In its bid to give a renewed thrust to all weapon system development in the country, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has silently launched a new centre operating out of its head quarters in New Delhi. The System Analysis and Modelling Centre (SAM-C) is the outcome of one of the strongest recommendations of the Prof P Rama Rao Committee, which played a key role in DRDO’s structural revamp. The SAM-C has the principle role of identifying all weapon systems that are projected for Indian defence. The unit is currently headed by senior missile scientist Dr N Prabhakar, in his capacity as the Chief Controller. An official confirmed to ‘Express’ that the idea of creating SAM-C was to maintain consistency across various weapon spectrum. “The Forces are fast-moving towards network-centric warfare capabilities. Hence, it is important to have the proper command, control structures and integrate the systems into a coherent entity,” said a top scientist, who didn’t want to be identified. The DRDO has so far kept most of the operations of SAM-C under wraps, with its team members already undertaking weapon assessment missions. Set up in September 2013, one of the main tasks of SAM-C is to optimise the DRDO resources spread across seven clusters (52 labs). Missiles, aircraft, sensors and command, control and communication systems will all be assessed by the SAM-C team over a period of time. “Currently the team has around 20 scientists drawn from all the DRDO clusters, including aeronautics, missiles, combat vehicles and naval systems. We have identified some major problems and are currently addressing the same,” the official said. When asked whether the setting up of SAM-C would prevent the DRDO from running into ‘time and cost over-run whirlpool,’ the official said that the unit has kept performance, schedule and cost as the three measures of merit. SAM-C is setting up a test bed to analyse systems of systems, in addition to run the mandate of prediction and negation of futuristic threats.
Source: http://www.newindianexpress.com
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