Navy gung-ho about war games

NEW DELHI: The five-nation naval war games in the Bay of Bengal, which concluded last Sunday, may not revert to the bilateral Indo-US format the next time. The exercises, called the Malabar series, are likely to at least have Japan as an additional invitee in future.

Military sources said that the exercises, which were originally held once a year, might continue to maintain the “periodicity” currently achieved. In the past six months there have been two Malabar exercises.

The recent six-day event, which brought together warships from Singapore and Australia apart from Japan and the US, was conducted in a standard communications format to enable joint operations with various navies. The Left in India has been angered by these exercises, which, it felt, were targeted at China.

The war games provided the Indian Navy with a complex setting, with three aircraft carriers, including two mammoth ones from the US, nuclear submarines, and scores of aircraft operating in concentration.

Though the navy was officially silent on the Malabar exercises, sources indicated that the series will stay multilateral. In effect, the just concluded multilateral version may not be “an exception”. The navy may, however, not make any permanent commitment on the countries that will take part in future, and the combination could change “according to the location and time”. #

A senior source in the defence ministry indicated that Japan could be a permanent invitee to the exercises. The Indian Navy had mooted such a proposal after the India-US-Japan naval exercise of April 16 off Tokyo Bay this year.

That trilateral exercise had taken place just after the Indo-US bilateral Malabar exercise between April 6 and 11 off Okinawa.

The just-ended exercises, the 13th in the Malabar round, were the most complex, both in terms of the foreign participation and the kind of exercises attempted. Navy sources said forces from the five participants engaged in combined anti-submarine searches, dissimilar aircraft combat tactics and other scenarios uniquely possible only in such a setting.

During the exercise, the forces also worked together on issues like ‘opposed transit’, a situation where a ship has to pass through an area where enemy aircraft are threatening it, and landing fighters and copters on the decks of ships belonging to other countries. Besides, they staged mock war exercises, and complex alliances to take on dissimilar combinations of aircraft, ships and submarines.

All these, sources said, were “a big step” forward in improving “inter-operability” with the other navies. Given the level of complexity achieved, the thinking is that multilateral exercises may make more sense. “To conduct a bilateral exercise after reaching a certain level of sophistication is a great strain on our resources without much gain,” a source argued. Malabar, he pointed out, is the most sophisticated military exercises #India conducts with any country.