Rival Radars: Pakistan's Chinese Counterpart to India's Swathi WLR

The India-Pakistan frontier has long been a hotbed of military tension, with both countries engaged in a high-stakes game of artillery warfare. In recent years, a new arms race has emerged, with both sides deploying advanced counter-battery radar systems to detect and destroy enemy artillery and rockets. At the heart of this competition lies the SLC-2 AESA counter-battery radar system, developed by China and deployed by Pakistan's Army.

The SLC-2 system is a mobile platform designed to detect and destroy enemy artillery and rockets by tracking their projectile trajectories back to the firing position, enabling rapid counter-battery strikes. The system is based on the technical foundation of American AN/TPQ-37 Firefinder radars sold to China, and offers a fully solid-state, digitized active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar operating in the S-band. This allows for high-resolution tracking of enemy artillery fire, with a peak power output of around 45 kilowatts and an instrumented range of roughly 50 km against rocket-class targets.

But India has its own indigenous counter-battery radar system, the Swathi WLR. Developed over nearly two decades through a challenging and sanctions-complicated process, the Swathi WLR offers a detection range of up to 50 km for artillery and around 30 km for mortars and rockets. This gives Indian forces early-warning and rapid counter-battery targeting capability comparable in broad strokes to the SLC-2's own performance envelope.

The Swathi WLR has undergone significant upgrades since its initial deployment in 2017, with the development of a dedicated mountain variant, known as the Swathi Mark II. This variant is specifically engineered for high-altitude terrain, and offers real-time, 360-degree scanning with an instrumented range of 50 km. The Mark II variant has been formally inducted into the Indian Army's Regiment of Artillery, with six units deployed along the Line of Control and Line of Actual Control.

The contrast between the two systems highlights the different paths each country has taken to develop its counter-battery radar capability. Pakistan has achieved its capability primarily through direct foreign procurement from China, a faster but more externally dependent route. India, on the other hand, has endured a decades-long, sanctions-complicated indigenous development effort that ultimately produced not just a domestically built system, but one flexible enough to spin off a dedicated mountain variant tailored to the specific terrain challenges of the India-Pakistan frontier.

This indigenous foundation has also opened export opportunities of its own; India has separately exported Swathi systems abroad, including a notable sale to Armenia. This suggests that the programme's long, difficult gestation period has ultimately paid dividends beyond just domestic capability.

As the arms race on the India-Pakistan frontier continues to escalate, one question remains: which system will emerge victorious? The SLC-2 AESA counter-battery radar system, with its advanced sensors and high-resolution tracking capabilities, is a formidable opponent. But the Swathi WLR, with its indigenous development and flexibility, is a system that has proven itself in the field. Only time will tell which system will ultimately prevail.