The Indian Army and the U.S. Army are currently participating in the latest iteration of the Yudh Abhyas combined military exercise at Fort Wainwright in Alaska. This development comes close on the heels of the Indian Navy’s Sindhughosh-class submarine, INS Sindhuvijay, mooring alongside the U.S. Navy’s submarine tender USS Frank Cable (AS 40), which departed the Indian port city of Chennai after a scheduled visit in August 2025.
These combined exercises suggest that military-to-military engagements that advance both capacity building and capability enhancement between India and the United States continue to be the norm – despite the political frictions stemming from the imposition of extremely high tariffs on India by the United States. These exercises also suggest that high level military-to-military engagement will drive the relationship forward between India and the United States. The two sides must leverage the security component of their partnership over the economic component to mend fractured bilateral ties.
The recent military-to-military interactions are significant, for they demonstrate that India and the United States continue to engage each other in both the terrestrial and maritime domains.
The 21st edition of the Yudh Abhyas (“Preparing for War”) military exercise in Alaska gives a fillip to military engagement between the two armies. These exercises are designed to advance interoperability, readiness, and cooperation between the two partners. The exercises began as counterinsurgency training exchanges in 2004; today, Yudh Abhyas has come to include brigade-level command post exercises and field training exercises that focus on conventional, unconventional, and hybrid threats. This exercise is designed to include a spectrum of tactical drills including heliborne operations, employment of surveillance and unmanned aerial systems, mountain warfare, casualty evacuation, and combat medical aid along with the integrated use of artillery, aviation, and electronic warfare systems.
Similarly, the naval component of the India-U.S. partnership received considerable impetus with the mooring of the submarine INS Sindhuvijay alongside the USS Frank Cable. According to a press release from the U.S. Navy, the exchange served to “to demonstrate the submarine tender’s capacity to maintain and repair allied and partner submarines throughout the Indo-Pacific.”
This exercise also exemplified the evolution of the India-U.S. partnership in the logistics domain, since the signing of the Logistics, Exchange and Memorandum of Exchange Agreement (LEMOA) in 2017.
The operationalization of the Master Ship Repair Agreement (MSRA) between India and the United States allowed three auxiliary ships – USNS Salvor, USNS Charles Drew and USNS Matthew Perry – to dock in India for maintenance and repair. With the port call by the USS Frank Cable, the repair of U.S. submarines at Indian ports may become a reality as well, especially at a time when the United States and India continue to cooperate with each other militarily to manage the China threat.
Despite a supposed thaw in ties between India and China, orchestrated partly due to the Trump administration’s 50 percent tariffs on India, the India-U.S. military-to-military partnership has continued unabated. The foundational military agreements between India and the United States continued to be operationalized, with a sustained focus on advancing interoperability between the two likeminded partners. In fact, the diverse focus of the latest exercises shows that both partners are keen to address both traditional and nontraditional military threats together.
The nomenclature being used is also important. For instance, the U.S. Navy’s official statement concerning USS Frank Cable’s visit to India emphasized “repair[ing] allied and partner submarines throughout the Indo-Pacific.” This reinforces India’s position as a “major defense partner” of the United States – even at a time when the partnership has witnessed considerable tensions due to the suspension of trade talks between the two countries.
Similarly, the focus on logistics cooperation, including maritime logistics, is also an important point of consideration. In general, such exercises enhance India’s maritime outreach while enabling New Delhi to expand both its influence and its presence in regions of importance to India. The lack of such military agreements had traditionally limited India’s ability to project power in distant waters.
The operationalization of these agreements has enabled the refueling of a U.S. aircraft on Indian soil and the repair of three U.S. naval vessels. Similarly, these same agreements can potentially enable Indian vessels to refuel and resupply in distant ports belonging to partner countries, enabling Indian forces to engage in longer deployments away from Indian shores. In the long term, such agreements could also enable Indian operations outside the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) expanding India’s maritime sphere of influence.
Finally, these combined exercises act as bridges that generate goodwill between the U.S. and Indian militaries. These bilateral exercises are also acts of strategic signaling. Despite the downslide in the India-U.S. bilateral partnership, these exercises continue to act as confidence and security building measures, helping provide some much-needed stability in the relationship.