ASEAN-India Maritime Exercise (AIME)

The ASEAN-India Maritime Exercise (AIME) is the first dedicated multilateral naval exercise between the Indian Navy and the naval forces of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), conducted in May 2023. Its legal and political foundation rests on the ASEAN-India Strategic Partnership, which was elevated to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership at the 19th ASEAN-India Summit in Phnom Penh on 12 November 2022, during Cambodia's ASEAN chairmanship. The exercise operationalises the maritime cooperation pillar of India's Act East Policy, announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the 2014 East Asia Summit in Nay Pyi Taw, and aligns with the broader Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative (IPOI) that India unveiled at the 2019 East Asia Summit in Bangkok. AIME thus sits within an institutional architecture that includes the ASEAN Defence Ministers' Meeting-Plus (ADMM-Plus), of which India has been a dialogue partner since 2010.

The inaugural AIME unfolded in two distinct phases following standard multilateral naval exercise design. The harbour phase was hosted at Changi Naval Base in Singapore from 2 to 4 May 2023, comprising professional exchanges, cross-deck visits, planning conferences, and subject-matter expert discussions that established common tactical procedures and communication protocols among participating navies. The sea phase ran from 7 to 8 May 2023 in the South China Sea, where ships and aircraft executed manoeuvres including maritime interdiction, visit-board-search-and-seizure (VBSS) drills, gun firings, helicopter operations, and complex tactical evolutions. India deployed indigenous platforms including INS Delhi, a guided-missile destroyer, INS Satpura, a multi-role stealth frigate, and a P-8I maritime patrol aircraft, signalling both interoperability intent and the maturation of domestic shipbuilding under the Make in India programme.

AIME's mechanics reflect the deliberate sequencing common to combined exercises: the harbour phase builds procedural commonality before vessels of differing doctrine and equipment converge at sea, reducing the risk of miscommunication during live evolutions. The exercise was co-chaired by Singapore, which held the role of country coordinator for ASEAN-India dialogue relations during the relevant period. Unlike a treaty-bound alliance drill, AIME operates on a consensus basis consistent with ASEAN centrality, the principle that the bloc retains the convening authority over regional security architecture. Participation by all ten member states—Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam—was envisaged, though varying levels of naval capacity meant that contributions ranged from full warship deployment to observer and staff participation.

The contemporary significance of AIME is best read against the calendar of Indo-Pacific naval diplomacy. The 2023 exercise followed the 2022 elevation of the partnership and coincided with India's hosting of the inaugural ASEAN-India Defence Ministers' Informal Meeting in November 2022. It complements India's pre-existing bilateral engagements such as the Singapore-India Maritime Bilateral Exercise (SIMBEX), running since 1994, and India's coordinated patrols with Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar. The Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi and the Integrated Headquarters of the Ministry of Defence (Navy) framed AIME as a confidence-building measure rather than a deterrence posture aimed at any third state, language calibrated to preserve ASEAN partners' relations with China.

AIME must be distinguished from adjacent constructs that practitioners frequently conflate. It is not the Malabar Exercise, which is a separate drill involving India, the United States, Japan, and Australia—the four Quad members—and carries a sharper deterrence connotation. Nor is AIME synonymous with the broader Quadrilateral Security Dialogue itself, which is a strategic consultative grouping rather than a naval exercise. AIME also differs from RIMPAC, the US-led Rim of the Pacific exercise, in scale and command structure. Critically, AIME is ASEAN-centric and consensus-driven, whereas Quad-linked drills proceed without ASEAN as a convening body; this distinction matters because several ASEAN states deliberately avoid the appearance of joining a China-balancing coalition.

The principal controversy surrounding AIME concerns its venue and the divergent threat perceptions within ASEAN. Conducting the sea phase in the South China Sea—where Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam maintain claims contested by China's nine-dash line, invalidated by the 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration award in the Philippines v. China case—imbues even a non-confrontational exercise with strategic signalling. Member states such as Cambodia and Laos, with closer ties to Beijing, calibrate their participation accordingly, exposing the limits of ASEAN consensus on hard-security matters. A further edge case is Myanmar, whose post-2021 military government complicates the bloc's collective defence diplomacy and India's bilateral naval cooperation in the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea.

For the working practitioner—whether a UPSC aspirant addressing GS Paper II questions on India's neighbourhood and bilateral relations, a desk officer in the East Asia division, or a maritime-security analyst—AIME is a compact case study in how India translates declaratory policy into operational presence while respecting ASEAN's diplomatic sensitivities. It demonstrates the convergence of the Act East Policy, the SAGAR doctrine (Security and Growth for All in the Region, articulated by India in 2015), and the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative in a single deliverable. Understanding AIME equips the practitioner to assess whether multilateral exercises can deepen interoperability without forcing partners into binary alignment, a question central to the future of the Indo-Pacific security order.