India To Add 18 Warships This Year In Largest Single-Year Naval Expansion
Defence minister says the navy is escorting Indian-flagged gas tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, and that recent warships are more than 75 per cent Indian-built
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| Image Source: @rajnathsingh on X |
Rajnath Singh, addressing the second Indian Navy Commanders' Conference of the year in New Delhi, described 2026 as a historic year for the service and said the scale of the expansion reflected the maturing of India's domestic shipbuilding industry. Warships commissioned recently contain more than 75 per cent Indian-made content, he said, adding that India should now aim to export warships to friendly countries rather than only meet its own requirements.
The expansion comes as the navy carries an unusually heavy operational burden in the Gulf. Singh said the safe passage of Indian-flagged merchant ships, particularly liquefied petroleum gas tankers, through the Strait of Hormuz under an operation the navy calls Urja Suraksha, or energy security, had been an outstanding achievement.
Shipping through the strait, which carries roughly a fifth of the world's seaborne oil, has been severely disrupted since the United States and Israel began strikes on Iran in late February. Iran responded by restricting passage, attacking merchant vessels and laying mines, and commercial traffic remains well below pre-conflict levels.
The stakes for India are direct. Singh said the country imports about 85 to 90 per cent of its crude oil and around half its natural gas by sea, which makes the security of shipping lanes a matter of economic and energy policy as much as of defence.
He described India as the first responder and preferred security partner in the Indian Ocean region, and said the maritime domain had become far more complex, citing congestion, deception and what he called grey-zone activity, the term used for coercion that stops short of open conflict. Monitoring and response mechanisms, he said, must be raised to a new level, and India's maritime surveillance architecture significantly upgraded to handle the growing volume and complexity of traffic.
Minister Singh also pointed to Indian warships operating in the South China Sea, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic as evidence of what he called blue-water capability, meaning the ability to sustain operations far from home ports rather than only in coastal waters.
He congratulated the navy on taking command of Combined Task Force 154, a training arm of the Combined Maritime Forces, the multinational naval partnership headquartered in Bahrain. During India's command, the navy ran an exercise at Kochi called Southern Readiness, involving 276 personnel from 27 countries, 76 facilitators and subject-matter experts, and four international organisations.
The minister praised the navy's approach to recruiting and deploying women under a policy it describes as All Ranks, All Roles, noting the posting of women officers to frontline warships and aircraft and their participation in the Navika Sagar Parikrama circumnavigation. He also cited the deployment of the sail training ship INS Sudarshini on a voyage called Lokayan-26 through the United States, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.
"If the seas are secure, India will be secure," Singh said, "and if India is secure, the resolve for a Viksit Bharat will be further strengthened," referring to the government's goal of a developed India by 2047.
The conference runs until 1 October and brings together the navy's senior leadership to review operational readiness and future capability. Singh also met the chief of defence staff and the army chief during the day.