Military diplomacy occupies an increasingly prominent place in India’s external engagement, moving beyond ceremonial exchanges to become a deliberate instrument of statecraft that links deterrence, partnership-building and regional order-shaping. As New Delhi’s strategic horizons have widened from South Asia to the Indo-Pacific and beyond, the armed forces have emerged as visible carriers of foreign policy, complementing traditional diplomacy with training, exercises, capacity-building and defence industrial outreach.[1] This shift reflects a broader recognition within India’s security establishment that military-to-military engagement can generate durable influence in ways that formal diplomacy alone cannot easily replicate, particularly among smaller and middle powers seeking practical security assistance rather than political alignment.[2]
Military Diplomacy as a Pillar of National Strategy
The conceptual boundaries of military diplomacy have expanded considerably over the past decade. What was once understood narrowly as high-level visits and defence dialogues now encompasses officer training, joint and multilateral exercises, humanitarian assistance, maritime domain awareness support, and the export of indigenous defence platforms bundled with training and logistics packages.[3] India’s own practice illustrates this breadth. The country simultaneously uses diplomacy to secure capabilities and technology for itself while extending training and defence assistance to smaller partners across Asia, the Indian Ocean littoral and Africa, a dual posture that few other rising powers have managed with comparable consistency.[4]
This evolution is not incidental. It corresponds to India’s self-description as a net security provider, a preferred security partner and a first responder in times of crisis, formulations that only carry weight if backed by demonstrable military engagement rather than declaratory intent.[5] The distinction between this cooperative model and the more coercive signalling associated with great-power rivalry is important, because India’s comparative advantage rests on offering reassurance and capacity rather than exacting political conditions. At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in 2026, India’s defence secretary reaffirmed this framing, describing New Delhi’s approach as anchored in a stable, secure and inclusive Indo-Pacific pursued through expanded military cooperation, technology partnerships and structured strategic dialogue with the United States and other key interlocutors.[6] Such statements are more than rhetorical flourish; they signal that military diplomacy has been elevated from an adjunct activity to a recognised pillar of India’s wider national security strategy, one that sits alongside diplomatic, economic and technological instruments of influence.[7]
The rationale for this elevation becomes clearer against the backdrop of a more contested regional environment. China’s expanding military footprint, growing maritime assertiveness and infrastructure diplomacy across the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia have sharpened the premium India places on credible, forward-leaning defence engagement.[8] For India, military diplomacy therefore performs several simultaneous functions: it reassures partners wary of over-dependence on any single major power, it builds interoperability that could prove valuable in contingencies, and it opens commercial and industrial doors for India’s expanding defence manufacturing base.
Defence Partnerships and the Indo-Pacific Security Architecture
India’s contribution to Indo-Pacific security architecture is best understood as operating at three distinct but interlocking levels. At the apex are major-power strategic partnerships, most visibly with the United States, where defence secretary-level talks on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue in 2026 focused explicitly on shared concerns in the Indo-Pacific and on deepening military cooperation with the US Pacific Command.[9] Beneath this sits a layer of regional middle-power partnerships, including with Japan, Australia and Southeast Asian states, several of which have matured into structured frameworks such as the India-Vietnam Joint Vision Statement on Defence Partnership towards 2030, which combined a mutual logistics support agreement with a defence line of credit and capacity-building commitments.[10] At the base is a widening network of support relationships with smaller littoral and African states, reflected in India’s decision to post new defence attachés to countries such as Ethiopia, Djibouti, Mozambique, the Philippines, Armenia and Poland, a move explicitly linked to expanding strategic ties and boosting defence exports.[11]
This tiered structure is reinforced by concrete defence industrial diplomacy. India’s export of the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile to the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia, demonstrates how platform sales are increasingly bundled with training, logistics support and long-term service relationships rather than treated as one-off transactions.[12] Such deals carry strategic weight beyond their commercial value. They embed Indian systems, doctrine and maintenance cycles within partner militaries, creating a form of technical interoperability that endures independent of political cycles. Since the 2020 Galwan Valley clash with China, this expansion of defence exports and attaché presence has been read within India’s strategic community as a deliberate effort to widen its security footprint across the Indo-Pacific rather than a series of unconnected bilateral initiatives.[13]
The scale of this attaché network is itself instructive. India’s defence wing presence has grown from forty-five countries in 2024 to fifty-two by early 2026, with an official ambition to exceed ninety defence wings by 2032, a target that would place India’s diplomatic-military reach on par with far larger defence exporting nations.[14] Coordinated exercises, staff talks, maritime logistics arrangements and policy dialogues at each of these tiers contribute cumulatively to a rules-supporting maritime order, even though no single initiative by itself constitutes a formal alliance architecture. This deliberate avoidance of alliance commitments, paired with substantive operational cooperation, is what distinguishes India’s approach from the block-based security arrangements favoured by other major powers in the region.
Building Influence Through Training, Exercises and Capacity-Building
If defence partnerships establish the architecture of India’s Indo-Pacific engagement, training and exercises supply its most durable content. India’s distinctive comparative advantage in this domain lies less in platform sales than in human capital. Officer training slots, specialised courses, mobile training teams and institution-building have long been central features of India’s defence diplomacy, particularly across the Indian Ocean region and Africa.[15] Because training programmes shape doctrine, procedure and professional habits over years rather than months, they generate a form of influence that persists well beyond the tenure of any individual government or defence minister.
Multilateral exercises extend this logic into the operational domain. Exercise PRAGATI 2026, hosted at Umroi in Meghalaya, brought together twelve friendly countries namely Bhutan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Philippines, Seychelles, Sri Lanka and Vietnam for a programme explicitly designed to improve coordination, encourage professional exchange, share best practices and strengthen intelligence management concepts through joint training.[16] Naval cooperation follows a similar pattern. The Malabar exercise, which involves navies of India, United States, Japan and Australia has evolved into one of the most substantive maritime interoperability platforms in the Indo-Pacific.[17] The Indian Air Force (IAF) participation in Ex Pitch Black 2026 since 2018 at the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Base Darwin reaffirms its commitment to strengthening defence cooperation and regional security.[18]
The cumulative effect of such engagement is influence that operates below the threshold of formal alignment. Exercises and training build professional familiarity among officer corps, cultivate habits of cooperation that outlast individual postings, and steadily improve interoperability, converting India from an episodic diplomatic actor into a recurring and dependable security partner.[19] This is a meaningful distinction in a region where many states are reluctant to make binding alliance commitments but are nonetheless eager for practical security cooperation that strengthens their own capacity without visible political cost.
Future Priorities for India’s Military Diplomatic Engagement
Notwithstanding this expansion, India’s military diplomacy continues to operate without a fully coordinated institutional framework. Analysts associated with the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses have argued that India still lacks sufficient mechanisms to employ defence diplomacy as a regular, integrated instrument of foreign and security policy, a gap that becomes more consequential as the scale of engagement grows.[20] Addressing this will likely require closer coordination among the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of External Affairs, the Integrated Defence Staff, individual service headquarters and the expanding cadre of defence attachés and wings, so that training offers, exercise calendars and platform diplomacy are sequenced deliberately rather than pursued in parallel.
Several further priorities merit attention as India’s military diplomatic matures. Air and maritime domain capacity-building for Indian Ocean and Southeast Asian partners, particularly in surveillance, coastal security and maintenance support, would consolidate India’s role as a first responder in the region.[21] Aligning exercise design more closely with strategic messaging and realistic regional contingencies, rather than treating exercises as symbolic set-pieces, would sharpen their operational value. Expanding professional military education slots and tailoring training packages to partner requirements would deepen the human-capital advantage that already distinguishes India’s approach. Closer integration between defence industrial cooperation, indigenous platforms and training ecosystems, consistent with the broader Atmanirbhar Bharat framework, would help convert export deals such as those for BrahMos into longer-term service and training relationships rather than isolated sales.21[22] Finally, developing systematic metrics to assess partner dependence, interoperability gains and the diplomatic returns of specific engagements would allow India to prioritise attaché and training resources more efficiently across an expanding partner list.
Conclusion
India’s military diplomacy has matured from a supportive adjunct of foreign policy into a genuine strategic instrument, one that blends deterrence, partnership-building, capacity creation and defence industrial outreach across a widening arc from the Indian Ocean to the Western Pacific. Its comparative strength lies in combining political reassurance with operational credibility and developmental utility for partners, an approach that generates influence without the overt conditionality often associated with major-power competition. The principal task ahead is not expansion for its own sake but institutionalisation: converting a rapidly growing network of attachés, exercises, training programmes and export relationships into a coherent, well-sequenced instrument of Indian grand strategy capable of sustaining New Delhi’s role as a preferred and dependable security partner across the Indo-Pacific.
Endnotes
[1] Sankalp Gurjar, “Expanding Arc of India’s Defence Diplomacy,” Journal of Defence Studies 17, no. 3 (2023), https://www.idsa.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/jds-17-3_Sankalp-Gurjar_0.pdf. Accessed on July 26, 2026.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] “Shangri-La Dialogue: India’s Defence Secretary Reaffirms Military Cooperation with US,” Times of India, May 29, 2026, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/defence/news/shangri-la-dialogue-indias-defence-secretary-reaffirms-military-coop-with-us. Accessed on July 26, 2026.
[7] Sankalp Gurjar, N 1.
[8] “India Seals BrahMos Deal with Vietnam, Indonesia Next,” Gulf News, May 30, 2026, https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/india/india-seals-brahmos-deal-with-vietnam-indonesia-next-1.500558636. Accessed on July 26, 2026.
[9] “India, US Hold Talks on Indo-Pacific Security Challenges on Sidelines of Singapore’s Shangri-La Dialogue,” The Economic Times, May 28, 2026, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/india-us-hold-talks-on-indo-pacific-security-challenges-on-sidelines-of-singapore. Accessed on July 26, 2026.
[10] “Joint Vision Statement on India-Vietnam Defence Partnership towards 2030,” Press Information Bureau, Government of India, June 8, 2022, https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1831981. Accessed on July 26, 2026.
[11] “India Posts Defence Attaches to Several New Nations for 1st Time,” Times of India, April 10, 2024, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/india-posts-defence-attaches-to-several-new-nations-for-1st-time/articleshow/109205408.cms. Accessed on July 26, 2026.
[12] Priyanka Salve, “India ramps up missile sales in Indo-Pacific as China’s assertiveness turns neighbors wary,” CNBC, July 10, 2026, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/10/india-missiles-brahmos-indonesia-china.html. Accessed on July 26, 2026.
[13] “India Seals BrahMos Deal with Vietnam, Indonesia Next,” Gulf News, May 30, 2026, https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/india/india-seals-brahmos-deal-with-vietnam-indonesia-next-1.500558636. Accessed on July 26, 2026.
[14] “India Goes Global: Over 90 Defence Wings Globally to Boost Military Power and Exports,” MSN News, January 5, 2026, https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/india/india-goes-global-over-90-defence-wings-globally-to-boost-military-power-and-exports/. Accessed on July 26, 2026.
[15] Sankalp Gurjar, N 1.
[16] Press Information Bureau, Government of India, “Multilateral Exercise PRAGATI 2026 Commences at Umroi, Meghalaya,” November 19, 2025, https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2263122®=1&lang=1. Accessed on July 26, 2026.
[17] “26th Edition of ‘Exercise Malabar’ Among Navies of Quad Countries Comes to an End,” The Indian Express, November 17, 2022, https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/pune/26th-edition-of-exercise-malabar-among-navies-of-quad-countries-comes-to-an-end. Accessed on July 26, 2026.
[18] Press Information Bureau, Government of India, “Indian Air Force Ex Pitch Black 2026 at Darwin, Australia,” November 19, 2025 (updated July 2026), https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2286254®=3&lang=1. Accessed on July 26, 2026.
[19] Sankalp Gurjar, N 1.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Gulf News, N 13.
