SITMEX | 17 Sep 2019
The inaugural trilateral exercise, involving the Indian Navy (IN), the Republic of Singapore Navy (RSN), and the Royal Thailand Navy (RTN), recently commenced at Port Blair, Andaman and Nicobar.
- SITMEX-2019 is five days long exercise.
- The exercise includes two phases:
- The harbour phase wherein professional exchanges, sports fixtures, and cross-deck familiarization visits would be organized.
- During the sea phase, a host of surface and air operations involving gunnery, force protection measures, and communication drills, would be conducted for experience gaining and learning each other's best practices.
- From the Indian side, Indian Naval Ships
- Ranvir- a guided-missile destroyer,
- Kora- a missile corvette, and
- Sukanya- an offshore patrol vessel, along with
- P8I- long-range maritime reconnaissance aircraft, will participate in this exercise.
- It is aimed at strengthening the maritime inter-relationship (in terms of interoperability) amongst Singapore, Thailand, and India, and significantly contributes to enhancing the overall maritime security in the region.
- Besides reinforcing the co-operation, the maiden IN-RSN-RTN Trilateral exercise would provide an opportunity to participating navies to come together in a spirit of collaboration to nurture stronger ties.
- The Indian Army and Royal Thailand Army (RTA) joint Military Exercise MAITREE-2019 is being held in Meghalaya from Sept 16-29, 2019.
- SIMBEX is the annual Maritime Bilateral Exercise between India and Singapore.