India and Australia set to sign submarine rescue and intelligence-sharing agreements.

India and Australia are set to sign three new defense agreements expanding intelligence sharing, maritime security, and joint operations. The move strengthens Indo-Pacific partnerships amid rising Chinese naval activity.

According to information published by India’s Ministry of Defence via the Press Information Bureau on October 5, 2025, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh will visit Australia on October 9–10 to conclude three agreements that expand cooperation in information sharing, the maritime domain, and joint activities. New Delhi frames the trip as a milestone marking five years of the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. Indian officials say the agenda includes a business roundtable with the defense industry and a broadened slate of service-to-service engagements that already range from ship visits to complex exercises at sea and on land.
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India and Australia deepen defense cooperation with new agreements on intelligence sharing, submarine rescue, and air refueling, reinforcing interoperability through joint exercises like AustraHind and Malabar as both nations strengthen their Indo-Pacific security partnership (Picture source: Royal Australian Navy).

Indian and Australian officials have said that the package will include an intelligence-sharing pact, a submarine rescue arrangement, and mechanisms for joint staff talks, with an air-to-air refueling demonstration showcasing practical interoperability. The visit follows a June ministerial in New Delhi that committed both sides to accelerate defense industrial cooperation and to operationalize more ambitious maritime security collaboration.

The cooperation lands on top of a busy exercise calendar: the armies will begin the fourth AustraHind combat drill in Perth on October 13, a company-level urban and semi-urban operation under a UN mandate designed to tighten combined arms tactics. At sea, both navies regularly train together in the Quad’s Malabar series, with this year’s edition expected in and around Guam under U.S. lead, reinforcing anti-submarine and high-end maritime warfare skills alongside Japan and the United States.

At the equipment level, both sides already share a critical common platform in the P-8 maritime patrol aircraft. India’s P-8I carries a customized sensor suite including the Raytheon APY-10 radar with an added air-to-air mode, magnetic anomaly detection, and Indian-origin datalinks, enabling long-range ASW, anti-surface strike with Harpoon, and networked ISR. Australia’s P-8A Poseidon equips similar sensors and weapons, ensuring the two navies can fuse tracks and prosecute targets across the same playbook of sonobuoys, radar, EO/IR and datalinks.

Air-to-air refueling cooperation is set to deepen: the Royal Australian Air Force KC-30A (A330 MRTT) can loiter 1,800 km from base with 50 tonnes available to offload for four hours, using both boom and hose-and-drogue systems, and can itself be refueled via UARRSI. This gives India’s fighters and patrol aircraft meaningful reach into the eastern Indian Ocean and approaches to the Western Pacific during combined operations, particularly when paired with tanker-qualified assets like the P-8.

The prospective submarine rescue pact is more than symbolism. India fields two fly-away deep submergence rescue systems delivered by JFD, each with a rescue vehicle certified to 650 meters, transfer-under-pressure facilities, and towed side-scan sonar and ROVs. Australia’s legacy LR5 system has a 16-person lift per sortie and has supported the Collins fleet, while Canberra has been reshaping its rescue arrangements after terminating a Phoenix International contract in 2021. Cross-certifying procedures and rescue seats, rehearsing fly-away deployments, and aligning decompression protocols would close a life-saving gap for both navies in the event of a DISSUB anywhere between Fremantle and Visakhapatnam.

Shared maritime domain awareness and ISR from P-8 formations reduce reaction time against surface and subsurface threats, while KC-30A support extends Indian fighter and patrol patrols along the sea lanes that feed Australia’s economy. Submarine rescue interoperability improves risk tolerance for concurrent deployments, enabling higher-tempo undersea operations with confidence that an incident would trigger a well-drilled, transportable rescue response. Layered onto the Mutual Logistics Support Arrangement signed in 2020, the new pacts together enable longer, farther, and more persistent bilateral missions.

New Delhi and Canberra are converting convergent threat perceptions into structured capability. The Indo-Pacific remains shaped by intensified Chinese naval activity from the South China Sea through the eastern Indian Ocean. By locking in frameworks for intelligence exchange, undersea safety, and air-refueling integration, India and Australia are signaling a steady move from episodic cooperation to routine combined operations alongside Quad partners. Exercises like AustraHind and Malabar harden interoperability at the tactical edge, while the October agreements codify it at the policy level.