Focus Areas

Defense And Security

The Indo-Pacific region faces an increasingly complex security environment characterized by shifting power dynamics, military modernization, and emerging strategic challenges.

Defense and security issues are central to maintaining peace and stability across the region, encompassing traditional military capabilities, alliance structures, defense industrial capacity, and the integration of emerging technologies into defense frameworks.

Critical challenges include ensuring adequate stockpiles of precision munitions, maintaining operational logistics in contested environments, developing robust integrated air and missile defense systems, securing space-based capabilities, maintaining nuclear deterrence, sharing a collective information network, and harnessing defense technology innovation to maintain strategic advantage.

As geopolitical competition intensifies and security threats evolve, enhanced defense cooperation, forward force posture, and strengthened deterrence capabilities are imperative.

To advance understanding of these critical issues and to promote actionable security solutions, the Pacific Forum’s Defense and Security focus area brings together government officials, military leaders, defense industry representatives, and security experts to address the region’s most pressing defense challenges.

Through research, dialogue, and strategic convenings, this focus area examines bilateral and multilateral defense relationships, capability development, defense industrial base resilience, contested logistics operations, critical munitions production and stockpiling, integrated air and missile defense architectures, space domain security, nuclear deterrence, communication architectures, defense technology advancement, and the practical integration of military and security forces across the Indo-Pacific.

The Forum, staying true to its tradition, adopts a collaborative approach to studying and understanding the region as opposed to prescriptive asymmetry. To that end, we engage in high-level dialogues, policy research and analysis, and next-gen activities.

At the Pacific Forum, we strive to cover India for all it has to offer. Not just the metropolises that convene the movers and shakers of India and increasingly the rest of the world – New Delhi or Mumbai – but as far and wide as the islands of Lakshadweep to the plateaus of Arunachal Pradesh.

This warrants a more inside-out approach to studying the nation, civilization, and the broader region.

The region has no slow days. It is constantly wrestling with complex debates at the intersection of identity, philosophy, and politics. From as foundational as its name (India or Bharat) to religion, caste, and the ensuing anthropological complexities, the debates make it a field day for a student of anthropology and a chimera for a tourist to the study of the region. Cursory reviews of headlines or the 3-minute read in global media do not do justice to the state nor civilization wrestling with many narratives surrounding its history, origins, and trajectory – a civilizational state, a post-colonial society, technological powerhouse, or the new factory floor of the world. Adding to this abstract is India’s foreign policy that is unlike any other. Its strategic affairs cannot fit into any one theoretical framework such as liberal internationalism or realism.

There is an “Aloha” element in all Pacific Forum’s work. The India program at the Forum is no exception. At the Forum, we bring the much-needed Aloha spirit to explore the dynamic US-India bilateral partnership, India’s foreign policy, and its engagement in the broader Indo-Pacific region.