Exercise Veer Guardian-2026 and the Evolving India-Japan Defence Ties
Exercise Veer Guardian 2026 marks a significant new stage in India-Japan defence cooperation, bringing the Indian Air Force (IAF) and Japan Air Self-Defense Force (JASDF) together at Air Force Station Jodhpur from September 9 to 22. With Japanese F-2A fighter aircraft operating from Indian soil for the first time, the exercise reflects the growing operational depth of the India-Japan strategic partnership.
On 9 September 2026, the Indian Air Force (IAF) and the Japan Air Self-Defense Force (JASDF) began the second edition of Exercise Veer Guardianv, the first edition of which was held in 2023. This time, India is hosting the exercise at Air Force Station Jodhpur. The fourteen-day drill, running until September 22, pairs the IAF's Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) Tejas, Su-30MKI, and Rafale fleets against three JASDF F-2A fighters, which flew the roughly 5,600-kilometre route from Tsuiki Air Base to Jodhpur via Okinawa and Thailand, with US Air Force air-to-air refuelling support en route — reportedly the first time Japanese fighter aircraft have operated from Indian soil. Kawasaki C-2 transport aircraft accompanied the contingent, understood to have carried ground support equipment ahead of the exercise.
The bilateral exercise focuses on advanced operational missions, air combat manoeuvring (ACM), alongside mission-planning conferences and expert exchanges on engineering and aerospace safety. The defence ministry has framed it, much as it did in 2023, as reinforcing "longstanding bonds of friendship and strategic cooperation between the two nations", citing gains in “tactical proficiency and aerospace operational synergy”. But the more interesting story is what has changed, and what has not, since the maiden edition from three years ago.
A leap of faith, twice over
When the first Veer Guardian was held at Japan's Hyakuri and Iruma air bases in January 2023, the significance lay more in who Japan was drilling with. Tokyo's combat-level air exercises had, until then, been confined to the US, UK, Australia and Germany - formal treaty allies or close partners within the Western security architecture. India fit none of those categories. Extending that circle to a non-aligned, Russian-equipment-reliant partner was, as commentary at the time noted, a ‘leap of faith’ for Japan. This was made possible by the groundwork laid by the 2008 Security Cooperation Declaration, the 2019 inaugural 2+2 Ministerial, and the Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA) signed in 2020, which allows reciprocal logistics support between the two forces and sits alongside the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) India had already signed with Japan's closest ally, the US.
That the second edition has now moved to Indian soil, with India hosting for the first time, extends that same leap in the other direction: New Delhi opening Jodhpur in Rajasthan, an operationally significant western air base, to a foreign air force it has no formal alliance with. When read against India's traditional preference for strategic autonomy, this reciprocity is arguably the more understated but more telling development of 2026.
Why Japan came around: FOIP and a harder threat environment
Japan's willingness to extend combat-level trust to India cannot be separated from Tokyo's own strategic reorientation. India occupies a central place in the Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) vision Shinzo Abe first articulated and the geography reinforces the logic: a JSDF base in Djibouti and India's position astride the Indian Ocean's sea lanes make New Delhi a natural node in Tokyo's regional planning. That vision has since been backed by resources and by changing law alike. Japan's National Security Strategy has pushed defence spending toward 2 percent of GDP, a marked departure from post-war norms and in April 2026 Tokyo went further still, ending decades-old restrictions that had confined Japanese military exports to non-combat categories — a normative shift as significant as the budgetary one. Framed this way, Veer Guardian is as much a product of Japan's own threat recalculation vis-à-vis China, Russia and North Korea as it is a bilateral gesture toward India.
The Pakistan angle: a plausible technical dividend
One detail largely overshadowed during the 2023 drills in Japan but prominent during this year's deployment to Jodhpur is the aircraft lineage of the F-2A. Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries developed the F-2A jointly with Lockheed Martin as a modified, larger derivative of the American F-16 Fighting Falcon, retaining much of the F-16's basic airframe and flight characteristics even as its radar and role were adapted for maritime strike. Pakistan's air force has flown F-16s since the 1980s, and they remain central to its fighter fleet. This means the IAF, which operates no F-16-family aircraft of its own, has had no earlier opportunity to fly against that airframe lineage under controlled, cooperative conditions - its only encounters with F-16s to date have come in actual operational or crisis settings, such as the Balakot aerial skirmish in 2019, rather than in a structured exercise permitting debriefs and tactic comparison.
Facing the F-2A at Jodhpur may therefore offer IAF pilots an indirect, peacetime read on an airframe family they otherwise only meet in conflict. However, it is worth being precise about the limits of this read-across claim. The F-2A's naval-strike-oriented radar, avionics and doctrine diverge from Pakistan’s F-16 fleet in ways that will likely limit how directly any tactical lessons transfer. Hence, this familiarity remains a plausible inference about a secondary benefit, not the core objective of the exercise.
This is institutional layering, not a single pivot
Veer Guardian does not stand alone. It is the air component of a deliberately multilayered exercise architecture that also includes Dharma Guardian (Army), held most recently from 24 February to 9 March 2026 in Chaubattia, Uttarakhand; JIMEX (Navy), and Japan's participation alongside India in the Quad-linked Malabar exercises and, since 2022, Japan's own entry into India's MILAN naval exercise. That architecture was reinforced on 20 August 2026, when Japanese Defence Minister Shinjiro Koizumi met his counterpart Rajnath Singh in New Delhi and the two sides signed a Memorandum of Arrangement on Maritime Security Cooperation — Japan's first maritime-security-specific agreement with any country, covering maritime domain awareness (MDA), search-and-rescue coordination (SAR), and logistics support. It was during this same visit that Japan's F-2A deployment to Veer Guardian-2026 was first disclosed, linking the exercise directly to that month's ministerial-level engagement. Each track is anchored institutionally by the 2+2 Ministerial and Defence Policy Dialogue rather than by any single security pact, a structure that mirrors India's multi-alignment approach more than a conventional alliance.
Frictions the exercise calendar cannot paper over
It would be misleading to read this convergence as unqualified alignment. Divergences remain: Tokyo's firm alignment with Western sanctions after Russia's invasion of Ukraine sits uneasily against New Delhi's continued Russian oil purchases and defence ties, although India’s defence purchases from Russia have reduced considerably; a 2022 episode in which India reportedly delayed clearance for a Japanese SDF aircraft collecting UNHCR relief supplies bound for Ukraine illustrated the friction points that persist even amid deepening cooperation. Equally, a long-pursued deal for Japan to supply ShinMaywa US-2i amphibious aircraft to India hasn’t materialised despite high-level backing on both sides. The defence-industrial cooperation has generally moved more slowly than exercise-level cooperation - though that gap has begun to narrow, with the two countries announcing the final agreement regarding their first joint co-development project, the UNICORN naval communications mast, at the July 2026 Annual Summit. Beijing, for its part, has previously used India-Japan defence exercises to reinforce its standard position that bilateral security cooperation should not target any third party — a formula it applies near-uniformly across unrelated partnerships — and Chinese state media framed the matter more pointedly around the 2023 edition, describing it as evidence of "growing military ambitions instigated by the US against China."
Why this matters for the broader relationship
For a relationship still calibrating how far strategic convergence with Japan can go without compromising India's autonomy and how far Japan's post-2022 National Security Strategy can extend defence cooperation beyond its traditional Western partners, Veer Guardian-2026 is best read as evidence of practical, gradual institutionalisation rather than a single strategic pivot. The venue swap, the platform mix, and the persistence of unresolved frictions together suggest a partnership deepening through repetition and reciprocity. It is this incremental, institution-first pattern that best explains how far India-Japan defence cooperation has come and how far it has to go.
About the Author
Kaveri Jain is a doctoral researcher in International Relations at the Amity Institute of International Studies, Amity University, Noida. Her work focuses on India-Japan relations during the Shinzo Abe era. She has presented at academic conferences, published in peer-reviewed platforms and written on various aspects of India-Japan ties, including foreign policy, technology cooperation, cultural exchange, diaspora diplomacy and engagement in the Indo-Pacific region.
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