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US-India defence ties: The limits to interoperability

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In Brief

On 19 July, the United States and India held the second meeting of their annual Strategic Dialogue, one of only a half-dozen such dialogue mechanisms that Washington has with other countries.

The budding US-India strategic axis has undoubtedly been one of the significant global geo-political undertakings of the past decade, and much has been written — oftentimes effusively — about its boundless promise in times ahead.

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That public assessment of the relationship has tended to race ahead of the realities on the ground is not a healthy development, viewed from the long-term perspective of managing expectations. A case in point is the bilateral defence relationship, up to this point considered to be the crown jewel of the burgeoning US-India strategic partnership.

Be it with regard to the ‘Greater Middle East’ or the ‘Indo-Pacific’ region, at the time of visualisation of the US-India defence and maritime partnership in the early-to-mid 2000s, the hope — if not expectation — in Washington was two-fold.

First, that New Delhi would be Washington’s key security partner in the vast expanses of the Indian Ocean region (IOR), increasingly joined with the American military in use-of-force planning to address regional contingencies — a Japan as it were, shorn of Article 9 restraints of the IOR. The 2005 bilateral Framework Defense Agreement lent credence to this belief, envisaging as it does Indian collaboration in ‘multinational operations … of common interest’ that conceptually span the range from humanitarian and disaster relief activities to more muscular Proliferation Security Initiative -style interdictions to perhaps even ‘coalition of the willing’ interventions that lack an explicit United Nations mandate.

Second, as such collaboration was gradually extended to ‘out-of-area’ operations, ranging from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, New Delhi would participate in the soft maritime constrainment of China. Lending weight to this belief were New Delhi’s prompt dispatch of a temporary liaison officer to US Pacific Command (PACOM) headquarters in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, its willingness to participate in trilateral naval exercises in the East China Sea, as well as its hosting of wide-ranging multinational exercises in critical Indian Ocean waterways that serve as approaches to the Malacca Straits.

US-India joint exercises, particularly, were seen as the glue that would furnish an operational ‘jointness’ on the ground which would permeate into a correspondent strategic purpose at the highest political level. To this end, joint-exercise-upon-joint exercise — on mountain, forest, snow, sand and sea — were conducted, such that New Delhi became Washington’s most active exercise partner over the past decade. Awed by the opportunity to train alongside America’s majestic armada, and overwhelmed, further, by the concurrent American bestowal of a landmark civil nuclear cooperation agreement, the goodwill accruing — it was assumed in Washington — would hasten a pro-American shift within New Delhi’s strategic coordinates.

But expectations have not been borne out — New Delhi appearing neither willing to confront Beijing in any security format other than one which is strictly bilateral (Sino-Indian) nor countenance the degree of interoperability in bilateral defence planning preferred by Washington. Indeed, at the point at which defence interoperability assumes the trappings of quasi-informal military alignment, the tendency in New Delhi has been to reflexively shrink from such engagement.

Almost a decade after its first broaching by Washington, New Delhi is yet to post a mid-level officer on a permanent basis to PACOM headquarters in Hawaii. Recent statements by India’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) that it does not seek such a relationship with US combatant commands, as well as MoD’s disallowing of all unsupervised contact between armed forces officials and foreign defence delegations, suggests a shrinking space for exchange of ideas at the mil-mil level with PACOM. Competing interpretations of permissible activities by US hydrographic survey vessels, including the USNS Bowditch, in Indian maritime zones meanwhile continue to fester, although without the vitriol that characterises Beijing’s exchanges with Washington.

Despite being afforded an exceptional window to the operation of the US military’s CENTRIX battlegroup networking system in the course of joint Malabar series exercises, New Delhi remains averse to signing a Memorandum of Agreement (acronymed CISMoA) that would facilitate tactical communications system interoperability. Driven as much by intrusiveness concerns, New Delhi has chosen to vest dependence instead on Russia’s military-grade satellite navigational system which is as yet only semi-operational. That top-dollar purchases of US-origin military transport and reconnaissance aircraft have had to be consequently kitted with down-rated avionics suites has not persuaded New Delhi otherwise.

Leery that navy-to-navy fuel transfer arrangements, as practiced during the US-India Malabar series exercises, might set a precedent for reciprocal fuel sharing requests during peacetime or otherwise in the South China Sea and beyond, New Delhi has stepped back from also initialling a mutual Logistics Support Agreement (LSA). Provision for logistics cooperation, it bears noting, was the rare case of an interoperability-aiding deliverable that was explicitly secured by Washington at the time of drawing up the 2006 Indo-US Framework for Maritime Security Cooperation.

US-India joint exercises themselves have also been scaled down — New Delhi apprehensive that the involvement of US carrier battle groups in the Malabar exercises and attendant shore leave for hundreds of American servicemen on Indian soil might open the door to demands for SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement)-equivalent immunity protections. And following a bluntly-worded demarche by Beijing in 2007 in the wake of five-party war games hosted in the Bay of Bengal, the multinational component of these exercises has been shifted ‘out-of-area’ altogether — all ensuing Malabar exercises in the IOR since being strictly US-India affairs. Far from suggesting a willingness to extend Indian maritime security obligations beyond the IOR, as some have inferred the trilateral Malabar exercises in the East China Sea to be, it reveals an Indian disinclination to be appended to an American and allied maritime strategy in its Indian Ocean zone of core interest.

Looking ahead, practical arms-length collaboration alongside, as opposed to integrating within, US-led forces — as has also been the pattern, in practice, with New Delhi’s support for US-led, international anti-piracy operations in these waters — appears to be the ceiling to such bilateral defence cooperation.

To the extent, further, that such ties are viewed in New Delhi as being somewhat superfluous to security requirements in its immediate maritime neighbourhood, US-Indian defence cooperation that assumes the characteristics of a quasi-informal military alignment will remain aspirational, at best — if at all — well into the future. Beijing’s dispatch of naval assets to protect its drilling and pipeline interests off the Burmese shoreline, as also the presence of PLAN submarines in the more enabling nautical environment of the Bay of Bengal, might alter this calculation, although such eventuality appears hypothetical at this time.

Sourabh Gupta is a Senior Research Associate at Samuels International Associates, Inc. in Washington DC, and a contributor to EAF. An expanded version of this post, originally appearing in the Pacific Forum CSIS PacNet newsletter, can be found here.

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