TROPEX 2025

Context:

The Indian Navy's Theatre Level Operational Exercise (TROPEX) 2025 is a major biennial event designed to enhance India's maritime defense capabilities. Here are the key details:

About TROPEX 2025:

• Duration: The exercise is taking place over three months, from January to March 2025, in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR).
• Scope: TROPEX is the largest maritime exercise conducted by the Indian Navy. It involves a comprehensive simulation of various maritime threats, ensuring that India’s military forces can work in a unified manner to respond to them.

Objectives:

• Validation of Warfighting Skills: The exercise aims to validate the Indian Navy’s warfighting skills and ensure its preparedness to handle a wide range of maritime threats.
• Integrated Response: The exercise helps to refine an integrated response to conventional, asymmetric, and hybrid threats that could arise from adversaries like China.

China’s naval strength is significant, with over 360 warships and submarines, and it maintains a presence in the IOR with 7-8 naval vessels and spy ships at all times, which highlights the importance of maintaining operational readiness.

Key Phases of the Exercise:

1. Harbour Phase: This phase involves operational planning, briefing, and coordination across the different branches of the armed forces to ensure readiness.
2. Sea Phase: The sea phase is focused on actual combat operations at sea. This phase will include:

• Combat Operations: Simulating scenarios to test operational strategies and tactics in maritime warfare.
• Cyber and Electronic Warfare: A critical component to address emerging threats in the cyber domain and electronic warfare (EW) operations.
• Live Weapon Firings: Real-time firing of weapons to simulate actual combat conditions.
• Amphibious Exercise (AMPHEX): Testing the ability to launch amphibious operations, which involves the coordination of land and naval forces.

Significance:

• The exercise is crucial for improving the jointness between the Indian Navy, Indian Army, Indian Air Force, and the Indian Coast Guard, which are all involved in TROPEX.
• It is an opportunity for these forces to work together and strengthen interoperability in the face of a range of complex and hybrid maritime threats.
• It also serves as a demonstration of India’s commitment to maintaining peace and stability in the Indian Ocean Region, a strategic area with increasing global geopolitical interest.

Strategic Context:

Given the growing maritime influence of China in the region, TROPEX 2025 is particularly relevant in ensuring that India’s maritime forces are ready to address potential challenges from this rising naval power, which continues to expand its presence in the IOR.

This exercise will serve as a major step in enhancing India’s naval power and its ability to respond to any future maritime threats, while reinforcing its strategic posture in the region.