By: Dhruva Jaishankar and Ammar Nainar
The following article originally appeared in India’s World Magazine on November 1, 2025.
Defense diplomacy—military cooperation in peacetime to enhance a nation's diplomatic goals, rather than specific operational objectives—is a critical function for any modern military. It is intended to build trust and convergence of interests with foreign militaries, share knowledge and best practices among partners, and enable collective security through burden-sharing.
India today undertakes many forms of defence diplomacy which extend to military capacity building, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR), professional military education (PME) and training, and high-profile visits and exchanges. In recent years, and despite some continuing constraints, new trends are shaping India's defence diplomacy, including higher states of readiness, new partners, more defence attaches posted at embassies abroad, and improved maritime information sharing.
The practice itself, including the integration of military officers in diplomatic missions, has a long tradition dating to the early 19th century. Since 1961, defence attaches have been recognised as enjoying the same immunities as civilian diplomats. But in many respects, India's own history of defence diplomacy predates such formal structures. As early as the 18th century, the Bombay Marines, forerunners to the Indian Navy, undertook hydrographic surveys in far-flung regions of the British Empire, including the Middle East and East Africa, as well as the Philippines, Palau, and Tasmania. After Independence, India set up training facilities in Nigeria for cadet training in 1964. In Bhutan, India set up an Indian Military Training Team (IMTRAT) which, since 1961, has trained the Royal Bhutan Army. After the 1960s, the Indian Air Force deployed instructors to train Iraqi pilots and to test pilot Egypt's combat aircraft. In the 1970s and 1980s, India gifted naval equipment to Bangladesh and Mauritius and deputed naval officers to Oman. The Navy also undertook goodwill "cruises" to countries in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. After the Cold War, these activities became more structured.
Four aspects of India's defence diplomacy
In practice, defence diplomacy in India is coordinated by officials at the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS), Ministry of Defence, and Ministry of External Affairs, who review initiatives for military cooperation and seek to harmonise defence with diplomatic priorities. Implementation is enabled by the Integrated Defence Staff, as well as individual services, particularly for training, staff dialogues, and protocol.
Generally, India's defence diplomacy assumes four forms.
1. Military education and training. India provides professional military education and training courses from pre-commission to command level. Joint institutions like the National Defence Academy and the National Defence College, and service-specific institutions, have been admitting foreign military officers since the early 1950s. Since 2014, almost 12,000 foreign personnel have been trained by India. The country has also deployed 200 defence personnel as part of military training teams in almost 20 countries, including Tanzania, Uganda, Lesotho, Botswana, Kazakhstan, Namibia, and Laos. The Ministry of External Affairs provides financial assistance under the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) scheme to facilitate such exchanges. In some cases, the MEA's Development Partnership Administration (DPA) divisions bear the cost, while in others, select regional divisions bear the expense. For developed countries, training is mostly self-financed. Training of foreign military personnel helps build interpersonal relationships and foster habits of cooperation in the long run. Such programs have contributed to better civil-military cooperation, as in Myanmar, and in improving operational coordination, as among the Quad countries following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
2. Capacity building. This extends to enhancing a partner country's capabilities through grants, concessional loans, technical training, and equipment and in India's case generally occurs at the request of the partner country. For example, the Indian Navy assists Mauritius with surveillance of its exclusive economic zones (EEZs) and preparation of its nautical charts. India is also building a Maritime Centre for Sri Lanka for search and rescue operations. Capacity-building can also extend to the provision of equipment. For example, India, for the first time, leased a submarine to a foreign country, Myanmar, and in the past, it has advised the Philippines in the expansion of its submarine capabilities, too. Guyana has also acquired maritime patrol aircraft from India through a concessional loan. The Indian Army has trained Cambodian troops in demining and has set up an information technology lab for Vietnam's Ministry of Defence, which has trained approximately 20,000 military officers, technicians, and civil servants throughout Southeast Asia.
3. HADR. This includes the use of military assets to provide relief following a natural disaster and evacuate non-combatants from conflict zones. This can also involve rescuing Indian citizens, restoring communications, transporting relief material, and maintaining essential services. Since 2000, India has conducted more than 20 HADR operations overseas, including in Myanmar, Turkey, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Mozambique, and Nepal. India has also evacuated its citizens from Yemen, Israel, Sudan, Ukraine, and Iran. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Indian Navy provided medical assistance to 15 Indian Ocean littoral countries, such as the Comoros and Bangladesh. Overall, the military can undertake frequent HADR operations given its mission-based deployments, ability to reach the affected site swiftly, pre-positioning of relief material, and possession of transport aircraft, landing ships, and helicopters. The Indian Navy has also deputed an officer in the MEA's Rapid Response Cell for faster coordination.
4. High-profile visits and exchanges. This enables the armed services to showcase their professional skills and capabilities for goodwill. All three services conduct regular overseas deployments, participate in international parades, air shows, and fleet reviews, and undertake cultural exchanges. For example, in 2025, India led a joint cruise of 44 sailors from nine Indian Ocean countries for port calls in Mauritius, Seychelles, Tanzania, Mozambique, and the Maldives. The Indian Navy also conducts public diplomacy exercises, such as global circumnavigation via a sailboat, INSV Tarini. In 2024, this effort was led by two women officers and concluded port calls in Cape Town (South Africa), Fremantle (Australia), and Lyttleton (New Zealand). India also led the fleet review in Papua New Guinea for the latter's 50th Independence Day. Recently, the Indian Air Force transported the Buddha's Holy Relics to Vietnam, attracting attendance from some 15 million devotees.
New trends in defence diplomacy
Rising demands and new partnerships require greater readiness, investments in maritime awareness, wider exercise networks, more attachés, and military exports.
In 2023-24 alone, the Indian Navy undertook approximately 221 deployments. This increase is in part attributable to a policy of 'mission-based deployments' since 2017, when the Indian Navy committed to maintaining a continuous presence in the Gulf of Oman and Aden, the Southwestern and Central Indian Ocean, the Northern Bay of Bengal, and the Malacca and Sunda Straits. Along with anti-piracy patrols and operations in the Gulf of Aden since 2008, India also undertook anti-piracy deployments in the Gulf of Guinea in 2022. Such deployments require sustenance and access, which the Navy secures through its operational turnaround points for refuelling and replenishment. These kinds of operations require new capabilities. For example, the recent rescue by INS Kolkata of a merchant vessel, MV Ruen, from Somali pirates made good use of long-range surveillance drones, maritime patrol aircraft, and transport aircraft to airdrop marine commandos.
Maritime domain awareness and military information sharing are also proving increasingly important. To be a maritime information hub, India set up an Information Fusion Centre for the Indian Ocean Region (IFC-IOR), which hosts liaison officers from at least 12 countries and is linked to 50 multinational centres. The IFC-IOR monitors threats such as illegal fishing, drug smuggling, piracy, and irregular migration. Information sharing is complemented by political-military dialogues involving the Defence and External Affairs ministries. Since 2018, India has begun "2+2" dialogues at the cabinet level with four close partners: Australia, Japan, Russia, and the U.S. With Nepal, there is a bilateral consultative group on security issues comprising army officers and diplomats. Additionally, India, for the first time, has posted three military officers as liaisons at select U.S. military commands. At the same time, India has expanded military education and training efforts, including increasing the number of seats in its National Defence College (from 100 to 120) to meet growing demand and facilitate additional participation from neighbouring countries like Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Nepal.
The Indian military is also now exercising with new partners across diverse geographies, such as Nigeria, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Since 2021, India has also participated in multilateral exercises hosted by the U.S. in Tanzania (Cutlass Express), the United Kingdom, and NATO in the UK (Cobra Warrior) and Greece (Iniochos). The Indian Army and Air Force have also begun hosting their own multilateral exercises: the Army's Africa-India Field Training Exercise AFINDEX (2019) and the Air Force's Tarang Shakti (2024). Although the Navy has hosted the Milan exercise since 1995, it has added an Africa-focused multilateral exercise in 2025 (AIKEYME). India has also begun exercising with regional organisations, namely the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the EU, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), and BIMSTEC, while hosting naval exercises with coalitions like the Quad (Malabar) and India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSAMAR).
With widening deployments, dialogues, and exercises, India is also opening new defence wings and has dispatched defence attaches to 12 new countries: Armenia, Algeria, Cote d'Ivoire, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Fiji, Mauritius, Mozambique, the Philippines, Poland, Seychelles, and Tanzania. As of 2024, India had 62 defence attaches with a target of 75 by 2030. Some of the new countries are significant importers of Indian weapon systems, like the Philippines (BrahMos cruise missiles) and Armenia (artillery guns). In 2024-25, India's defence exports were worth nearly US$2.76 billion, emblematic of a growing domestic defence industry. But supporting the expanded global presence also required India to withdraw attachés from Chile, Sudan, Turkmenistan, and Pakistan and reduce its presence in Western countries like France and the U.K. At the same time, India is leveraging concessional loans provided by the Export-Import Bank of India to widen defence exports to new destinations, such as Latin America and Africa.
Continuing Challenges
The drawdown of some defence attaches is indicative of some of the capacity constraints under which India still must function. One challenge remains inter-agency coordination between the services, between civilian ministries, and between the political and military leadership. The creation of a Chief of Defence Staff and Department of Military Affairs was meant to partly address this, along with some 82 active duty military officers seconded to the MEA to support various regional and functional bureaus between 2007 and 2022. Additionally, personnel limitations persist: India's 62 defence attaches in about 55 countries pale in comparison to China's similar presence in 110 countries. Finally, financial constraints can still impede defence diplomacy in a variety of ways.
Going forward, India's defence diplomacy will certainly confront a more competitive international environment. Uncertainties remain about the U.S. military presence in the Indo-Pacific region while China expands its capabilities, readiness, and reach. These and other developments will likely compel Indian defence planners to assess how much defence diplomacy and outreach to partners can work to improve India's security environment.