Maritime military powers in the Indo-Pacific Region: A comparative analysis of Japan, Australia and India, 1980– 2017

The global maritime domain exists not only for logistics and commercial traffic but also as a military operational domain in which state actors compete. It is important to understand each actor’s maritime military strategies and the best framework for an analysis of these strategies. This paper uses a comparative analysis of Japan’s, Australia’s and India’s military strategies in the maritime domain from 1980 to 2017. It examines their force building and their tendencies at the military-strategic level, as per the analytical framework illustrated in Table 1.