Navies of Singapore, Thailand, India team up for drills

Aimed at bolstering maritime inter-relationships, a maiden trilateral exercise involving the navies of India, Singapore and Thailand commenced at Port Blair on Monday. The five-day-long exercise would also contribute significantly to enhancing the overall maritime security in the region, Eastern Naval Command (ENC) said in a press release here.

This would also strengthen the mutual confidence among the three navies - Republic of Singapore Navy (RSN), Royal Thailand Navy (RTN) and Indian Navy (IN) - in terms of inter-operability and development of a common understanding of procedures. In this exercise, RSN Tenacious, a formidable-class guided missile stealth frigate and His Majesty's Thailand Ship (HTMS) Kraburi, a guided frigate would be exercising with Indian Naval ships Ranvir, a guided missile destroyer, Kora, a missile corvette, and Sukanya, an offshore patrol vessel, alongwith P8I long range maritime reconnaissance aircraft, the release said.

During the event at the harbour in Port Blair, professional exchanges, sports fixtures, and cross deck familiarisation visits would be organised, it said. The exercise at the sea scheduled fromSeptember 18 to 20, a host of surface and air operations involving gunnery, force protection measures and communication drills would be conducted providing experience-gaining and learning from each other's best practices, the release said.

Besides fostering co-operation, the maiden IN-RSN-RTN trilateral exercise would provide an opportunity to the navies to come together in a spirit ofcollaboration to nurture stronger ties, it added..