On Friday 17 March 2006, Dr Tim Huxley (IISS Senior Fellow for Asia-Pacific Security, Editor of Adelphi Paper, Corresponding Director of IISS-Asia) and Mr Rahul Roy-Chaudhury (IISS Research Fellow for South Asia) addressed Members of the Institute on “Navies and Maritime Security: Perspectives from Southeast Asia and India”. Organised by IISS-Asia, the event took place at Prestige Room, 9 Raffles Place, Level 57 Republic Plaza.
Synopsis:
Southeast Asian states face an unprecedented range of maritime security challenges. At the same time, they are increasingly investing in expanded naval capabilities. However, the new capabilities that they are attempting to develop – at great cost – are not always relevant to the most acute threats. These are increasingly generated by non-state actors, rather than rival states. To respond to these concerns effectively, some Southeast Asian states might need to invest less in developing capabilities based on large, guided-missile equipped warships and submarines and more in coast-guard type forces equipped with large numbers of relatively inexpensive patrol vessels supported by expanded maritime air patrol capabilities.
Partly because of the apparently inadequate enforcement capabilities of Southeast Asian states, during the current decade the region’s maritime security has increasingly come to interest larger powers, including India. India's first aircraft carrier-led deployment to Southeast Asia last year, patrols with the Indonesian and Thai navies in the high seas adjacent to the Strait of Malacca-Singapore, and exercises with the Singaporean navy in the South China Sea indicate the degree to which this region occupies an increasingly important place in India's naval outlook. India's revised maritime doctrine conceives of the arc from the Persian Gulf to the Strait of Malacca as a legitimate area of political, military and economic interest. The key to the Indian navy's new engagement in Southeast Asia could lie in varying interactions with the U.S. and Chinese navies, and a mix of 'soft' power options such as hydrography, maritime capacity-building, shipping ties, disaster management and coast guard diplomacy.
Before joining the staff of the IISS in 2003, Dr Huxley was Reader in Southeast Asian Politics and Director of the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Hull. Amongst other publications, he is the author of Defending the Lion City: The Armed Forces of Singapore (Allen & Unwin, 2000) and two IISS Adelphi Papers: Arming East Asia (No 329, co-authored with Susan Willett) and Disintegrating Indonesia? Implications for Regional Security (No 349). Since joining the IISS, he has contributed analysis of recent Southeast Asian developments to the annual Strategic Survey and The Military Balance, as well as writing numerous Strategic Comments articles on diverse Southeast Asian and Asia-Pacific security topics. His article ‘The Tsunami and Security: Asia’s 9/11?’ was published in the Spring 2005 issue of Survival, the IISS quarterly journal.
Since 2003, Mr Roy-Chaudhury has run the IISS South Asia security programme. Earlier, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, and served in the National Security Council Secretariat in the Prime Minister’s Office in India. Prior to his official appointment, he was a senior staff member at the Institute for Defence Studies & Analyses in New Delhi. He was a Member of the Indian Government’s ‘Expert Committee for the Preparation of a Vision Document for the Indian Ocean’, and the ‘Committee on the Establishment of a National Defence University in India’. He was also the Indian representative to the Maritime Cooperation Working Group of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific. Mr Roy-Chaudhury writes regularly on South Asia for IISS publications and has written two books: Sea Power and Indian Security (Brassey’s, London, 1995) and India’s Maritime Security (IDSA, New Delhi, 2000).
