For nearly six months now, one of the world’s most important stretches of water has been effectively shut. Since the last week of February 2026, when the United States and Israel launched strikes against Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and LNG normally passes, has been mined, patrolled by hostile small boats, and closed to shipping in fits and starts ever since. Iran’s conventional navy was, by the Pentagon’s own account, largely destroyed within days of the opening strikes. Yet Tehran has continued disrupting one of the busiest waterways on earth for months afterward, using mines, drone and missile strikes on tankers, small-boat harassment, and a toll regime imposed through a self-declared Persian Gulf Strait Authority. A US submarine sank an Iranian frigate off Sri Lanka in early March, pulling the confrontation into the Indian Ocean itself. Shipping through the strait fell by well over ninety per cent at points during the crisis, insurers have had to reprice marine war risk across the Gulf, and India’s Navy has spent the past several months running an active escort operation, Operation Urja Suraksha, to keep Indian-flagged and India-bound tankers moving safely through these waters.
What this crisis has demonstrated, starkly and in real time, is that a navy does not need to win a fleet action to achieve a strategic effect at sea. Iran’s ability to keep a major chokepoint disrupted for months with a navy the United States itself declared defeated is a lesson every maritime planner is now studying closely. Sea denial today is assembled from mines, drones, missiles, small boats, and economic coercion working together across domains, not from a single dominant platform. It is a case study in the kind of dispersed, multi-domain disruption a modern navy has to be built to both project and defend against.
This is the context in which the Indian Navy’s own doctrinal thinking has evolved. The Indian Navy released the Maritime Security Strategy 2026 at the Naval Commanders’ Conference in April, building on the Indian Maritime Doctrine of 2025, and both place multi-domain operations at their centre. The modern maritime battlespace, as it is now understood within the Service, stretches from the seabed to outer space, a dense and transparent grid in which naval operations are no longer a matter of ships and submarines alone but of satellites, unmanned systems, and networks working together. What follows is what Maritime Multi-Domain Operations, or Maritime MDO, actually means for a navy like ours.
Maritime MDO: Concept and Evolution
For most of naval history, the maritime domain meant the surface and, eventually, the water beneath it. A fleet action was won or lost by ships and submarines, with aircraft added on once carriers matured. That framing no longer holds. The sea is now a domain stitched together with space-based surveillance, undersea sensor networks, cyber infrastructure ashore, and the electromagnetic spectrum, all feeding a single operational picture that a commander uses to decide where and when to act.
Multi-domain operations, as a concept, grew out of the recognition that single-service, single-domain thinking cannot keep pace with an adversary who no longer respects those boundaries. A hostile actor today can degrade a fleet’s effectiveness without firing a shot at it, by blinding its satellites or disrupting its data links. Equally, as the Strait of Hormuz has shown, a weaker actor can achieve outsized strategic effect by combining a handful of cheap tools, mines, small boats, and drones, across a chokepoint the world’s most powerful navies cannot fully secure. Maritime MDO is the Navy’s answer to both sides of that reality: treating the sea, air, land, space, cyber, and cognitive domains as one continuous battlespace, and building the capacity to shift effect from any one to any other, at speed.
The doctrinal groundwork has been laid steadily rather than suddenly. The Indian Maritime Doctrine of 2025 formalised a persistent ‘No War No Peace’ condition, in which the Navy operates continuously below the threshold of open conflict, dealing with grey-zone pressure and hybrid threats even in what looks like peacetime. The Maritime Security Strategy 2026 carried this further, describing Operational, National, Regional, and International tiers of maritime domain awareness. This is not strategy written in the abstract. It follows years of watching the Houthis disrupt Red Sea shipping since late 2023, and it follows the closure of the Strait of Hormuz this year, which briefly forced both of the Middle East’s major maritime corridors shut at once. Maritime MDO is not a future concept. It is what the Navy is already doing to keep the country’s energy lifelines open.
Integrating Sea, Air and Land
The West Asia conflict illustrates what happens when integration is uneven. Iran’s mining and small-boat campaign in the strait was countered largely by American air power and naval blockade operating together, degrading Iranian coastal radar, command networks, and anti-ship missile sites from the air even as warships enforced the blockade at sea. It took land-based strike capability, naval presence, and constant surveillance working as one system to even partially restore safe passage, and the strait still cycles between open and closed months later. The lesson is straightforward: maritime security is never purely a naval problem. Coastal radar, land-based strike aircraft, satellite tasking, and naval escort all have to be planned and rehearsed together, because an adversary using mines and small boats will exploit any gap left between them.
The Navy’s own exercises reflect this thinking. Milan-26, held off Visakhapatnam in February this year alongside the International Fleet Review, was built around what naval planners called multi-domain synergy, testing anti-submarine warfare, air defence, and electronic warfare drills across ships from more than seventy participating navies under shared communication protocols. The push toward Integrated Theatre Commands is the institutional expression of the same idea. Once maritime, land, and air forces in a theatre answer to a single joint commander, the case for holding domain-specific plans in separate silos weakens. A submarine detection, a satellite image, and a coastal radar track are only useful once fused into one picture fast enough to act on, whether the threat is a hostile fleet or a handful of mine-laying skiffs.
Networks, Sensors and Decision Superiority
Everything above depends on the unglamorous plumbing underneath it: networks, sensors, and the systems that turn raw data into a decision a commanding officer can act on in seconds rather than hours. The Strait of Hormuz crisis has again been instructive. Reports of scores of commercial vessels being redirected and disabled while the blockade was enforced, and Iran’s parallel ability to track and target tankers transiting a waterway barely fifty kilometres wide, both depended on persistent surveillance and rapid tasking of strike assets against a picture that changed by the hour. That is decision superiority in practice: not having more sensors than the adversary, but converting sensor data into a usable picture faster than the adversary can act on theirs.
At sea, this depends on layers most people never see. Underwater Domain Awareness, tracking submarines, mines, and unmanned underwater systems, has moved from a niche specialisation to a stated strategic priority in the Maritime Security Strategy 2026, alongside seabed domain awareness protecting undersea cables and pipelines, and space domain awareness watching for interference with the satellites the fleet now depends on for navigation, communication, and targeting. The risk, though, is obvious to anyone who has served at sea: more sensors and more networks mean more attack surface. A navy that centralises its data to sustain coordination across domains must also assume that data link will be contested or jammed, and build the redundancy to fight through that degradation rather than being paralysed by it. Decision superiority that collapses the moment communications are disrupted is not superiority at all. It is a vulnerability advertised as a strength.
India’s Maritime MDO Imperatives
Three things follow for the Indian Navy over the coming decade. First, platforms need to be built for a networked fight from the outset rather than retrofitted for one later. The newer Visakhapatnam-class destroyers and Nilgiri-class frigates entering service are a step in that direction, but the real work is in the sensors, data links, and software that let a ship operate as one node in a fleet-wide grid rather than an independent unit that happens to share a frequency with its neighbours.
Second, chokepoint vulnerability is no longer a distant, theoretical concern. The sinking of an Iranian warship off Sri Lanka in March, and the months of tanker attacks and mining that followed in the Strait of Hormuz, have shown how quickly a conflict thousands of kilometres away can spill directly into the Indian Ocean and threaten Indian shipping and energy supply. Operation Urja Suraksha, the Navy’s ongoing escort mission through these waters, is the visible face of that response, but the underlying imperative is broader: sustained, layered maritime domain awareness across the Gulf, the Arabian Sea, and the wider Indian Ocean Region, built before any crisis reaches our sea lanes rather than assembled after it does.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, the whole-of-nation dimension of this doctrine deserves more attention. Multi-domain operations, as India’s own doctrine writers have made explicit, now extend beyond the three services to private satellite operators, shipping companies, port authorities, and academic and media institutions shaping the information environment around a conflict. Operation Southern Readiness, run out of Kochi in July with the Combined Maritime Forces and twenty-seven partner nations, and the chairmanship of the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium India assumed in February for the 2026 to 2028 cycle, are both about building exactly this wider ecosystem of maritime domain awareness, not just within the Navy’s own fleet.
The Indian Ocean is not going to become less contested, and the Strait of Hormuz has shown how a conflict at one chokepoint can ripple across an entire ocean within days. A Navy that has internalised Maritime MDO, fusing sea, air, land, space, and cyber into a single decision cycle, is best placed to keep the country’s sea lanes open regardless of where the next crisis originates.
