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India Gives Navy Control of Andaman and Nicobar Command
NEW DELHI — To shore up its Andaman and Nicobar Command, India has given control of the command to the Navy alone rather than continuing the current practice of rotating control among the Air Force, Army and Navy.
The Indian Ministry of Defence decided that giving control to the Navy would help strengthen the command, a Navy official said.
The command was created to observe Chinese activity in the Indian Ocean and to function as a base for future littoral warfare.
The command is functioning at a low level and includes troops and officers from all three services, the Navy official said.
Russian-made Su-30MKI fighter aircraft have been placed in the command, and there are plans to increase the number of operational airfields on the island, as well as stationing an unspecified number of submarines.
The Andaman and Nicobar islands comprise 572 islands that lie less than 100 kilometers from the Indonesian coast. A joint command was established there in 2001 to boost India’s ability to rapidly deploy troops in the region.
While the command is intended to bolster defenses against China, analysts say, it also will prepare for littoral warfare due to its strategic location. The Andaman and Nicobar islands straddle the strategic seaway leading to the Malacca straits. These islands are near a number of littoral states in the Bay of Bengal and stretching to the Indian Ocean.
The ultimate role of the Andaman and Nicobar Command will be overseeing Indian interests in the Indian Ocean region, said Rahul Bhonsle, retired Indian Army brigadier and defense analyst.
“The role of this command would firstly be essential in providing a sort of springboard to strengthen India’s look-east policy. Secondly, to set an example for the viability of creation of future integrated commands. Thirdly, enable India to ensure and enhance the security of the region in the eastern part of the Indian Ocean region.”
The Indian Navy plans to position its latest P8I long-range reconnaissance aircraft in the Andaman and Nicobar islands to intensify its surveillance measures in the Indian Ocean region and beyond.
India purchased eight P8I aircraft from the USA in a $2.1-billion deal and negotiations are on to buy four more. Six of these aircraft have already arrived at the naval base INS Rajali at Arakonam on the Tamil Nadu coast. The remaining two would come next year.
In 2012, the Navy commissioned INS Baaz – India’s eastern-most air station in the Campbell Bay. Dornier and islander aircraft now take off from its 3,500 ft runway. The Navy plans to extend the runway length to 6,000 ft so that P8Is can be flown from that station.
The Indian Ministry of Defence decided that giving control to the Navy would help strengthen the command, a Navy official said.
The command was created to observe Chinese activity in the Indian Ocean and to function as a base for future littoral warfare.
The command is functioning at a low level and includes troops and officers from all three services, the Navy official said.
Russian-made Su-30MKI fighter aircraft have been placed in the command, and there are plans to increase the number of operational airfields on the island, as well as stationing an unspecified number of submarines.
The Andaman and Nicobar islands comprise 572 islands that lie less than 100 kilometers from the Indonesian coast. A joint command was established there in 2001 to boost India’s ability to rapidly deploy troops in the region.
While the command is intended to bolster defenses against China, analysts say, it also will prepare for littoral warfare due to its strategic location. The Andaman and Nicobar islands straddle the strategic seaway leading to the Malacca straits. These islands are near a number of littoral states in the Bay of Bengal and stretching to the Indian Ocean.
The ultimate role of the Andaman and Nicobar Command will be overseeing Indian interests in the Indian Ocean region, said Rahul Bhonsle, retired Indian Army brigadier and defense analyst.
“The role of this command would firstly be essential in providing a sort of springboard to strengthen India’s look-east policy. Secondly, to set an example for the viability of creation of future integrated commands. Thirdly, enable India to ensure and enhance the security of the region in the eastern part of the Indian Ocean region.”
The Indian Navy plans to position its latest P8I long-range reconnaissance aircraft in the Andaman and Nicobar islands to intensify its surveillance measures in the Indian Ocean region and beyond.
India purchased eight P8I aircraft from the USA in a $2.1-billion deal and negotiations are on to buy four more. Six of these aircraft have already arrived at the naval base INS Rajali at Arakonam on the Tamil Nadu coast. The remaining two would come next year.
In 2012, the Navy commissioned INS Baaz – India’s eastern-most air station in the Campbell Bay. Dornier and islander aircraft now take off from its 3,500 ft runway. The Navy plans to extend the runway length to 6,000 ft so that P8Is can be flown from that station.
Andaman and Nicobar Islands: India’s Strategic Outpost
Flight MH370 has put the spotlight on little known but strategically important territory.
By Jeff M. Smith
Flight MH370 has put the spotlight on little known but strategically important territory.
By Jeff M. Smith
Missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 has acquainted the world with a long-forgotten corner of the Indian Ocean: the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (ANI). Known to few outside India, the island chain constitutes a valuable geopolitical asset for that country and is positioned to play a pivotal role in any maritime competition between India and China in the 21st century. In December 2012, I traveled to the ANI to conduct research for my new book, Cold Peace: China-India Rivalry in the 21st Century. Here’s what I found.
A distant and long-neglected sentinel outpost in the eastern Indian Ocean, the ANI are a chain of 572 islands (slightly more than 30 of which are inhabited) with a majority-Hindu population numbering just under 400,000. The most remarkable feature of the islands is their location: stretching over 500 miles north to south at the western entrance of the Strait of Malacca, they straddle one of the most critical naval and trade chokepoints in the world.
Some have likened the ANI to America’s Indian Ocean military outpost at Diego Garcia. However, the comparison is inadequate; though host to far more modest military capabilities, the ANI are in a far more valuable location, are 200 times the size of Diego Garcia, and enjoy a more solid foundation of volcanic soil than the British-owned coral atoll. Covered in thick tropical vegetation and host to India’s only active volcano, the ANI constitute just 0.2 percent of India’s landmass but provide for 30 percent (600,000 sq kms) of the country’s 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ).
The islands occupied a marginal position in India’s strategic consciousness until October 2001, when Delhi established a new Andaman and Nicobar Command (ANC) in the local capital, Port Blair. The ANC is India’s first and only joint tri-service command, with rotating three-star commanders-in-chief from the Army, Navy and Air Force reporting directly to the chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee.
Today the command serves as the focal point for Indian engagement with regional navies in Southeast Asia. This includes bi-annual coordinated patrols with the navies of Thailand and Indonesia, the annual SIMBEX maritime exercises with Singapore, and the biennial Milan multilateral naval exercises.
The ANC’s jurisdiction is limited to the islands’ exclusive economic zone, with no formal responsibility for the South China Sea. Its tasks include maritime surveillance, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, as well as suppressing gun running, narcotics smuggling, piracy, and poaching in India’s EEZ. However, Sainik Samachar, a magazine published by the Indian Ministry of Defense, notes the ANC’s mandate also includes “ensuring that the eastern approaches to the Indian Ocean comprising the three straits – Malacca, Lombok and Sunda – remain free from threats for shipping” as well as “monitor[ing] ships passing through the Six Degree and Ten Degree Channels.”
This last responsibility is critical, as the ANI enjoy domain over two channels west of the Strait of Malacca that play host to the world’s most important shipping lanes. The vast majority of international trade transiting the Strait of Malacca passes through the 200-kilometer-wide Six Degree Channel between the Indonesian island of Aceh and Great Nicobar, home to the Indian Navy’s newest air base. This means the bulk of container traffic through the Strait of Malacca also passes through India’s EEZ. To the north the 150-kilometer-wide Ten Degree Channel separates the Nicobar Islands from the Andaman Islands and is used by a much smaller volume of ships bound for the Bay of Bengal.
With such premier real estate, Western observers might expect the ANI to be a cornerstone in India’s maritime strategy; a firewall against threats to the east and a power-projection platform serving India’s interests in the Pacific. And yet, by all accounts the ANC is only modestly equipped militarily.
Force-levels on the islands have remained largely static since the tri-service command was established in October 2001. The ANC hosts just one infantry brigade, around 15 small warships – mostly amphibious landing ship tanks and small landing craft – and a handful of Dornier-228 maritime patrol aircraft, as well as Mi-8 and Chetak helicopters. The command has no unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), despite requests from ANC commanders for Israeli-origin Heron UAVs. Reports suggest two Indian Navy warships are regularly deployed to patrol the northern and southern islands and in January 2013 the Indian Navy commissioned its largest offshore patrol vessel at the ANC for maritime surveillance and patrolling.
Port Blair, which began as a penal colony, was long shunned by the Indian military hierarchy as a desolate outpost. Delhi has not “outlined a bold geo-economic vision for the island chain,” says Indian analyst C. Raja Mohan which “can no longer be neglected as a group of islands suitable at best for the transportation of criminals and political offenders.”
Other Indian strategists have begun calling for a greater utilization of the ANC. Retired Indian Air Marshal Dhiraj Kukreja says India needs to “grow out of its earlier thinking” and “develop the islands as a hub or ‘spring board’” for power projection in the region. Others in the military establishment see the ANC as a “trump card” against China, ideally positioned to interdict Chinese oil supplies from the Gulf and Africa in any potential Sino-Indian confrontation. Some 80 percent of China’s oil imports currently pass through the Strait of Malacca. Retired Rear Admiral Raja Menon argues: “Today they are merely SLOCS [Sea Lines of Communication]; tomorrow they will be the Chinese Jugular…. [$10 billion] spent on strengthening the Indian Navy’s SLOC interdiction capability would have given us a stranglehold on the Chinese routes into the Indian Ocean.”
Such statements tend to underestimate the practical challenges associated with any single country attempting to “cut off” China’s oil supplies, even one as favorably positioned as India. The only conditions under which an operation to “cut” China’s SLOCs would likely be effective – and where the ANI could be adequately leveraged – would be in the event of a large-scale, multi-country conflict with the Indian Navy operating in conjunction with the U.S. Navy, the littoral states in the Strait of Malacca, and others.
That doesn’t mean India cannot or should not further develop the ANI as a strategic asset. As it finally begins to add strategic substance to the Look East Policy it adopted in 1991, India is conducting increasingly sophisticated and numerous military exercises with the U.S.-allied countries of the Western Pacific, transforming its once-dormant relationships with Japan and Australia, searching for energy off the coast of Vietnam, and working to ensure freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.
With its capabilities more fully developed, the ANI could help India monitor military and commercial traffic passing between the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific. They could provide India a forward position from which to serve its growing economic, political, and military interests in East Asia, and further position India as the “gatekeeper” of the Indian Ocean. At a time the People’s Liberation Army Navy is increasingly active in the Indian Ocean – including the recent deployment of its first nuclear submarine to the area – the timing is ripe.
Jeff M. Smith is the Director of South Asia Programs and Kraemer Strategy Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC. This article was drawn from excerpts from his new book,
Cold Peace: China-India Rivalry in the 21st Century
.
Navy plans to position new P8I recon aircraft in Andaman
Boeing P-8I of the Indian Navy
“After the runway extension, we would like to position some of the P8Is in the Andaman. It will be advantageous for us. However, it would not be a full-fledged base for the aircraft,” Navy Chief Admiral R K Dhowan told Deccan Herald on Wednesday. The US-origin aircraft has a range of 8,600 km and an endurance of 10 hours.
The planned move dovetails into the Navy’s future vision of expanding its reach beyond its traditional eastern limit at the Malacca Strait to protect national maritime interest. “We have the necessary assets,” he said.
He echoed the same line as his predecessor Admiral D K Joshi, who had stated that the Navy was prepared to protect the ONGC oil exploration vessels in the disputed South China Sea.
But Dhowan’s assertion assumes significance because it comes in the wake of a joint statement by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Barack Obama, in which they “expressed concern about rising tensions over maritime territorial disputes and affirmed the importance of safeguarding maritime security and ensuring freedom of navigation throughout the region, especially in the South China Sea.”
Dhowan said Navy’s operational readiness was at the highest as the time of patrolling at sea has increased by 50-75 per cent, when India’s naval presence was felt from Vladivostok to Australia to Hawaii and Persian Gulf. The aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya sailed non-stop from Russia to Mumbai.
Source:- India Gives Navy Control of Andaman and Nicobar Command | Defense News | defensenews.com
Navy plans to position new P8I recon aircraft in Andaman
Andaman and Nicobar Islands: India’s Strategic Outpost | The Diplomat
