When the Salvor, a U.S. Navy rescue and salvage ship, pulled right into a port in India’s southeast this summer season, the job at hand was patching up the getting older vessel. But there was an even bigger mission, too: opening one other door for a U.S. army attempting to stretch out throughout the Indo-Pacific and counter Chinese energy.

The Navy ship was the third in a 12 months to reach at Kattupalli, an industrial hamlet north of Chennai with a state-of-the-art shipyard. And this time, the go to marked the beginning of a five-year ship restore settlement — a tangible step towards protection cooperation for 2 nations pushed collectively by geopolitics and Washington’s want to court docket and strengthen a rising Asian big.

“We’re well equipped to do this,” mentioned Arun Ramchandani, the top of the protection unit of L&T, the Mumbai-based conglomerate that constructed the shipyard. “And I think that this is just the beginning.”

The deal, which incorporates one other protection contractor in Mumbai, is a part of a method the Pentagon calls “places not bases” — pursuing entry to extra websites the place the United States has no army installations of its personal. In the huge Indo-Pacific, such connections may show essential for deterring China and, within the occasion of a battle, sustaining a U.S. mobilization.