A few years later we were intrigued to find ourselves besieged by navies wanting to exercise with the IN. A little reflection showed that given India’s position astride the shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean, which has 100,000 ships transiting through annually, it made sense for those who depended on these arteries of commerce to know and befriend the sole regional blue water navy. The US is finding to its discomfort that while it can try to set agendas world-wide, it is spread too thin to effectively implement them everywhere. So it is no doubt in quest of “partners”.

Then there were others who thought highly of our professional attainments and wanted to learn maritime warfare skills from our sailors. So we made a list of navies we would exercise with periodically: Singapore, Oman, Indonesia, Thailand, Russia, US, UK, and France. In addition, our ships would exercise with other navies like those of China, Japan, New Zealand or Australia during mutual port calls.

Why switch from the bilateral to multilateral exercise format? Over the past decade or so, our surface-ship operators, submariners and aircrew have gained tremendously in self-confidence and expertise by pitting their professional skills against the best in the business. However, each such exercise takes months of preparation, and consumes ship, submarine and aircraft operating hours; and in the past few years it was becoming obvious that by exercising separately with so many navies we were overstretching both our material and personnel. The answer: go multilateral, reduce the time, multiply the benefits, save machinery hours, and give more leave to the sailors. The MEA was not very keen, but obviously the navy managed to convince them. This is the real reason that for the first time ‘Malabar’ has five navies participating — not secret instructions from the Pentagon.

... contd.