US raises pitch to sell India its missile defence system

Farnborough (UK), Jul 19 (PTI) With India hastening its
search for a system to beat threats from ballistic, tactical
and cruise missiles, the U.S. has raised a pitch to sell its
front-line 'Patriot' missile system, and also delivered
"classified presentation" to Defence Ministry officials.

"Raytheon is interested to bid with the Patriot system to
the Request for Quotation (R.F.Q.) for medium range surface-to
-air missile (MR-SAM) issued by India recently," the U.S.
defence major's Patriot Programme vice president and deputy
Skip Garret said here on the sidelines of the Farnborough
international air show.

Though India has sought a small number of the MR-SAM with
50-km. range - PTI has learnt that the RFQ was for just one
system - the Patriot missiles with "high probability kill"
could easily take care of India's needs, Garret said, raising
the campaign decibels to a new high.

Officials from the U.S. Department of Defence had in the
last few months given some classified presentations on the
Patriot's capabilities to officials from the Indian Defence
Ministry, who "formally expressed interest" in the system, he
said.

Patriot, the foundation of the U.S. Army's integrated air
and missile defence architecture, is a long-range,
all-altitude, all-weather system field to defence advanced
threats, including aircraft, tactical-ballistic-cruise
missiles.

Capable of simultaneously engaging numerous targets in
severe electronic countermeasure conditions, Patriot is also
the foundation of a U.S. two-tiered defence against the
escalating tactical-ballistic missile threat.

In 1990, following Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the U.S.
forces had exploited the anti-tactical ballistic missile
capability of Patriot system in Israel and Southwest Asia to
counter Iraqi's SCUD missiles.

Since then the U.S. has spent over USD 3 billion to
upgrade the Patriot system to Patriot Advance Capability-3
(PAC-3) configuration 3.

To a question, Garret, a retired two-star general,
said any new country going in for the Patriot missile defence
system would get the latest version of PAC-3, while existing
customer countries would get the upgrades.

U.S.' Patriot system would face a stiff competition in
its bid to bag the Indian order from the Russian's S-300
surface-to-air missile variant and the Israeli's Arrow-2
missile defence system.

However, problems would arise for Israelis if the
U.S., which partially supported the Arrow programme with
funds, puts spooks in their bid.

Defence Ministry, it is learnt, had recently asked the
international bidders to take additional two months from the
already set deadline of July-end to submit their bids for the
RFQ.