Major joint military exercises
Major joint military exercises — Yudh Abhyas · Vajra Prahar · Indra · Garuda · Malabar · Tarang Shakti
12 min read · Updated 2026-05-25
What is a joint military exercise?
A joint military exercise is training in which two or more militaries work through the same scenario in the same theatre to build interoperability, exchange tactics and signal intent. India runs one of the world's most diverse calendars: Yudh Abhyas and Malabar with the United States, Indra with Russia, Varuna and Garuda with France, Surya Kiran with Nepal, and the India-hosted Tarang Shakti of 2024.
The story
It is 6 August 2024, Sulur Air Force Station, Tamil Nadu. On the runway, Indian Su-30 MKIs taxi alongside German Eurofighter Typhoons, French Rafales, Spanish A400Ms, Australian F/A-18s, and Singaporean F-16s. Above them, an Indian C-130J flares onto the runway. The PA system crackles: "Exercise Tarang Shakti has commenced."
This is India's first multinational air exercise of its scale — 51 air assets, 12 countries, two phases (Phase 1 Sulur + Phase 2 Jodhpur), running through September 2024. It is the air-power equivalent of what Malabar has been for navies since 1992 — a high-end interoperability platform that doubles as strategic signalling.
A year earlier, in August 2023, Yudh Abhyas 2023 — the India- US bilateral army exercise — was held at Auli, Uttarakhand, just ~100 km from the LAC with China. Beijing protested. India and the US continued.
For UPSC, military exercises are the most-asked Prelims topic in GS-III internal security. They are the diplomatic-military intersection the examiner loves: each name carries a date, a country, a venue, a service. Get the Y-V-I-G-M-T roster down and you've cleared a third of the IR-security question paper.
Why this matters for UPSC
Joint military exercises appear in almost every UPSC Prelims paper 2018-25 — direct statement matching, country-pair recognition, service-arm identification. Mains uses them as evidence-base for India's strategic partnerships. Interview boards ask for strategic read — what does exercising with X signal about our alignment?