With Quad nations becoming a member of arms on maritime area consciousness within the Indo-Pacific, India plans to hurry up acquisition of armed drones from the US even because the Indian Navy is working in the direction of extending the lease of two General Atomics manufactured Sea Guardian surveillance drones which expires in January 2024. The two Sea Guardian drones are primarily based at Rajali Naval Base in Tamil Nadu.

While the price of armed Predator drones (MQ-9B) will likely be a figuring out issue within the acquisition programme, the Indian Navy is happy with the output of its surveillance model, the Sea Guardian, since two of them have been leased in 2020 for maritime area surveillance.

Given the endurance of the drones, the Sea Guardians present actual time area consciousness from the jap board of Africa and Gulf of Aden to Sunda Straits in Indonesia and past. The leased drones have been additionally used to survey the Chinese build-up all alongside the LAC after the May 2020 aggression by the PLA in East Ladakh.

The acquisition of armed drones, hi-tech know-how switch and Indo-Pacific will likely be among the many matters of debate when Prime Minister Narendra Modi goes for his State go to to the US subsequent June 22. The state dinner will likely be preceded by International Yoga Day on June 21 and a diaspora operate at Chicago later.

The preparations for the US go to, stated to be a recreation changer, was mentioned throughout PM Modi interplay with US President Joe Biden and in a bilateral assembly between External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on the sidelines of the G-7 summit.

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In the Quad summit joint assertion launched on May 22, the leaders of US, India, Japan, and Australia have determined to hitch arms on Indo-Pacific partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPDMA) with regional fusion facilities within the Indian Ocean, South-East Asia and the Pacific Islands for shared area consciousness within the Indo-Pacific.

While the acknowledged targets have been to answer humanitarian and pure disasters in addition to fight unlawful and darkish fishing, the unspoken objective is to watch the enlargement and surveillance actions of the Chinese Navy and its consumer states.

It is on this context that the US has accelerated its ship constructing exercise in Quad international locations to match the enlargement of the Chinese Navy with the latter making deep forays into the Indian Ocean area since 2017.

Given that China has leveraged its ties with Cambodia, Myanmar, Iran, and international locations on Africa’s jap seaboard aside from consumer state Pakistan, the Chinese Navy will likely be sending lengthy vary patrols into the Indian Ocean as early as 2025. The armed drones are one of many key army platforms to counter the Chinese problem.