Across the Indo-Pacific, the United States has made common cause with a key strategic partner: India. The U.S.-India relationship, which top U.S. officials have called “the most important bilateral relationship on the planet,” has taken off recently, and some of its greatest successes have been in the maritime domain.1 India has purchased major U.S. naval platforms—including MH-60R helicopters, P-8 Poseidon antisubmarine warfare aircraft, and Harpoon missiles—and strengthened information sharing with the United States on China’s naval presence.2 The two navies now collaborate annually with their Quad partners for the Malabar naval exercise, and U.S. naval vessels are even being repaired at Indian shipyards.3,4
For years, this level of cooperation was unthinkable. But faced with China’s increasingly threatening maritime posture, both countries now view collaboration as a strategic priority. U.S. leaders hope India’s location and naval strength could prevent Chinese domination of the Indo-Pacific. Because India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands are near the Malacca Strait, which People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) ships and 80 percent of China’s imported oil pass through, India has leverage to deter Chinese aggression.5 While India has been unwilling to provoke China by fully militarizing these islands, it also views naval cooperation with the United States as necessary to bolster its position as a leading regional security provider and balance against Chinese aggression at its border. For now, this convergence of interests has brought the two sides together. However, to further strengthen maritime security and counter China’s naval strength, the two navies must be more integrated, with more interoperable equipment and improved operational collaboration.
Equipment Integration
Achieving a closer naval relationship with the United States will require India to reduce its reliance on Russian platforms. About 40 percent of Indian Navy equipment is of Russian origin, including destroyers, submarines, and one of its two aircraft carriers.6 Though U.S. arms sales have cut into Russia’s position, the persistence of Russian hardware in the Indian Navy makes the United States reluctant to link its secure networks to Indian platforms and share sensitive information, which limits naval integration.7 This helps explain why the two navies have not achieved their full potential in countering China’s Indo-Pacific naval presence—the two can rarely track Chinese submarines together in real time, and they cannot conduct more complex naval exercises that would increase interoperability.8 However, with Russia now facing difficulty meeting India’s naval orders amid its war in Ukraine, the United States has an opportunity to decrease the Indian Navy’s dependence on Russian military equipment, platforms, weapons, and technology.
For example, given the Indian Navy’s underfunded nature, the United States could offer to meet its needs more affordably. As Dr. Sameer Lalwani of the U.S. Institute of Peace has mentioned, this would involve strategic use of Excess Defense Articles (EDA) and Foreign Military Financing (FMF). EDA allows the United States to provide foreign militaries with equipment that is surplus to U.S. needs at reduced or no cost.9 For instance, the RQ-4A Global Hawk, an unmanned aerial vehicle that completed its last U.S. Navy deployment in 2022, could increase India’s maritime domain awareness. Avenger-class minesweepers, which the United States is looking to decommission, also could help the Indian Navy, which is aiming to purchase 12 minesweepers to counter potential Pakistani and Chinese mines nearby.10
FMF offers countries loans and grants to make U.S. military equipment more financially attractive. Fiscal issues reportedly forced the Indian Navy to reduce its request for additional P-8I Neptunes from ten to six, limiting its ability to patrol the Indian Ocean.11 A major FMF package, however, could lower the cost of U.S. P-8s to help the Indian Navy acquire more. India’s planned third aircraft carrier could integrate U.S. systems such as the E-2D Hawkeye airborne early warning aircraft, another opportunity for FMF-backed offers.
In the near term, reducing India’s dependence on Russia for large naval ships will be nearly impossible for U.S. shipyards, which are struggling to meet the U.S. Navy’s needs. One workaround could be multinational deals. Japan and South Korea are building high-quality warships faster and at lower cost than U.S. shipyards.12 Given their interest in entering the Indian arms market, these countries could build warships for India, with the United States providing FMF to subsidize U.S. technology to equip them, including combat systems and weapons. Such packages could be competitively priced, address Indian concerns about overreliance on a single supplier, and cultivate a stronger Indian Navy that is increasingly interoperable with U.S. and allied forces. As India’s domestic production capabilities increase, the so-called SUJI (South Korea, U.S., Japan, India) grouping could even become a major provider of naval assets to Southeast Asia, leveraging India’s low-cost production capacity, Japan and South Korea’s existing regional relationships, and advanced U.S. technologies to strengthen regional deterrence against China.
The United States and India also could jointly produce sea-denial systems. India aims to bolster its defense industrial base through joint projects rather than standard arms sales, and there are ample opportunities for such initiatives in sea-denial technologies. These could include torpedoes, underwater loitering munitions, and unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs), all of which would strengthen India’s antisubmarine warfare capability and enable closer monitoring of Chinese vessels. Both India and the United States have been working separately to develop uncrewed systems, and through the new India-U.S. Defense Acceleration Ecosystem, they have identified undersea communication and maritime intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) as the focus for two joint challenges and asked startups from the two countries to create innovative solutions addressing these needs.13 Once a promising Indian maritime ISR startup is identified, it could be brought into a joint project with the two countries’ defense labs and a U.S. player in USVs. The United States would be reluctant to work with India on more advanced undersea monitoring technologies, which are for closer partnerships such as AUKUS, but an initial goal could be cooperation on something simple, such as mine countermeasures USVs. A medium-term ambition could be to jointly produce and operate a maritime ISR platform that patrols the Indian Ocean region and tracks Chinese naval movements.
Operational Cooperation
Decreasing India’s reliance on Russian equipment means little, though, if the Indian and U.S. Navies do not work together closely and build operational trust. While the two countries have increased their information sharing, logistics collaboration, and naval exercises, more remains to be done to unlock the partnership’s potential for reinforcing maritime deterrence against China and providing public goods—such as humanitarian assistance and disaster relief—for the Indo-Pacific.
Maritime Domain Awareness
As the University of Sydney’s U.S. Studies Center has argued, one goal should be “tracking and ‘handing off’ overwatch [of] Chinese submarines transiting geographic areas of responsibility.”14 In 2016, India was considering developing a chain of sound surveillance sensors (SOSUS) in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and connecting them with the United States and Japan’s “Fish Hook” SOSUS network, which detects Chinese submarine activity in the western Pacific and Indian Ocean Rim.15 It is unclear whether the three countries have built an interlinked SOSUS chain, but if not, doing so should be a priority; it would enable more comprehensive undersea domain awareness for all
three partners.
However, these sensors produce enormous amounts of raw data.16 If India has constructed its SOSUS network (or is in the planning stages), it will need technical assistance to parse and analyze the data, tasks that took many years for the United States and Japan to master.17 So, the United States could play a capacity-building role by connecting the Indian Navy with U.S. companies that could provide AI-enabled tools for processing and analyzing sensor data. Indian sensor networks could then contribute meaningfully to joint MDA efforts, providing more fidelity on China’s undersea presence.
Making the most of such collaborative MDA initiatives also requires greater information sharing, especially by addressing long-standing concerns on tactical data links. In 2018, India and the United States signed the Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement, permitting India to access sensitive communication platforms used by the United States and its close allies for information sharing.18 There is immense potential here: the two sides could attain a common operating picture of Chinese naval activities. India, however, has been unwilling to shift fully to U.S. tactical data links, including Link 16, fearing they could imperil Indian autonomy.19 Instead, with the Indian Navy now equipping ships with software-defined radios, which can more easily shift between communication links, the United States could offer India technical solutions that ensure its naval platforms can switch between Link 16 and India’s indigenous data link.20 This could assuage India’s worries about being locked into U.S. technology and enable more real-time MDA data sharing across the Quad, because Japan and Australia already use Link 16.
Given the depth of cooperation this would entail, India may not be comfortable with real-time information sharing. India does, however, seem to be interested in joint assessment of intelligence, as the Stimson Center’s U.S.-India Strategic Dialogue found in 2021.21 This would require regular meetings of U.S. and Indian naval intelligence analysts, such as through a standing U.S.-India Joint Intelligence Assessment Center. These joint assessments would allow the two navies to periodically review the PLAN’s threat level and evaluate its efforts to expand into the Indian Ocean. This could also bring the two sides into increased alignment on the issue’s urgency, increasing India’s interest in stepping up maritime security cooperation with the U.S. Navy.
Logistics
Operational collaboration also involves strengthening cooperation on logistics. This already is a strong suit of the U.S.-India naval partnership. India allowed a U.S. P-8 Poseidon to refuel at the Andaman and Nicobar Islands during the India-China border clash in 2020, and the two navies have engaged in ship-to-ship refueling at sea on several occasions, most recently in March 2024. In 2023, the United States signed master ship repair agreements with two Indian shipyards, enabling them to repair U.S. Navy vessels mid-voyage.22 India and the United States also signed the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) in 2016, which allows each country to access certain of the other’s military facilities for peacetime refueling and resupply.23
Nevertheless, expanding logistics coordination will be essential for facilitating joint naval efforts and enabling the U.S. Navy to operate sustainably across the Indo-Pacific, where current logistics capabilities reportedly are “inadequate to support operations . . . in a contested environment.”24 The United States should work toward signing MSRAs with more Indian shipyards, such as those in Goa and Gujarat, so India becomes a major U.S. Navy logistics hub. As part of a future National Defense Authorization Act, Congress also could incorporate a waiver for India in the Jones Act, allowing it to repair more than just noncombat vessels.
The two countries should build on the recent increase in U.S. naval repairs at Indian shipyards to facilitate regular ship refueling, resupply, and repair, perhaps through a joint working group for the implementation of LEMOA. The University of Sydney’s U.S. Studies Center noted this group could help create “standardized operating procedures,” including guidelines for when Indian and U.S. naval vessels passing through the Indian Ocean could be replenished by their counterparts. The two countries also should schedule regular naval repairs at Indian shipyards in the coming years, allow more frequent refueling of U.S. P-8s at the Andaman and Nicobar Islands during maritime patrols, and conduct joint contingency planning, discussing logistics arrangements the U.S. Navy could use in case of Chinese aggression against Taiwan or in the South China Sea.
Joint Exercises and Operations
Cooperation on maritime domain awareness and logistics will make conducting joint exercises easier. Recent bilateral naval exercises have largely been passing exercises, occurring when U.S. naval vessels transited the Indian Ocean. These can be regularized so U.S. warships engage in joint exercises with Indian vessels on nearly every transit between the Persian Gulf and western Pacific. The two nations also could establish an annual bilateral naval exercise in the Bay of Bengal that incorporates many vessels and involves multiple complex phases over several weeks. One phase should focus on humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HA/DR), strengthening the two sides’ ability to respond jointly to humanitarian emergencies in the Indo-Pacific. Another phase should prioritize antisubmarine warfare, leveraging the Bay of Bengal’s proximity to the Strait of Malacca. If India were to agree to host this at the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the two navies’ special forces could practice island defense, which the United States may need in the event of a Taiwan contingency.
Naval exercises can pave the way for joint operations. This could include joint P-8 patrols in the eastern Indian Ocean for maritime domain awareness focused on tracking Chinese submarine movements. Joint naval patrols also would be useful in the western Indian Ocean, where Houthi rebels have disrupted international shipping. With the recent Houthi attacks on ships heading to India and carrying Indian manufactured goods, New Delhi likely sees the need to strengthen its naval presence there.26 The United States could encourage India to join the multinational coalition working to safeguard shipping in the Red Sea. Because U.S. leadership of this initiative may dissuade India from joining, Washington should enable India and other key partners to command the coalition on a regular rotation. The goal should be to encourage India to become a major security provider in the western Indian Ocean, one that reduces the U.S. Navy’s burden there once the Houthi threat abates so U.S. forces can stay focused on the western Pacific. India’s provision of maritime security could also extend to HA/DR, especially if the two countries conduct coordinated operations in response to natural disasters.
Realizing these possibilities will require strengthening U.S.-India naval integration, but with sustained efforts to increase interoperability and expand operational coordination, the two navies can work together to bolster maritime security in the Indo-Pacific for years to come.
1. “U.S., India Share ‘Most Important Bilateral Relationship on Planet’: Top White House Official after Modi’s State Visit,” The Indian Express, 6 July 2023.
2. Sushant Singh, “U.S., Indian Navies Sharing Information on Chinese Subs, Says Pacific Command Chief,” The Indian Express, 19 January 2017.
3. U.S. Pacific Fleet, “Malabar Navies’ Leadership Meet in Pearl Harbor,” press release, 19 September 2023.
4. Damien Cave, “U.S. Pursues Defense Partnership with India to Deter Chinese Aggression,” The New York Times, 18 October 2023.
5. Lucas Myers, “Internal Politics, Instability, and China’s Frustrated Efforts to Escape the ‘Malacca Dilemma,’” Wilson Center’s Asia Dispatches, 20 July 2021.
6. Matthew Stein, “India Takes a Step Away from Russian Defense Industry,” Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs 6, no. 5 (July–August 2023).
7. Blake Herzinger, Tom Corben, Ashley Townsend, Darshana Baruah, and Tomohiko Satake, “Bolstering the Quad: The Case for a Collective Approach to Maritime Security,” United States Studies Centre, 8 June 2023.
8. Herzinger et al., “Bolstering the Quad.”
9. Sameer Lalwani, “The Chinese Threat No One Is Talking About—And How to Counter It,” Politico, 16 March 2022.
10. “Indian Navy Launches Fresh Hunt to Buy 12 Minesweepers from Indian Shipyards,” Hindustan Times, 5 August 2023.
11. Rahul Bedi, “Navy Must Clear Many Hurdles If It Wants Second Indigenous Aircraft Carrier,” The Wire, 18 March 2023.
12. Brad Lendon, “These May Be the World’s Best Warships. And They’re Not American,” CNN, 3 June 2023.
13. Jon Harper, “First INDUS-X Joint Challenges to Focus on Undersea Communication, Maritime ISR,” DefenseScoop, 5 September 2023.
14. Herzinger et al., “Bolstering the Quad.”
15. Abhijit Singh, “Militarising Andamans: The Costs and the Benefits,” Hindustan Times, 29 July 2020.
16. Commodore C. P. Srivastava, “Bay of Bengal: The Emerging Undersea Battlefield and the Concomitant ASW Challenges,” Indian Defence Review 35, no. 4 (October–December 2020).
17. Srivastava, “Bay of Bengal.”
18. Ankit Panda, “What the Recently Concluded U.S.-India COMCASA Means,” The Diplomat, 9 September 2018.
19. Sameer Lalwani, Elizabeth Threlkeld, Christopher Clary, and Zoe Jordan, “Toward a Mature Defense Partnership: Insights from a U.S.-India Strategic Dialogue,” The Stimson Center, 16 November 2021.
20. “BEL to Provide Software Defined Radio Tactical Worth ₹1000 Crore to Bring Strategic Depth to Armed Forces,” ET Government (India Times), 9 February 2021.
21. Lalwani et al., “Toward a Mature Defense Partnership.”
22. Cave, “U.S. Pursues Defense Partnership with India.”
23. Manoj Joshi, “New Delhi Is Adopting the Singapore Model for Military-Industrial Relations with the U.S.,” The Wire, 29 June 2023.
24. Department of Defense, Pacific Deterrence Initiative (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, April 2022).
25. Snehesh Alex Philip, “U.S. Military Aircraft Refuels at Indian Base for First Time Under Defence Pact,” The Print, 2 October 2020.
26. “Houthis Release Video Showing Armed Men Hijacking India-bound Ship in Red Sea,” Hindustan Times, 21 November 2023.
