New Delhi: The latest edition of the Malabar Exercise begins next week in Australian waters that will see the navies from India, the US and Japan along with the host focusing on interoperability when it comes to sea deterrence and sea denial in the Indo-Pacific.
Multi-role stealth frigate INS Sahyadri and indigenous destroyer INS Kolkata will be participating in the exercise to be held from 11 to 21 August.
“This the first time that the navies would be travelling to Australia, almost touching the Southern Pacific Ocean. The location signifies that the navies are acquainting themselves with different parts of the Indo-Pacific,” a Naval source told ThePrint.
Sea denial is a strategy to deny the enemy’s ability to use the sea without necessarily attempting to control the sea.
India has a logistics agreement in place with all the three countries, who are also part of the Quad grouping, that allow their armed forces to coordinate closely and to use each other’s bases for repair and replenishment of supplies, besides facilitating scaling up of overall defence cooperation.
While the Malabar series of exercises began between India and the US in 1992, Japan joined it in 2015 and Australia in 2020.
India hosted the Malabar Exercise in the Indian Ocean in 2020 in two phases in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea. The 2021 edition was held in Guam in the Western Pacific, while last year Japan hosted it off Yokosuka island near the East China Sea.
The exercises highlight the convergence of views among the participating countries on maritime issues and their shared commitment to an open, inclusive Indo-Pacific and a rules-based international order.
Even as Beijing alleges that the Quad is aimed at it, the grouping has maintained that it is not intended ‘against China’. In 2021, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Quad was not a military alliance but only a grouping of ‘like-minded democracies’. There have, however, been increasing concerns regarding China’s increasing belligerence in the Indo-Pacific.
China’s apprehensions are that in war times, the four countries will come together to block the strategic Strait of Malacca, which is the shortest sea route between Middle East and East Asia that reduces transportation time and cost. The blockade of energy trade will invariably mean bringing the country’s economy to a standstill.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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