and arming systems. Even nuclear weapons don't have that many arming stages.
I hope you can calculate the speed at which SOWs are moving prior to hitting the target vs. the window of time needed to identify the error and arm the warhead. There are countless examples of PGMs missing their targets.
However I would love to see some documentation on the exact arming mechanism of SPICE that you described.
ISRO launched said planetlabs sats so we know what their capabilities are. The analysis of this damage needed a SAR capability not some MP camera.
Sir, it depends on the resolution of the said SAR asset. AFAIK, the best SAR satellite in service with ISRO has a 50cm resolution. I don't see how a SAR satellite can show some sort of bomb damage invisible to an optical satellite.
You're not getting what he's trying to convey. For the past 2 months or more, ever since he debuted here, he's been elaborating on the ISPR line of argument - that the IAF & consequently the GoI never wanted any collateral damage but merely wanted to send a message across to Pakistan. What he's hinting at when he says that the wrong co ordinates were fed was they weren't done unintentionally but intentionally.
He's claiming a deliberate miss. Please go thru his posts again.
The ISPR narrative is as follows -
- 26th Feb .Balakote. IAF fires into the trees and kills a crow & destroys a few trees. The Deterrent claims IAF deliberately fed in co ordinates into the guidance system of the SoW, so as to be a shot over the bow.
27th Feb. LoC. PAF deliberately drops SoW into the compounds of our Brigade IA HQ without fuses, to send a message. In the dogfight which followed they shot 1 MKI & 1 MiG 21 & took 1 PoW. Initially the report by Gafool was 2-3 Indian pilots taken PoW. Here, The Deterrent concedes PAF may have lost a Mirage - III or a F-16, but mostly a Mirage. The rest of the narrative is similar to ISPR.
Check with him.
Sir, I'm afraid that you misunderstood my current posts. That was my initial conclusion (in March) that IAF missed on purpose, since I was baffled by SPICE missing its intended target. When the ASPI's analysis (
India’s strike on Balakot: a very precise miss? | The Strategist) came out, it became apparent that there was a systematic targeting error made in the process of computing the flight profile, since all SPICE-2000s missed by similar distances which can be mapped back to an identical elevation error. Also, IAF could have bombed the eastern side of the hill, which was much convenient and safer, if it intended to miss on purpose.
As far as the ISPR is concerned, they stated that PAF 'thwarted' the IAF strike, which is not true.
