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The United States has bluntly signaled a deprioritization of the Indian Ocean at a peculiar time. The reversion of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command to its former name, U.S. Pacific Command, signifies no material change in force posture or organizational responsibilities, but it unavoidably signals less focus on the Indian Ocean, presumably in favor of its consistent top priority in the western Pacific, although it’s not clear anyone really knows.
The recent closure and persistent uncertainty over the Strait of Hormuz have underscored the fragility of international shipping lanes that traverse the ocean, especially in Asia, where most countries relied on oil shipped through the strait. And China’s economic, diplomatic, and military presence in the region continues to grow inexorably. These mounting challenges should suggest increasing — not decreasing — attention to maritime security in the Indian Ocean.
Indeed, in recent years, the United States and its like-minded partners, Australia and India, appeared to recognize the need for closer military cooperation. They have erected and are developing a series of bilateral defense agreements, including the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement, the Military Logistics Support Agreement, and the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement. This reflects a broader global trend in which defense cooperation agreements have proliferated. Yet agreements alone do not guarantee that militaries can operate together effectively in a crisis.
These arrangements are necessary but not sufficient to support combined military operations during a crisis in the Indian Ocean. In a multi-day matrix game involving former senior military and defense officials, participants repeatedly encountered institutional frictions that delayed coalition action despite the existence of extensive defense agreements. Three shortcomings proved particularly important: insufficiently delegated authorities for operational decision-making, communications arrangements that were untested under crisis conditions, and the absence of routine operational interaction. Unsurprisingly, these coordination challenges were most acute with non-allied India, which also had the added challenge of locating significant defense decision-making authorities in its Ministry of External Affairs. Rather than a shortage of agreements, these institutional constraints proved the principal impediments to timely coalition operations.
The next phase of defense cooperation in the Indian Ocean should therefore focus on strengthening the enabling foundations of military cooperation: delegated authorities, crisis communications, and routine operational interaction.
Our matrix game involved nine former senior military and defense officials from Australia, India, the United States, and Japan. The game examined two crisis scenarios in the Indian Ocean to “stress-test” the “enabling foundations” of military cooperation — that is, the capabilities and arrangements that allow partners to operationalize military cooperation.
Matrix games are now a well-established form of simulation. They use open-ended, competitive storytelling to examine how experienced practitioners assess options, constraints, and trade-offs in complex scenarios. The benefit lies in their iterative narrative structure, which allows participants to develop and contest competing stories about how a crisis might unfold by justifying proposed actions and explaining the institutional, legal, and operational constraints that shape their decisions. As the scenario evolves, each development creates new challenges and decisions for participants. The goal of such games is not to produce repeatable numerical outcomes regarding relative capabilities or strategies — it is, rather, to uncover the actors’ preferences and constraints. These games can generate “unexpected insights” by testing assumptions that may not emerge through other wargaming methods.
Our matrix game confirmed that some important foundations for cooperation already exist but also revealed vulnerabilities that could impede coordination during a fast-moving contingency. As the game players have extensive experience within their respective military and defense establishments, the frictions identified across the scenarios can be said to reflect the opportunities and constraints facing decision-makers of the United States, India, and Australia in a crisis. The findings, therefore, should not be understood as “proof” of capability shortfalls, but as evidence of authentic perceptions among experienced practitioners about where existing arrangements may not be sufficient to support coalition missions.
Through the discussions that occurred in each scenario, we found that effective military cooperation requires not only formal agreements, but also clear mandates, regular operational engagement, and repeated opportunities to stress-test arrangements through practice before a crisis occurs.
Cooperation depends on whether agreements have been translated into routine staff interactions, delegated authorities, secure communications, and practiced operational procedures. Without these enabling foundations, even close partners can struggle to coordinate when speed and integration matter most. From this, we developed three broad recommendations: delegate authorities, build operational relationships, and continuously test the system.
The first priority should be to align and expand the authorities available to partner defense establishments so they can coordinate and execute coalition operations at the speed required during crises. National decision cycles and execution are impeded when defense establishments lack the necessary authorities to act. Our game demonstrated that partner militaries’ lack of delegated authorities created inefficiencies and delays in operational coordination.
This problem is rooted in the legal authorities vested in each military. In Australia and the United States, the defense establishments are statutorily empowered to manage foreign military relationships. In India, by cabinet regulations, the Ministry of External Affairs has authority over all matters relating to foreign affairs, including military cooperation. In the game, operational headquarters in India, especially, needed to seek approval from the Ministry of External Affairs for even some operational-level decisions, including sharing limited data — far below the threshold of targeting data — on dark shipping.
To be sure, the Ministry of External Affairs is the custodian of India’s vaunted policy of strategic autonomy, so it would naturally be guarded about any new foreign commitments. However, the problem of inter-agency authorities highlighted by the game was not matters of policy — they were, rather, the operational interpretation and execution — authorities which rest with the defense establishments in Australia and the United States. The game’s findings are consistent with real-world examples of Indian diplomats providing guidance or authority for operational matters. During the 2020 border crisis, for example, Indian forces required a cabinet-level decision to change their rules of engagement to use firearms in self-defense. During that same crisis, India and China established three channels of crisis talks, and as tensions escalated, Indian diplomats began to attend the military-to-military channel designed to implement political decisions.
Yet, setting aside any normative judgment, the game’s finding was the asymmetry of authorities that each partner’s defense establishment enjoys. The United States also has its own impediments in terms of authorities to share information. For example, sharing information requires a cumbersome foreign disclosure process, made worse by a culture that disincentivizes sharing. The seam between the Pacific Command and Central Command areas of responsibility means that the United States would face a coordination challenge in the event of a crisis that spans both the western and eastern Indian Ocean.
This finding aligns with broader critiques of U.S. command arrangements in the Indian Ocean. Analysts have argued that dividing the region among Pacific Command, Central Command, and Africa Command complicates the development of a unified U.S. strategy for the Indian Ocean as a single strategic theater. Our exercise suggests that these strategic seams have operational consequences, creating additional coordination challenges for coalition operations during fast-moving crises.
In the game, countries made strategic gains when their operational plans were well-integrated and quickly executed. In one scenario, China quickly gained the initiative and posed problems for Australia and its partners simply by acting first. In the game, China’s more centralized decision-making structures enabled it to act more quickly than the coalition of partners.
What can be done to streamline relevant authorities in partner countries? Often, it would be a matter of cabinet-level decisions to empower the defense ministries with a mandate to execute a campaign of engagement rather than statutory revision. The recent maritime security collaboration roadmap between Australia and India, for example, provides exactly this form of covering authority for a series of future engagements. A broad mandate, which covers the unpredictable requirements of crisis decision-making rather than the deliberate policies and plans of peacetime defense engagement, would be especially useful.
A mechanism for such a broader, unspecified mandate could involve the establishment of a multilateral defense consultative mechanism — at either the senior official or ministerial level — among Australia, India, the United States, and Japan. All these countries already have a series of bilateral defense policy talks, but bringing them together in a multilateral forum would enable broader synchronization. Such a mechanism could provide a forcing function for accountable action in each country’s defense establishment, allowing ministries and military services to plan and prepare without constant reference to other agencies.
Establishing such a process in peacetime would enable multilateral coordination for the rational development of all of these enabling foundations, backed by a regular pattern of official and Track 2 tabletop exercises. It would be faster and more streamlined than coordination through a range of bilateral 2+2 meetings and would have more direct salience over military activities than the Quad Foreign Ministers’ Meetings.
As other studies have also demonstrated, effective military cooperation depends on partners being able to exchange classified information rapidly and securely, particularly during a crisis when decisions must be made under significant time pressure. This depends on a range of mechanisms and processes, from secure, multi-point communications between individual platforms and operational headquarters to standard operating procedures for the rapid foreign disclosure of classified information.
Yet our game found that the existence of agreements does not necessarily translate into effective operational cooperation. The three partners currently lack secure communication pathways and established routines of cooperation at multiple levels, from individual platforms to operational headquarters. Some existing lines of communication between partners’ headquarters appear to be latent and not routinely used. In particular, while Australia and the United States routinely share highly classified data seamlessly, they encounter friction when sharing information or coordinating operations with India, reflecting the relative absence of routine staff interaction with the non-allied partner.
This finding is consistent with recent assessments of Australia-India-U.S. maritime and undersea domain awareness cooperation, which conclude that existing information-sharing arrangements remain largely ad hoc and inconsistent.
Ultimately, agreements are necessary but not sufficient for enabling good communication in crisis. They provide the legal and policy framework for intelligence and logistics sharing, but they do not create the organizational habits that make cooperation effective under pressure. As one participant observed, “signed paper doesn’t put jets in the air.”
The three partner countries need to focus on using existing arrangements more consistently during peacetime. Regular use and routinized coordination would familiarize personnel with counterpart systems, structures, and personnel and provide an opportunity to troubleshoot implementation problems before crisis strikes.
First, partner countries should identify whether existing agreements require supplementary arrangements. They should seek to discover if the agreements, such as the Military Logistics Support Agreement, have actually eased the administrative burden and time lags that previously encumbered logistics sharing. This process should also test existing mechanisms for information sharing and establish reliable communication and coordination pathways between operational headquarters.
Second, testing should be accompanied by routine operational interaction. The goal should be to establish new routines of contact, such that interaction with counterparts is a regular part of staff processes, rather than episodic or latent potential. The level of staff interaction between Australia and the United States is already very high, but there is room for improvement between these countries and India. The experience of Australia and Japan illustrates how rapidly military cooperation can deepen through sustained institutional contact.
Staff interaction should occur across multiple echelons and functional areas, recognizing that no single point of contact can effectively coordinate every aspect of coalition activity. Operational headquarters should establish regular contact outside formal exercises — for example, through periodic staff discussions, leave-behind personnel following major exercises, or eventually, rotational liaison staff, to develop communication pathways that can be relied upon during crises. In the Philippines, for example, U.S. forces maintain a high “heel-to-toe” tempo of exercises, amounting to a de facto rotational presence there. Over time, this could evolve into a rotational staff presence at counterpart headquarters.
Third, exercises should increasingly be used to stress-test coalition procedures rather than simply build familiarity.
Frequent and mutually supporting official and Track 2 tabletop exercises that bridge the operational and strategic levels provide opportunities to test assumptions, identify vulnerabilities, and refine plans before a crisis occurs. As one game participant argued, “I don’t think you can ever have too many tabletops.”
Over time, this program of combined tabletop exercises could evolve into the phased sharing of standard operating procedures and even contingency plans. More demanding iterations of Exercise Malabar should combine more capabilities across more domains to train more realistically by bridging operational and strategic levels, including, at minimum, forces responsible for information operations and the cyber and space domains.
Rapid and efficient cooperation in crisis or conflict depends on mechanisms that have already been tested, refined, and routinely used in peacetime. Research demonstrates that performance in crisis depends heavily on habits and routines developed in peacetime. Field training exercises alone are unlikely to provide the type of routines and regular engagement necessary for effective crisis cooperation. While exercises are important for building trust and familiarity, they are episodic and bounded events that require lengthy preparation before a brief period of cooperation. Once they conclude, staffs typically revert to normal peacetime practices.
Australia, India, and the United States need to operationalize the agreements they already have by delegating operational authorities, institutionalizing routine interaction, and continuously testing interoperability during peacetime. Ultimately, the challenge for Australia, India, and the United States in the Indian Ocean is whether they can translate a growing network of agreements into the habits, authorities, and routines necessary to act together when a crisis arrives.
Professor Rebecca Strating is the director of the La Trobe Centre for Global Security at La Trobe University, Melbourne. Her research focuses on Asian regional security, maritime disputes, and Australian foreign and defense policy.
Dr. Arzan Tarapore is a research scholar at Stanford University. His research focuses on military strategy, Indian defense policy, and Indo-Pacific security.
This article is part of a research project on “Enhancing Military Cooperation on the Indian Ocean” conducted by Peter Dean, Ambika Vishwanath, Hannah Bourke, and the authors, funded by Australia’s Department of Defence.
Image: U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons
