Abstract
Between 14 and 26 March 2026, Indian warships met Indian-flagged energy carriers emerging from a contested Strait of Hormuz and shepherded them into the northern Arabian Sea. The operation was executed within a fortnight of the strait’s effective closure, in a theatre some two thousand kilometres from Indian shores, alongside the largest voluntary repatriation India has managed in three decades. That such a response was possible at all is the subject of this paper. The prevailing account of India’s West Asia policy treats joint exercises with Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia as ceremonial reassurance, the diplomatic furniture of a relationship whose substance lies in energy and remittances. This paper argues the opposite: that the exercise programme, the access arrangements and the multilateral command appointments accumulated over three decades constitute an operational architecture, and that the 2026 crisis was the first occasion on which that architecture was drawn down rather than displayed. Reading the record through the literature on defence diplomacy and through the Indian military’s own developing vocabulary of jointness, it reconstructs how bilateral exercises, port access at Duqm, command of a Combined Maritime Forces task force and a whole-of-government evacuation machinery are converted into deployable capability under fire. It then identifies three fragilities that condition the model’s durability: an incomplete jointness reform at home, an asymmetry of reciprocity abroad, and a political ceiling on what defence diplomacy in a fragmented region can be asked to deliver. Six recommendations follow, directed at the tri-service and defence-policy community.
Keywords
Defence Diplomacy, Jointness, Interoperability, Operation Sankalp, Operation Urja Suraksha, Combined Task Force 154, Duqm, Information Fusion Centre-Indian Ocean Region, Theatreisation, Atmanirbhar Guardrail, West Asia.
