By building up the notion of the Indo-Pacific as a critical region, Shinzo Abe, the late Japanese prime minister, created a strategic framework that presaged the geopolitical and economic integration now taking place across Asia and parts of Africa. As South Asian and Middle Eastern countries merge into West Asia, a new continental order could reshape the global balance of power.

During his first visit to India as prime minister, in August 2007, Abe delivered his seminal ‘Confluence of the two seas’ speech to the Indian parliament. Abe drew his speech title from a book written by the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh in 1655, which explored the commonalities between Islam and Hinduism as neighbouring religious and civilisational constructs. The Pacific and Indian Oceans also share many commonalities, Abe noted. The ‘dynamic coupling’ of these ‘seas of freedom and of prosperity’ would transform not only the Indo-Pacific region but also ‘broader Asia’.

But Abe, who was assassinated last July, had more than just maritime metaphors in mind. His overarching goal was to build the most consequential bilateral relationship in the Indo-Pacific: India and Japan. As one of the first Asian leaders to recognise the global and regional impact of China’s rise, Abe went on a one-man crusade to create a viable new balance of power. By expanding the geopolitical dimensions of the Asia–Pacific region and pushing it westward towards the Indian Ocean, he helped shift the region’s strategic profile.

Abe’s 2007 speech highlighted the intellectual vacuum in Washington at the time. While the United States was at the height of its ill-fated ‘war on terror’ and mired in two protracted, costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Abe sought to redefine the Indo-Pacific on Japan’s terms, as a rival to the China-centric ‘community of common destiny’.

For Abe and his successors, fostering cooperation across the Eurasian and African rimlands through extensive networks of defence and trade ties was the key to realising the vision of a broader Asia. In placing the Indo-Pacific at the heart of this vision, they drew on the insights of the 19th-century American admiral Alfred Mahan and the British naval historian Julian Corbett.

Mahan and Corbett, the pioneers of modern naval strategy, viewed sea power as an essential source of national strength. The 20th-century political scientist Nicholas Spykman emphasised the strategic centrality of the Eurasian rimland, in contrast to Halford Mackinder’s insistence on the centrality of the Eurasian heartland. Together, Mahan’s and Corbett’s writings on sea power and Spykman’s maritime-based approach to geopolitics provided the intellectual foundations for Abe’s broader Asia.

Today, the clearest manifestation of Abe’s Indo-Pacific strategy is the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, better known as the Quad, which began as a humanitarian initiative when the US, Australia, India and Japan formed a joint relief operation following the deadly tsunami that devastated Indonesia in 2004. After his re-election in 2017, Abe repurposed it as a vehicle for his geopolitical vision.

But the Quad was only the beginning. It has been followed by a series of ‘minilateral’ institutions, including the AUKUS defence pact between Australia, the UK and the US; the US–Australia–Japan Trilateral Strategic Dialogue; trilateral cooperation between Australia, Indonesia and India; and a joint Italy–Japan–UK fighter-jet project. These initiatives, all of which aim to boost security and stability across the Indo-Pacific, reflect the region’s ongoing transformation into a ‘geography of strategies’.

After the Iraq War and Arab Spring pushed Arab states to diversify their alliances and partnerships and decrease their reliance on the US, Asian countries such as China, Japan, India, Indonesia and South Korea rushed to fill the vacuum. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, for example, are India’s third– and fourth-largest trading partners, respectively. Japan has become a trusted regional leader in technology, clean energy and space exploration. And South Korea is now a major supplier of technology and arms to the Gulf states and Egypt. Deepening defence and trade ties, together with the Gulf states’ growing clout, have accelerated the Middle East’s integration into the Asian economic sphere.

While Abe sought to offset China’s rising power by redefining the Asia–Pacific region, strategists and intellectuals (including me) have been trying to establish a regional balance of power by expanding the geopolitical definition of the Middle East to include India and other South Asian countries. The Abraham Accords between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain; the Negev Forum; the I2U2 summit comprising India, Israel, the UAE and the US; and the France–UAE–India trilateral framework all point to a fledgling Indo-Abrahamic alliance between India, Israel and the Arab states.

The introduction of India into the Middle East’s political and economic domain is an extension of the geostrategic model Abe championed in his ‘Confluence of the two seas’ speech. With India as the link between the Indo-Pacific and the Indo-Abrahamic countries of West Asia, a continental Asian order is beginning to take shape.

On 18 February, India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar gave a keynote address at the inaugural Raisina @ Sydney dialogue, organised by ASPI and the Observer Research Foundation. The following is a lightly edited version of his speech.

As we see the world at this time, it’s important we all appreciate that the larger outlook is one of great uncertainty, a lot of unpredictability, with new players, new behaviour. There is the cumulative impact of three years of Covid, the damage that it has done to the global social economic fabric, the year of the Ukraine conflict, the knock-on effects—the fuel, food, fertiliser, trade disruptions; the shortages it has created; the uncertainties it has enhanced—and then take some of the perennial challenges which pre-existed, such as climate.

Climate was a growing concern. What we thought was the future portended has actually happened to us. We are witnessing climate events on an increasingly large, more catastrophic scale. In fact, today in any global risk assessment, I would say building in a climate calculation is very much a part of that.

There are the other concerns—concerns about terrorism, concerns about maritime security. There are also growing concerns about financial sustainability. There are more than 70 countries who have engaged, or are engaging, the International Monetary Fund in terms of stabilising their national finances. And unlike in the near past, many of these are not low-income countries. Some of them are middle-income countries. I think even an optimistic view of the world would be reasonably pessimistic at this point in time.

My second point, flowing from that, is that today there really is an urgent collective task. That is, how to de-risk the global economy. Part of that is exactly the events that I have referred to: overdependence on manufacturing, overdependence on energy, overdependence on services.

How do we create more reliable and resilient supply chains? In a more digital world, how do we ensure at least the minimal trust and transparency? Because the fact is that we cannot be agnostic about data in the manner in which we were mistakenly agnostic about products. Where does my data reside? Who processes it, what do they do with it, how do they extrapolate it? That matters deeply to me. For us to pretend that all nations are the same and it’s none of our business what happens inside, I think that era is now behind us and we must not just accept it. We must actually be aware of it and make plans to deal with this.

This applies also to green technologies. We should not end up in a world where our desire to be greener leads us to be more dependent on a few and therefore more insecure. How do we decentralise? How do we collaborate? How do we diversify? In a sense, how do we democratise the world? Democratise it technologically, democratise it economically?

If I were to pick three words to describe the state of our contemporary world, the number one would be globalisation. Globalisation has worked. It’s had its problems; it’s had its downsides. It’s had, actually, an enormous impact, both the pluses and minuses, on global society. Globalisation actually has helped to create a rebalancing.

The G20, whose presidency India current holds, is proof of that rebalancing. Until 2008, the global leadership, such as it was, was seen as the G7. However, the events of 2008–09 demonstrated that G7 was too narrow. And I would not stop at G20. I use it as a metaphor to underline the point that if you look today at the production and consumption centres of the world, they are vastly different—certainly from what they were in 1945. But I would say almost every decade it’s very useful to actually see a decile chart of who’s up and who’s down and how the balances are shifting there.

That rebalancing is creating an emerging multipolarity. The United States has been the premier power and, for the foreseeable future, will remain the premier power. This is an undeniable factor, as is the rise of China, the share of China in the global economy and global technology and global influence.

However, you’re clearly going to see many more powers who will have more influence on global debates and global outcomes than they did before. Some of them would be sufficiently separated from the rest of the herd, to be seen as a bull, and therefore you will have a multipolarity.

Since Brexit, there’s obviously been a very intense global debate about globalisation, and President Trump’s election intensified that debate. But it’s not an issue of, ‘Is globalisation good or bad?’ You can’t turn it back. It’s there. It’s hardwired into our existence.

The issue is really, what’s the right model of globalisation? Is it a model which is fairer—fairer within societies, fairer between societies? Is it a model where the benefits exceed the vulnerabilities? Because that is today also a very important downside of globalisation. The preferred direction of globalisation that a lot of countries want to see is a key global debate.

In a changing world, obviously there will be new conversations. And among the conversations we are seeing are those of the importance of values, of beliefs, of ideologies. One debate, of course, is that of democratic countries, pluralistic societies and those who are not. But there’s another debate, and it’s a debate within the democratic world, which is really: whose democracy, whose values, whose definition, whose norms?

Here too, there is a transformation of the world, the rebalancing. A lot of it derives from an era of G7 dominance—a very Euro-Atlantic view of what is democracy. Now, the fact that democracy is perceived as a global aspiration is actually because India chose to be a democracy at the time of its independence and because the first country which was decolonising—and it happened to be the largest country which was decolonising—chose a difficult, democratic path.

Despite decades of adversity and limited resources, India stuck to that path when actually other democracies questioned the viability. That, today, is very much at the centre of a debate and a conversation that we must have on democracy. There are practices and beliefs and cultures which are relevant to how democracy is actually executed and improved.

My next point, of course, is the welfare of the world. Here again, the fact that the capacities of some countries are not what they used to be is a very relevant factor. I particularly refer here to the United States.

The big change in the last decade is not that US capacities are relatively less than they used to be. It is that the US is actually getting into a mindset where it’s aware of that limitation and is open to working with like-minded partners to address it—and like-minded partners include countries who are not treaty allies.

In Australia, it’s not a change you will readily realise, because you are a treaty ally. For you, working with the United States is not anything new. It’s part of your history for the last 80 years.

For India, it is a change. Certainly, there have been big changes in our foreign policy, but I would equally stress that there’s been a big change in American thinking. This is not the same United States with which we dealt in the 1960s or 1980s or even frankly in 2005. There is an evolution out there and you can see that evolution on a whole range of issues.

As a result, we have new strategic concepts, new geopolitical theatres, new mechanisms. Obviously the most notable of these on a conceptual level is the Indo-Pacific. At a mechanism level, it is the Quad.

The Quad to me is an enterprise laden with a lot of significance. If you look at it, there’s that Indo-Pacific space—four countries, not geographically contiguous at all, with an enormous amount of sea space and some land space between them, but who have, in different ways, overcome their own past outlook to forge something common in response to a perceived global and regional need. And it’s an India world with which I happen to be associated more closely than most others. I’m still probably the only witness in office of the first effort in 2007. And I’ve seen it at various levels from doing it as a permanent secretary to a foreign minister and now we’re seeing it as a summit level.

It is a development of great consequence. And it’s not just India; I look at the foreign policy of our other Quad partners as well. I think today it has a salience that very few would have predicted perhaps even two or three years ago.

Finally, let me end with a few thoughts on our G20 presidency. It’s obviously an extraordinary opportunity and a great honour. It’s a time when you have a certain convening power and an agenda-shaping opportunity. But it’s also, as I said initially, a particularly difficult juncture of world politics.

The G20 works as a troika. The incoming and the outgoing are associated with the current chair. We had a supportive role when our predecessor chair, Indonesia, was holding that responsibility. We know that last year was a real struggle, that the Ukraine conflict had very strongly polarised the G20. All of us worked very hard to find some kind of common ground on that issue. I believe that we did succeed, finally, at the Bali Summit. An enormous amount of credit is due to Indonesian patience and creativity.

Today, the rest of the world expects the G20 to address its concerns because those 180 countries have real problems, pressing problems, deep concerns, and they think it is for the top 20 economies of the world to show the direction, to come up with answers and, at the very least, to be cognisant of their concerns.

Our hope is that we are able to steer the G20 in the direction to undertake the responsibility and remit of economic growth and global development. We are not just feeling the vibes from the rest of the world. We actually did it as a practical, empirical exercise. In the month of January, we consulted 123 countries at the level of prime minister and cabinet ministers. We have a good sense today by asking the world, ‘Here we are with this responsibility. What is uppermost in your mind? What is your most pressing concern and what can we do about it?’

From what I can see, the Australian view is very much aligned with the thinking which I have put forward. For me, this relationship is exceptionally important, and I can only underline that by the frequency of my visits. It makes a big difference in the G20, in the Quad, bilaterally, and regionally as well.

I’m coming here after spending three days in Fiji. Do bear in mind that the India that I represent today is also an India whose influence and interest and footprint are growing in the world. We feel we can be of utility and support in regions which may not be that proximate to us. That too has been part of my conversations in Australia.

In 1943, Thomas Watson, the chair of IBM, famously said, ‘I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.’ Senior engineers at the corporation dismissed the future use of microchips.

Scepticism of emerging technologies is not uncommon and reflects a fear or misunderstanding of the new and unknown. But we are now on the cusp of a range of next-generation technologies that will shape our daily lives and add another dimension to shaping geostrategic settings.

There are increasing concerns for citizenry around data and information protection, cybersecurity, job security from the rise of artificial intelligence and so on. These developments are occurring at a rapid rate. According to a report by EY, ‘By 2030, the world will be entering the 6G era; an intelligently autonomous, sensory, massively distributed but highly networked world that blends our physical, digital and human systems.’

This has not only potential personal consequences, but also enormous geostrategic and economic implications. For defence planners, those effects may prove as critical as traditional military power projection. Technology is also driving innovation in industry not seen for decades, and the private sector needs to understand where its efforts are best placed given the strategic consequences.

The Quad partnership, comprising Australia, India, Japan and the US, has prioritised supporting and guiding this technological evolution to buttress investment in projects and technology consistent with its intent to maintain a free and open Indo-Pacific. This will require a concerted and coordinated effort between governments, industry, private capital partners and civil society.

Achieving the Quad’s goals will also require deepening and strengthening people-to-people links, building trusted professional networks, making policy and regulatory adjustments, and facilitating better information sharing. As a first step to developing a roadmap for cooperation, ASPI hosted the inaugural Quad Technology Business and Investment Forum in Sydney in December 2022, supported by the Australian Department of Home Affairs. The forum will become an annual Quad event and report directly to the Quad Critical and Emerging Technology Working Group.

The scope of the working group is, so far, fairly modest. It encourages a statement of principles on technology design, development and use; coordination on technology standards; cooperation on telecommunications deployment; diversification of suppliers; cooperation to monitor trends; and dialogues on critical technology supply chains. While discussions between government, the private sector and civil society on these issues is still at an embryonic stage, new links are being forged at conferences like the forum.

The future prosperity of nations will be determined by their ability to harness emerging technologies, particularly AI for automation and data analysis, and quantum computing. Quantum computing alone has the potential to revolutionise society by solving complex problems in seconds that would take the fastest supercomputer thousands of years.

Technology advancements over the past few decades now underpin national security and drive economic prosperity by creating new jobs, securing competitive manufacturing, improving our health and vaccination outcomes, increasing agricultural productivity, modernising our infrastructure and communications, enabling our energy transition, strengthening our defence forces and, most fundamental of all, preserving our democracy.

The challenge for the Quad is how best to coordinate investment between government and the private sector, and then coordinate that investment across the Indo-Pacific. Quad nations are in different parts of this technological evolution and have varying levels of existing cooperation.

The US and Australia are generally comfortable working together on technology development, whereas Japan and India have traditionally been more cautious about collaboration. Through a range of meetings and information-sharing exercises, the Quad is working to break down barriers and help governments better understand how differences can be harnessed as strengths rather than weaknesses.

While the US continues to lead development and innovation in AI and quantum computing, China is investing heavily in the sector to counter the emerging strategic competition between Quad members and their partners. US President Joe Biden is determined to maintain America’s strategic advantage in the emerging technology sector, especially AI, and has introduced a range of export restrictions as well as enhancing tech partnerships with trusted allies and friends, including Australia, Japan and India.

Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has also committed his government to ‘think about national security from a variety of perspectives, not just force’. The Kishida administration looks set to take this to new levels in response to what former national security adviser Kitamura Shigeru has referred to as a ‘tectonic shift’ in the development and application of new technologies.

Keio University professor and special adviser to former prime minister Shinzo Abe (the father of the Quad) Tomohiko Taniguchi highlights that ‘investment in emerging technologies, such as AI and quantum computing, is becoming more critical for Japan, as is the need to collaborate with like-minded nations, including the Quad member nations’.

The Indian government has signalled that it will leverage hosting the G20 this year to help promote the need for a collaborative regulatory approach to and cooperation on emerging technologies. India is ranked eighth in terms of private investment in AI behind Europe, the US and China. However, a recent report published by Deloitte suggests that most Indian businesses plan to increase their AI investments.

The Australian government will focus on its strengths such as research and development, and training and education. It will also seek to take a leading role in the Quad emerging technologies architecture to ensure that critical technologies and their applications embody the principles that define Quad member nations’ values and allow them to uphold the rule of law and human rights.

As agreed by the Quad members in 2021, ‘a free, open, inclusive, and resilient Indo-Pacific requires that critical and emerging technology is governed and operates according to shared interests and values’. This is no small task, and governments, industry and investors all have a role to play.

Governments often find themselves on the back foot when it comes to innovation, especially when market competition and consumer protection are tested by technological growth. But governments are critical to the development of new technologies through their support for initiatives and the creation of conducive environments for innovation and investment. Governments also set regulatory frameworks, assist with seed funding support for emerging technologies and facilitate private capital investment through public–private partnership arrangements and investment match-funding.

The private sector is essential in bringing new technologies to the market. It is the private sector that must identify, evaluate and carry forward the best ideas to commercial outcomes. Businesses, entrepreneurs and investors turn innovations into the products and companies that change the world.

Innovation is also critical for the private sector in terms of competitiveness, and is the key to success for private businesses, helping to cut costs, improve products, open new markets, and improve digital fluency and skills development.

Finally, there is the capital required to take start-up emerging technologies and scale them up at the rate required for large government-endorsed programs and initiatives. Private-sector capital will be central to this success as governments won’t have the money to fund everything. However, venture capitalist firms need support to help identify the best areas for investment and incentives to invest through government funding support.

Perhaps a first step to help align the three sectors is the development of an investor prospectus for emerging technology that highlights investment opportunities across the Quad and then develops a mechanism for collaborative investment. This is just one practical solution to help build co-created, co-designed and co-funded Quad initiatives.

Having a bold vision of this future will help companies streamline investments today and chart a transformation roadmap for tomorrow.

Few countries have the resources to be competitive in all technologies that might be critical to their national interest. Some technology cooperation is easier—and has a longer history—in bilateral or trilateral settings. It will take astute policymakers to marry together our trade agenda with domestic industry and innovation policy—but things are moving quickly and the time for action is now.

After a false start 15 years ago, the annual Malabar naval exercise has become a key strategic development for the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue partners, the United States, India, Japan and Australia.

Warships from the four nations have just concluded the 26th iteration of Exercise Malabar, which began under an agreement between the Indian hosts and the US in 1992. The original aim was to improve interoperability between the US and Indian navies, and for many years the exercise involved few ships.

In 2007, warships from the US, India, Japan and Australia took part, but that aroused anger in Beijing, which sent each of the four countries a diplomatic note, or démarche, criticising what it saw as a developing security relationship.

Australia didn’t take part in the Malabar exercise again until 2020.

Malabar’s expansion reflects the growing ties among the Quad navies. The Quad’s announcement of the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness is another welcome step, but more is needed to formalise a Quad maritime security arrangement. The new partnership is useful because it will give regional nations access to satellite tracking data to monitor ships and enable a common operating picture. However, it needs to be complemented by an initiative that clearly outlines areas of maritime responsibility in the event of conflict in the Taiwan Strait or elsewhere. An updated Radford–Collins arrangement involving India and Japan as partners offers a potential solution.

Named after the then commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Fleet, Admiral Arthur Radford, and Australia’s then chief of naval staff, Rear Admiral John Collins, who negotiated it, the Radford–Collins agreement was reached in 1951 to establish clear areas of maritime responsibility between the US and Australian navies in the event of war. The agreement also divided up responsibility for ensuring the free flow of maritime trade. The zones were based on the Southwest Pacific and the Anglo–New Zealand–Australian–Malaya, or ANZAM, area, which stretched from the eastern Indian Ocean to New Zealand and across the Southern Ocean to the New Guinea area from south to north. Radford–Collins remains a useful tool for coordinating areas of maritime influence, but new challenges and partners necessitate an update of the arrangement.

While Radford–Collins was signed during an era that shared some similarities with the current period, the emergence of China as a major maritime force and the evolving Sino-Russia axis has altered the balance of power in the region. The continued growth of the Peoples Liberation Army Navy’s surface and submarine fleets and long-range hypersonic missiles will make defending maritime trade more difficult in war time. Beijing’s ongoing use of aggressive maritime grey-zone tactics in the South China Sea signals a willingness to use naval power to achieve its geostrategic goals.

The PLA Navy currently has 355 platforms, including aircraft carriers, surface combatants and long-range submarines. While it is likely to initially concentrate most of its forces in the first island chain close to the Chinese mainland, it would be capable of attacking shipping lanes with long-range missiles or submarines. Any significant interruption to Australia’s supply chains and exports would have devastating consequences. The potential effects of a maritime blockade are highlighted by the disastrous economic impacts of Russia’s blockade of Ukraine. Maritime coordination with Indian and Japanese forces alongside the US will be required to help defend the Indo-Pacific shipping lanes should they be threatened.

The recent increase in the naval presence of the UK and France in the Indo-Pacific is, to a large degree, intended to protect regional shipping lanes in the face of increased Chinese grey-zone activities in the South China Sea. Consequently, the Five Power Defence Arrangements may bring renewed importance and relevance to Radford–Collins. The FPDA has also remained useful in encouraging multilateral naval exercises, as has the Quad.

The development the Quad is a welcome step in the protection of the global rules-based order. All four powers are committed to ensuring freedom of navigation through international waters and that commerce flows are free from coercive forces. It remains a strategic forum, but the Quad has also been useful in encouraging greater partner cooperation as highlighted by the Malabar exercises.

Despite improved collaboration, the Quad partners are spread across two large oceans and have divergent views on some security issues. This includes some Indian divisions over the long-term implications of AUKUS. However, major Indian defence think tanks have produced mostly favourable pieces on AUKUS, as have Japanese think tanks. While there are some national differences, there’s a joint commitment within the Quad to protect the global rules-based order, and a multilateral Radford–Collins agreement could support its mission. Ultimately, the Quad offers an opportunity for regular joint ‘naval cooperation and guidance for shipping’ operations, which can help boost cooperation in protecting the merchant marine.

The Australian and US navies are already regular participants in multilateral merchant marine protection exercises like the Bell Buoy series. There are also useful international forums like the Pacific Indian Ocean Shipping Working Group. Japan and India do not participate in the Bell Buoy exercises or the working group.

The increased importance of the Malabar exercise and the Quad’s establishment of the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness signal a clear desire to collaborate in the defence of regional shipping lanes against the possibility of Chinese aggression. Radford–Collins was created to establish lines of maritime responsibility, cooperation and communication in the face of a common threat. By formulating a modernised, Quad version of the agreement, the partners can clearly delineate areas of maritime responsibility and formalise common naval communications and procedures in the event of war. Ultimately, a new Radford–Collins agreement would help Australia and its allies refine their joint administrative, capability and operational planning in the Indo-Pacific, bringing a degree of certainty during such uncertain times.

There has been a discernible upturn in India–Australia defence ties in recent months, with increased interaction between the two maritime nations through bilateral and multilateral military exercises.

The maritime waters between Indonesia and northern Australia are an area of mutual interest to both countries, being a gateway to the Indian Ocean region. These drills have reaffirmed the shared objectives of an open, inclusive and rules-based Indo-Pacific region, an oblique reference to the threat of Chinese expansionism that has raised strategic challenges in the region.

Several such exercises have taken place in the wake of the June meeting in New Delhi between India’s Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and his Australian counterpart, Richard Marles. Defence and security are the main drivers of the India–Australia comprehensive strategic partnership, based on ‘mutual trust and understanding, shared values, and common interests, of democracy and rule of law’.

During a series of high-level visits in April, the chiefs of the Australian army and navy visited India, leading Australia’s high commissioner to India, Barry O’Farrell, to remark that joint defence activities had experienced a ‘near four-fold increase’ since 2014.

Within a month of the defence ministers’ summit, the Indian Navy and Royal Australian Navy reasserted their strong navy-to-navy links and interoperability by conducting their Maritime Partnership Exercise off Perth on 19 and 20 August. Indian-built offshore patrol vessel INS Sumedha joined HMAS Anzac to conduct cross-deck landing of helicopters, tactical manoeuvres and a farewell steam-past.

The exercise was also in consonance with the joint guidance provided by the chiefs of the two countries’ navies in August 2021.

From 19 August to 8 September, more than 100 personnel from the Indian Air Force, flying four Russian Sukhoi-30MKI fighters and two Boeing C-17 Globemaster military-transport aircraft, were among 2,500 military personnel from 17 air forces that participated in Exercise Pitch Black 2022, the Royal Australian Air Force’s capstone biennial engagement with key strategic partners. Back after a hiatus of four years on account of Covid-19, this mammoth exercise was conducted from the RAAF bases at Darwin, Tindal and Amberley, and featured a range of realistic and simulated complex aerial scenarios involving large formations.

Four days after the end of Pitch Black, the RAN, supported by the RAAF, hosted its other flagship biennial exercise, Kakadu 2022, ashore in Darwin and in the waters off northern Australia. The 12-day exercise has grown in size and complexity since its inception in 1993, and this time involved ships and maritime aircraft from 14 navies. India participated with a Boeing P-8I maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft, and the indigenously designed and built 6,000-tonne guided-missile stealth frigate, INS Satpura.

‘Exercise Kakadu is our navy’s most significant international engagement activity and is vital for building relationships between participating countries,’ said RAN chief Vice Admiral Mark Hammond.

In April, P-8 aircraft from both countries conducted coordinated anti-submarine warfare and surface surveillance operations. A team from the Indian Navy’s maritime patrol squadron, Albatross, engaged with its counterparts from the RAAF’s 92 Wing.

This engagement coincided with the 14th India–Australia navy-to-navy staff talks over three days, where the deputy chief of the RAN, Rear Admiral Christopher Smith, and Rear Admiral J. Singh, an assistant chief of India’s naval staff, acknowledged the two countries’ growing cooperation amid emerging challenges on the maritime front. The talks were held under the framework of the 2021 joint guidance for the India–Australia navy-to-navy relationship, the first such document signed by the Indian Navy with any country.

That was also the time the two nations held the fourth iteration of their biennial naval exercise AUSINDEX in Australia. Commenced in 2015, the exercise has grown in complexity and spans complex surface, subsurface and air operations between ships, submarines, helicopters and long-range maritime patrol aircraft of both countries.

Australia has been a late entrant to the annual Malabar exercise, which had started in 1992 as a bilateral drill between the Indian and US navies in the Indian Ocean. Japan became a permanent member in 2015 and Australia, in 2020, making Malabar a pivotal operation involving the four Quad countries.

In September, the Quad foreign ministers reaffirmed their commitment to oppose any unilateral actions that seek to change the status quo in the Indo-Pacific.

These four powerful navies will be holding Malabar exercises off Yokosuka in Japan from 8 to 18 November. The US Navy has a base in Yokosuka that is currently the home port to Carrier Strike Group 5, led by USS Ronald Reagan. The advanced exercises will involve live firing and war-gaming manoeuvres. The RAN participated once in Malabar in the past, in 2007, when the Republic of Singapore Navy also participated.

And in its first large-scale multilateral exercise this year, the RAN deployed HMAS Arunta to the 11th edition of India’s largest multinational exercise, Milan 2022, which was themed ‘Camaraderie, cohesion and collaboration’. The biennial exercise was held in March in the port of Visakhapatnam and in the Bay of Bengal, and drew together 26 ships, one submarine and 21 aircraft from 16 navies from across the Indo-Pacific.

Visakhapatnam will be a port of call—at the end of this month—for Indo-Pacific Endeavour 2022, a key regional engagement activity of Australia that runs across Southeast Asia and the northeast Indian Ocean from September to November. These engagements with a record 14 countries will be supported by a Maritime Task Unit of RAN ships and embarked Australian Army members, as well as RAAF air mobility aircraft for fly-in, fly-out engagements, totalling 1,800 personnel, five ships and 11 helicopters. The centrepiece of the task group will be the Canberra-class landing helicopter dock HMAS Adelaide.

Indo-Pacific Endeavour began in 2017 as an annual activity to deliver on the promise of the 2016 defence white paper to strengthen Australia’s engagement and partnerships with regional security forces.

There will also shortly be a meeting in Australia of the India–Australia Joint Working Group on Defence Research and Materiel Cooperation. The group will probe further opportunities for bilateral industrial cooperation to increase the resilience of supply chains and deliver capabilities to their respective defence forces. India will also be offering niche opportunities to Australian defence firms.

Both partner countries have also set up programs for facilitating the exchange of young officers from their armed forces for joint training and military-to-military exposure.