The condolence messages were immediate and unqualified. Hours and days after the horrific 22 April attack at Pahalgam in India – where terrorists based and trained in Pakistan, according to Indian police, targeted Hindu men and killed 26 – world leaders rushed to offer sympathy and support to India. Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said “we stand with India,” a sentiment also shared by US President Donald Trump. They did not call for Indian restraint – instead, they offered their unqualified support. But what form of support could partners such as Australia and the United States provide?
The United States obviously has the most to offer. It could use some of its formidable intelligence capabilities to help hunt for the attack perpetrators and their networks, support Indian military operations, or warn of counter-attacks. It also has a wider suite of policy levers, including economic coercion, to extract Pakistani concessions on its backing of terrorists.
Australia’s potential support is necessarily more modest and indirect. But it does have interests in upholding regional security and cultivating a deeper security partnership with India. The developing post-Pahalgam crisis offers Australia an opportunity to demonstrate its seriousness on both counts – for example by assuming greater responsibility for maritime surveillance in the Indian Ocean.
Blinded by the fight
India’s government instantly blamed Pakistan and placed its military on higher alert – probably in preparation for a punitive strike on Pakistan, but also in anticipation of a wider tit-for-tat cycle of violence that could spread across ground, air, and sea domains. Such preparations demand a higher tempo of operations and the need to concentrate required forces. Some critical capabilities, such as India’s fleet of P-8I intelligence-gathering aircraft, will be key enablers of Indian operations, but are scarce enough that any high-intensity operations will stretch them thin.
The growing Chinese presence already gives Australia and India a powerful incentive to cooperate more, but the latest India-Pakistan crisis adds an urgent new reason.
India’s P-8Is are a modified version of the P-8As that Australia and the United States operate. They are most commonly used as maritime patrol aircraft – indeed, in India they are operated by the Navy, not the Air Force, as they are in Australia – because they are especially valuable in finding and tracking submarines. But their suite of on-board sensors are just as valuable in detecting and understanding adversary forces on land. Indeed, India has repeatedly used its P-8Is to monitor Chinese forces on their disputed land border in the high Himalayas. It even used them to monitor Pakistani forces the last time a terrorist attack triggered an Indian punitive strike in 2019.
India has a fleet of 12 P-8Is – not all of which would be available to fly at any given time – and has identified a need for more. It may require a sizeable proportion of the available aircraft to maintain round-the-clock surveillance of Pakistani ground and naval forces, especially as preparations for an Indian strike develop, and especially if the crisis then escalates into open conflict.
This could sharply reduce the number of Indian P-8Is available for other missions that it commonly undertakes in peacetime. In particular, India will likely have less capacity to monitor the waters of the Indian Ocean, which its P-8Is routinely do. The demands of a military confrontation to India’s west, and the scarcity of state-of-the-art surveillance planes, means India risks losing some visibility its south. Australia can and should step in.
Share the burden
Both Australia and India have good reason to be suspicious of Chinese naval and associated activity in the Indian Ocean. In February-March, a Chinese navy task group circumnavigated Australia in a show of force, and in April a dual use research vessel skirted Australian waters before loitering suspiciously off Western Australia. Those high-profile episodes are part of a longer trend of growing Chinese naval deployments and research vessel activity in the Indian Ocean. Alongside an expanding network of civilian and military ports, they suggest a clear Chinese commitment to sustain a larger naval presence there in the near future.
Australia and India already cooperate to watch over these waters, albeit on an ad hoc basis, including through coordinated P-8 operations. The growing Chinese presence already gives them a powerful incentive to cooperate more, but the latest India-Pakistan crisis adds an urgent new reason. Australia operates twelve P-8As that could be deployed at higher tempo to maintain persistent surveillance in the Indian Ocean, if India needs to re-task its P-8Is to the Pakistan contingency.
Australia assuming a greater share of the burden for Indian Ocean surveillance makes strategic sense for both countries. The Indian Navy has traditionally been “weighted west,” with more combat power concentrated in the western Indian Ocean, in part precisely because of the prospect of conflict with Pakistan. Australia, meanwhile, has formally declared the northeast Indian Ocean as part of its “primary area of military interest.” By offering to backfill Indian operations in the eastern Indian Ocean, the two countries could gain valuable experience in making operational coordination and information-sharing more routine. This would help to ensure that the latest crisis does not create surveillance blind-spots that China could exploit while India is focused on the contingency. And perhaps most importantly, it would help to hone processes and build trust between India and Australia, standing as an inflection point of closer military cooperation.
