Major joint military exercises

Story hook

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?