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There is a growing understanding among maritime security practitioners of the importance of Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) as an essential enabler of maritime security. This article describes Australia’s efforts to develop an integrated national MDA system that brings together data and intelligence from a range of military and civil agencies and commercial sources to which a risk-based assessment is applied. This has become an essential tool to combat transnational maritime security threats in the Indian Ocean and elsewhere. But inherent limitations of national MDA systems are also pushing Australia and other countries to cooperate in trying to improve MDA. This paper then examines ways in which Australia can promote MDA cooperation in the Indian Ocean. It considers the effectiveness and limitations of current and proposed multilateral information sharing arrangements in the region. It concludes that Australia should primarily focus on working with selected Indian Ocean partners to enhance information sharing and help develop integrated national MDA systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia’s Cocos Islands and Christmas Island are remote islands with potentially great significance for Australia’s strategic role in the eastern Indian Ocean region and the wider Indo-Pacific. This paper explores the growing militarization of islands throughout the Indian Ocean in the context of growing strategic competition in the region. It then considers the strategic value of Australia’s Indian Ocean territories and makes recommendations about the further development of defense infrastructure to potentially support Australian air operations in Southeast Asia and the eastern Indian Ocean. Upgraded facilities on both Cocos and Christmas would provide Australia with valuable leverage in its relationships with regional defense partners and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Control over access to the Indian Ocean is often seen through a highly securitised lens. Strategic actors have long sought to use geographical constraints to maintain the region as a relatively enclosed strategic space. It has only a few narrow maritime entrance points and the littoral is not well connected to the interior of the Eurasian continent. These factors have contributed to the historical domination of the Indian Ocean by a succession of extra-regional maritime powers and the virtual exclusion of Eurasian land powers such as China and Russia. This paper considers how the physical geography of the Indian Ocean has contributed to its control by some powers and the exclusion of others. It then discusses China’s Maritime Silk Route/One Belt One Road initiative, which includes growing interests in Indian Ocean ports and plans to build new overland pathways to connect China with the Indian Ocean. The paper concludes that while China’s growing maritime interests in Indian Ocean are strategically important, it is the new overland routes connecting the Eurasian hinterland with the ocean that have the potential to change the entire geostrategic character of the region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper looks at the key strategic issues faced by China in the Indian Ocean within the context of growing Sino-Indian rivalry. It makes two basic arguments: first, that China has considerable strategic disadvantages in the Indian Ocean as compared with India; and second, that India has had more success than China in developing security relationships in the region. These propositions differ from a more common narrative, according to which China is establishing security relationships throughout the region that seriously threaten India. This paper argues that, on the contrary, China faces a strategic dilemma right across the Indian Ocean that it will only be able to partially mitigate in the short to medium term. Perhaps we should be asking how China's strategic vulnerability should be best managed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article will ask whether Sino-Indian strategic competition in the Indian Ocean should be properly understood through the lens of a security dilemma. It examines the strategic positions of India and China in the Indian Ocean and concludes that India has an overwhelming strategic advantage that China cannot realistically mitigate in the foreseeable future. This advantage precludes any real security dilemma arising between them. In fact, both China and India have good reasons to keep strategic competition under control while they each broaden their regional influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many Australian observers see Australia and India as 'natural' partners whose strategic perspectives are likely to become ever closer in coming years. This article will examine recent developments in the Australia-India security relationship and consider some possible limits to the strategic convergence of Australia and India, particularly in Indian Ocean security. It argues that Australia's challenge in coming years will be not only to address areas of common interest but to also actively engage with India on the interests and expectations of littoral states and extra-regional powers in the security of the Indian Ocean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]