Arms and the man

The Telegraph (April 05, 2009)                                                                           Print This News

A.S. Pillai, who scripted the success of the supersonic land attack version of the BrahMos missile, is a tough technocrat who rarely takes no for an answer.

It’s just another day in the life of A. Sivathanu Pillai. The man whose personal triumph has turned into a national and even a global feat displays few emotions. He sits in his chambers at the headquarters of the Defence Research and Development Organisation and in a low-decibel, matter-of-fact voice chronicles how his project, India’s latest semi-homegrown missile, is — for the moment — the world’s envy.

It zips at nearly a kilometre a second — thrice the speed of sound — and even while flying that fast it can manoeuvre itself to find an assigned target, even one sited within a cluster of urban buildings. Pillai has just demonstrated a spectacularly successful third test of the supersonic land-attack version of the BrahMos, a non-nuclear cruise missile designed for precision strikes, lethal enough in appropriate numbers to cripple or devastate an entire nation.

“Right now, there’s nothing like it anywhere in the world,” says Pillai, happily helping himself to a bowl of curry leaf-flavoured chanachur. The 62-year old electrical engineer who is the chief executive officer of the decade-old India-Russia joint venture BrahMos Aerospace, a company that has built an array of missiles, knows what he is talking about. He has beaten ongoing efforts by the United States and a European consortium to build a similar supersonic missile — a weapon that travels faster than sound.

In the third test of the BrahMos land-attack version, Pillai wrested victory from near defeat. A first test on January 20 had failed. A second test on March 4 was inconclusive — sections of the army brass thought it had failed; Pillai disagreed.

So on March 29, Pillai put the BrahMos through a stringent test in the Pokhran desert, more challenging than typical situations it would encounter in a real world scenario. It had to find a small building-like structure with decoys around it trying to fool it into hitting the wrong target. The missile hit the bull’s eye. A day later, a top army officer said the Indian Army would like to take it into its arsenal.

And to think it all started with a hug. As a 20-year old student of electrical engineering in Tamil Nadu, Pillai demonstrated a student project to Vikram Sarabhai, the chief of India’s space programme in the late 1960s, on a visit to his college. Pillai had constructed a time-delay switch, a technology routinely used in satellites today but a novelty back then. An impressed Sarabhai hugged the young student.

When he graduated, Pillai joined the space department, working there for a decade on India’s first satellite launch vehicle and planning future projects, before joining India’s Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme (IGMDP) in 1986 where he contributed to the design and development of technologies that went into the Prithvi and the Agni ballistic missiles. In the late 1990s, Pillai was picked to head the $300-million Indo-Russian BrahMos Aerospace, tasked with the mission of delivering supersonic missiles.

Even a US supersonic missile missed when the US needed it badly. On August 20, 1998, US Navy ships in the Arabian Sea fired their subsonic Tomahawks into suspected Al Qaeda camps sheltering Osama bin Laden in eastern Afghanistan. Flying at top speeds, the Tomahawks took two hours to cover the distance of 1,100 miles to the target. By that time Bin Laden had disappeared.

The land-attack version of the BrahMos knows where to strike — you can feed in the specific data with the exact latitude and longitude. And it can be launched in four minutes. “With an arsenal of some 300 supersonic missiles, in 10 minutes you would have no enemy,” says Pillai.

He picks up a sheet of paper, sketches an imaginary country, places dots on it to mark targets and cancels them out to indicate the missiles destroying them. “And this can be done with minimum civilian casualties because accuracy is so good,” Pillai claims.

After the failure of the first test, Pillai got his team to tweak the missile’s software to introduce a technology called dynamic error building — a mechanism that allows the missile to gradually zero in on the target. The missile has a range of 290 km, but in Pokhran it had to find its target within 50 km to keep away from villages. The shorter the range, the higher the precision demanded of the weapon.

But missiles, a few argue, always hit their targets on paper. Some in the army are still sceptical about India’s missile programme. As part of the 50-year old DRDO, Pillai is familiar with the tensions between the armed forces — the main users of DRDO technologies — and its network of laboratories.

South Block and Sena Bhavan have sometimes pitched ripples of derision, even mockery, against the capabilities of the DRDO and projects that Pillai has been involved with. “Which technology has the DRDO ever delivered on schedule,” wonders one senior army officer, who asked not to be named. “Look at the main battle tank Arjun or the light combat aircraft Tejas.”

Armed forces officers also complain that DRDO technologies lag behind in many domains and are inferior to competition from outside India. “The wearer knows where the shoe pinches. We have to make do with obsolete technologies,” an army offi er says. Some also point out that, except for the induction of Prithvi and Agni, even the 25-year old IGMDP has not delivered all that it was intended to.

But Pillai appears at ease with such indifference and even open hostility. “When it comes to really strategic technologies — the Agni missile or stealth technology or electronic warfare systems — there are no complaints,” he says.

The toughening of Pillai is a tale in itself. The Generals look better in their spit and polish uniform. Pillai has a paunch, his shirt sticks out and he looks more like a school teacher than the head of a missile programme.

His brush with the army — and his doggedness that forced it to accept the land-attack version of the BrahMos —is only the latest in a series of encounters he has had within the babudom that he works with, while being a part of the establishment.

Three years ago, at the annual defence exposition that India hosts in New Delhi, Pillai announced he was setting out to seek export markets for the original BrahMos anti-ship missile to countries India viewed as “friendly”.

A month later, Pillai went to a neighbouring country, but not adjoining India’s borders. He was received coldly by the Indian mission there. When he told the Indian diplomats he was there to sell missiles, they nearly choked over their single malts. Pillai, a teetotaller, went about it clerically and clinically. He knows the missile market is competitive from the experience back home. The marketing mission failed. But that has not stopped him. Russia, India’s joint venture partner in the project, is expected to buy the missile in large numbers. Pillai is still looking for other markets for brand BrahMos in far off continents. He does not want the names of the countries out just yet.

In the meantime, missile makers are tapping into the Indian market at a time when the missile race in South Asia is intensifying. This is also a region where tensions between India and Pakistan worry the world.

Sensing that India’s armed forces need pinpoint accuracy to strike terrorist targets in real time, missile makers are seeking out its market. Pillai wants BrahMos to fill the gap. But competitors are coming in fast and furious.

The US-based Raytheon Corporation, which sells missiles, radars, and surveillance systems to both India and Pakistan, has offered to make presentations about its latest Tomahawk versions — still subsonic missiles — to the Indian armed forces.

There is also the MBDA of France, where army chief General Deepak Kapoor is currently on a visit. The Exocet anti-ship and surface-to-surface missile from the MDBA is yet another possible subsonic competitor to the BrahMos. MBDA sells bunker-busting missiles to the Indian army through a joint venture with the defence public sector Bharat Dynamics Limited.

Among other offers, in September 2008, Lockheed Martin was understood to have offered to India a deal of $170 million for a dozen Harpoon air-to-ground and anti-ship missiles that are not of the same class or category as the BrahMos.

But Pillai appears unfazed. He has his target in sight.

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