After decades of tense relations, India and the United States pursue common concerns in South Asia waters
By RICHARD R. BURGESS, Managing Editor
The Indian Navy established its first unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) squadron in January at Kochi, a coastal naval air station in southwest India. From there, the Israeli-built Heron UAVs patrol the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal.
UAV bases also are being established in the Lakshadweep Islands in the Arabian Sea and at Port Blair in the Andaman Islands near the western approaches to the Strait of Malacca. The network of UAV bases is indicative of the growing importance to India of maritime security, a goal that today dominates its naval planning and operations.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Pacific Fleet uses submarines and maritime patrol aircraft — some assigned from a U.S. base in Bahrain — to maintain surveillance in the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean. Additional surveillance is provided by ships passing to and from the Persian Gulf.
The separate efforts of India and the United States to enhance security in South Asia waters are indicative of the broad range of common interests the two nations share after decades of tense relations.
A new “framework” for defense cooperation, signed in June 2005 in Washington by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President George W. Bush, calls for a range of cooperative efforts between the two nations including concerted improvements in maritime security.
In addition, both nations are trying to improve military relations with China, and both maintain an intensive focus on the Malacca Strait, a vital international trade route and 600-mile link between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.
India and the United States each are reaching out to win new friends and allies in Asia. Both were praised for their disaster relief after the December 2004 tsunami that devastated nations along the Indian Ocean rim, for example, and Indian medical teams served aboard the U.S. hospital ship Mercy during its early July humanitarian visit to Bangladesh.
Defense cooperation between the two countries is growing as they increase the size and complexity of their joint military exercises and explore the feasibility of increasing the sale of U.S. defense goods and services to India.
The warming relations come amid fundamental changes in the foreign policy and defense strategies of each nation.
India was for years a leader of the so-called Non-Aligned Movement — rooted in anticolonialism — that proclaimed political neutrality and resisted diplomatic alliance with the United States or the United Kingdom. In some ways, however, India was a satellite in the Soviet sphere of influence, in part because it relied heavily on the Soviet Union for military technology and weapons.
Pakistan openly aligned with the United States during the Cold War, and “New Delhi approached Moscow very reluctantly after it was cold-shouldered by the United Kingdom first and then the United States in helping to modernize its military,” said Dr. G.V.C. Naidu, a senior fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis (IDSA), New Delhi.
However, “there was a shift in the strategic thinking in New Delhi in the early 1990s,” said Pramit Mitra, a research associate in the South Asian Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. With the demise of the Soviet Union and the rise of India’s global trade — much of it with the United States — India recognized a need to broaden its alliances.
“There’s a new crop of bureaucrats who are rising up in the Indian Foreign Service now who view the United States as more of an ally rather than as someone who is hell-bent on containing India,” Mitra said.
Washington also has changed. After 9/11, the Bush administration looked out at the world from a different point of view. The United States created alliances with countries near Afghanistan, quickly repaired its strained military relationship with Pakistan (which long has had ties to China’s military) and began to see India as a huge democracy “with lots of potential,” Mitra said.
“After 9/11, the Bush administration recognized that India deserved far more attention than it previously received,” he said.
This year, several top U.S. officials have visited Prime Minister Singh and Indian defense officials such as Pranab Mukherjee, minister of defence, and Adm. Arun Prakash, chief of the naval staff. Included were Bush; Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and, most recently, Adm. Gary Roughead, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
Roughead described the New Framework as “a statement that captures our intent and provides the basis of much of the work that we are doing and will continue to do in the future.”
The document does not mention China, but the huge nation to India’s north “is a major factor in the burgeoning security cooperation between India and the United States,” said Naidu. “China is not going to pose an immediate threat but its rise will have far reaching consequences for regional order and balance.”
India engaged in a border war with China in 1962, but today Indian officials discourage talk of India’s value to the west as a counterweight to China.
In fact, “India and China are improving their bilateral relationship,” Mitra said. “Indian companies are broadening their base in China. India and China have taken the position not to let [security] disputes get in the way of improving their bilateral ties.”
Talks on resolving the border dispute have been moving forward since China recognized Indian sovereignty over Sikkim and the March 2005 visit to India by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabiao, according to Mitra. In July, a Himalayan border crossing, the Nathu La Pass, reopened for trade after being closed for more than 44 years. India exercised with China’s Navy off the coast of China in 2003 and in the Indian Ocean in 2005.
These are analogous to the changes wrought by the U.S. Pacific Command, which is ratcheting up its communications with China’s military as a means to lower tensions and “get more contact, get more exposure … we want them to be more engaged,” said Adm. William J. Fallon, Pacific Command commander. Relations were tense for years following the collision of a U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane and a Chinese tactical aircraft off China’s southern coast in 2001.
Fallon recently hosted a delegation of Chinese officers at his Hawaii headquarters and in September visited Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing and senior military leaders during stops in Shanghai, Guangzhou and other cities. Fallon made a return visit in May that included talks with Defense Minister Cao Gangchuan and other senior defense officials.
The results have been mixed. China’s military leaders snubbed Fallon’s December meeting of Asia military officials but agreed to observe the huge Valiant Shield 2006 naval exercises off Guam beginning June 19. India remains concerned that the Chinese are building a deep-water port in Pakistan.
India’s leaders want “to be sure that no country is in a position to choke India’s trade, especially its oil supplies from the Middle East,” Naidu said.
To help ensure its operational flexibility in the region, India is building bases in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands at the northeast end of the Strait of Malacca that “constitute a strategic bastion both to close the door to China from entering the Indian Ocean and potentially also as a springboard to project force against China into the South China Sea and beyond,” said Dr. Donald S. Berlin, professor at the College of Security Studies at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.
“The Strait of Malacca is one of the main doors into the Indian Ocean,” Berlin said. “India’s national security could require, in some contingency, closing that door sometime in the future. India wants to have the capacity to do that.”
The Indian Navy in October hosted a Maritime Security Training Conference for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and cooperates closely with navies of Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, which patrol the strait in an ongoing operation called the Malsinda Patrols, mainly to counter piracy.
The Strait of Malacca is of primary concern to the U.S. Pacific Command, given its importance to commercial shipping (carrying half of the world’s trade in petroleum) and naval transits between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. The Pacific Fleet maintains a logistics base at Singapore.
Fallon, who is concerned with the threat of piracy and terrorism, particularly with Islamic separatist conflicts in the Philippines, signed a pact in April with Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore outlining standard operating procedures for maritime security. Malaysia and Indonesia are opposed to any permanent foreign patrols in the strait, but welcome U.S. assistance in surveillance and early warning.
India’s operations in the strait and elsewhere reflect a growing self-confidence and a broader view of India’s destiny, Berlin said.
“India is expanding in a strategic and geopolitical sense in the Indian Ocean region,” he said.
The advances in Indian naval thinking are reflected in a November address to the IDSA by Prakash, who has published the Indian Maritime Doctrine document and announced that his staff is working on a comprehensive maritime strategy document.
Prakash envisions four major roles for the Indian Navy, including defeat of any direct threats, projecting influence in its maritime areas of interest, cooperating with the Indian Coast Guard and providing maritime assistance, including disaster relief.
To date, the main interaction between the United States and Indian navies have been the annual Malabar exercises held in the Indian Ocean.
“Over the past three years it’s really gained in complexity,’ said Lt. Matt Fleisher, the India desk officer in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. “We had a carrier involved last fall for the first time.”
India has the world’s fifth largest navy and is one of the few nations that operates aircraft carriers.
The Malabar exercises give the two navies opportunities to work on issues of interoperability.
“How we move information operationally back and forth in the most rapid and secure ways that we can — the systems and the protocols — that’s an area we are most challenged in,” Roughead said. “We are helped greatly in operating with the Indian Navy because of the common language (English). Now it’s a question of working out the equipment compatibility and procedural dimensions.”
Roughead, who spent part of his childhood in India, also stresses the benefits of personnel exchanges — ship and aircraft crew members — during the exercises in building personal relationships between the two navies.
“I really want the exchanges occurring at the lieutenant and lieutenant commander level,” he said. “Those are the people who 10 and 20 years from now will be leading our navies. To be able to develop friendships that are able to endure over that length of time could be good for both of our navies and both of our countries.
“To be able to view the importance of maritime security through a very similar lens adds so much to the security and stability out in this part of the world where so much of our economies depend on that free flow of commerce.”
The Pacific Fleet has been hosting Indian military observers during U.S. exercises and operations with increasing frequency. Indian naval personnel observed the three-carrier exercise in the Philippine Sea in June and the Rim of the Pacific exercises off Hawaii in July. The Indian Navy will be one of 22 navies represented at the Western Pacific Naval Symposium in Hawaii in October.
The next Malabar exercises, slated for this fall, will emphasize expeditionary warfare, Roughead said.
“We’re looking more toward opportunities where in shorter periods of preparation we can continue to exercise together,” he said. “It’s important that we begin to look at the relationship with the Indian Navy as one that is not just exercise-centric but we [also] focus on other dimensions, including interoperability that goes beyond exercises, how we can coordinate other activities related to maritime security.”
The Indian Navy believes its sizeable force has a lot to offer the U.S. Navy in terms of cooperation.
“Having India ‘onboard’ would accrue tremendous dividends for the U.S. Navy, which would continue to be overstretched due to its global responsibilities,” said Indian Navy Cmdr. Gurpreet S. Khurana, currently a fellow at the IDSA.
The U.S.-Indian naval cooperation also is expanding into training, equipment transfers and potential technology sales. The first four Indian Navy pilots to be trained by the U.S. Navy have moved into their advanced training, according to Fleisher. India has acquired the decommissioned amphibious transport dock ship ex-Trenton from the U.S. Navy, which is scheduled to be delivered in April, along with six Sea King utility helicopters.
If the new defense engagement between India and the United States continues to grow, the two huge democracies will forge a relationship greater than the sum of its parts that will enhance political stability and security over a significant portion of the globe. Both countries increasingly realize they need each other.
“There is no nation on the planet that is so large that it can handle all the challenges ahead by itself,” said Pace, in a June address to the United Service Institution of India. He termed the growing relationship between India and the United States “a natural partnership” for the future.
