Contested Waterways and Blue-Water Navies: Naval Modernization and Sea-Lane Vulnerabilities in India–China Strategic Competition

Abstract

The maritime dimension of India–China strategic competition is increasingly shaped by a paradox: the same sea lanes that enable national growth also create exposure to disruption. This paper argues that the central strategic problem is not a simple race to match hull numbers, but the interaction among naval modernization, geography, logistics, surveillance, and the concentration of trade and energy flows through a limited set of routes. India retains a significant geographic advantage in the Indian Ocean, while China is narrowing the operational gap through fleet expansion, overseas logistics access and sustained presence. India’s response has therefore moved toward a combination of blue-water capability, maritime domain awareness, island infrastructure, indigenous shipbuilding and partnerships. The paper develops a vulnerability framework that distinguishes between platform strength and sea-lane resilience, and applies it to the Strait of Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, the Malacca approaches and the Andaman Sea. It finds that India’s most consequential vulnerabilities arise from energy dependence and the high economic cost of routing disruption, while China’s principal constraints remain distance, sustainment and the need to protect a long chain of overseas access points. The study concludes that credible deterrence depends less on seeking absolute maritime dominance than on building distributed surveillance, resilient logistics, anti-submarine capability, undersea awareness, and selective denial options that raise an adversary’s expected cost without making commercial sea lanes unnecessarily militarized.....