The Chandipur missile testing range will now be used by Singapore. Junus Tan explains how will India be affected by this?

Disclaimer: Junus Tan is a freelance defence expert-cum-blogger and does not belong to any Govt. body, NGO or any other organization.

For those who don’t know much about the topic, this sharing of the missile testing facility at Chandipur goes beyond just military partnership to a much much deeper strategic level.

Just a bit of background

India shares a strategic partnership & good military relations with Singapore. Since more than a decade, the armed forces of Singapore uses few of the Indian military installations for training their armed forces with their jets & equipment.

    Mechanized forces of Singapore train at Babina Army range, Uttar Pradesh.

    Artillery regiments gets trained at the Deolali ranges, Nashik, Maharashtra.

    F-16s from Singapore fly & train from Kalaikunda air base, West Bengal

Singapore being a small country & having territorial limitations, cannot train in it’s own country with all it’s military hardware.

India also conducts annual bilateral naval exercise called Singapore India Maritime Bilateral Exercise (SIMBEX) to strengthen it’s naval capabilities & establish coordination with Singaporean forces.

Now coming to the question, how will India be affected by sharing the Integrated Test Range at Chandipur with Singapore ?

Why would India let some other country train in our lands, using our airfields & army ranges ? The reason & effects are more than what it seems like in the first look.

The reason is:

India is in the process of making a strong friend. Look at the position of Singapore on Asian map:

Singapore shares the international maritime boundary with China. This country along with few others sits between the waters of India & China. The waters in the region are controlled by Singapore & if India becomes a military Ally of Singapore, it extends Indian Navy’s indirect reach to waters controlled directly by the Chinese Navy in the South China Sea.

This will help India to maintain a watch as well as be in naval striking range in case any aggression occurs by the Chinese Navy in the future. Also, in extreme case, if war breaks out between India & China, India will have more allies in the water to counter the advance of the Chinese Navy than China have.

In fact in 2019, SIMBEX took place in South China sea, much closer to the Chinese navy dominated waters, as opposed to in Indian Ocean. INS Kolkata and INS Shakti participated in the exercise from India’s side.

Pic: An interesting thing to note here is INS Kolkata is a stealth destroyer which was deployed during the exercise.

Not only Singapore, India has often joined the other countries in the region to establish its presence in the backdrop of China’s aggressive behavior. India has joined the navies of the United States, Japan, and the Philippines for quadrilateral presence exercises near the South China Sea.

Singaporean using the Integrated test range at Chandipur is just a small gesture by India to reinforce the relationship that we have with Singapore. The real reason lies beneath.