A Chinese naval task force, comprising 700 sailors, marines and staff, is once again making its way through the waters between the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, a rotation that is so routine that Beijing no longer advertises it. Since December 2008, the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has deployed one fleet after another to patrol the waters off Somalia and the Gulf of Aden with a core of a guided-missile destroyer or frigate, a logistics ship, a pair of helicopters and several dozen special operators. The neighbourhood around it has changed and what used to be a policing mission against Somali pirates is not what it says now. Since late 2023, the Houthis have continued to launch attacks against shipping craft from Yemen, prompting a Saudi navy blockade in July, which introduced a new terror threat for Red Sea traffic, while only a few weeks ago Pakistan signed a defence memorandum with Somalia which provided Islamabad with its first formal military foothold on the Horn of Africa.

Timing is no accident. The agreement was signed in Islamabad by Pakistan's defence minister and Somalia's Ahmed Moallim Fiqi in the first week of August with the participation of Pakistani army and navy chiefs, and included cooperation in counter-terrorism, military training, and technical exchange. Reports started swirling within days of an alternate, unconfirmed deal for around two dozen JF-17 Thunder fighter planes valued at nearly nine hundred million dollars, and if the deal is finalized, it would be Somali's biggest defence deal yet. All these are part of a package that is not happening without Beijing's involvement. In the two years that Pakistan has been embarking on its own naval modernisation programme, it has been almost entirely Chinese-owned, from eight attack submarines under an apparently massive five-billion-dollar contract for the Hangor class, to Chinese shipbuilding companies having a stake in virtually every major naval project in Pakistan. A Pakistani toehold in Mogadishu is at home with a Chinese naval rotation that already considers the waters its own, and Chinese capital already at Somali ports and training programmes.

The economics behind this flag waving is more difficult to overlook than the flag waving itself. A week prior to the escalation of the Houthis' campaign, the Bab el-Mandeb strait the passage between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden saw approximately 296 transits. That dropped to 269 in the week the Saudi blockade kicked in in July, dipped to 266 the next week and has not budged from around 252 through the second week of August, a decrease of about 15 percent and one that has proven difficult to shake. The Suez Canal transits, by contrast, have not fared as badly, with 1,088 recorded in the week that ended 16 August compared with 1,070 in the previous four weeks, indicating that some owners are opting not to drop transits completely, but are choosing to do some transiting in the Suez and some in the Red Sea. The war-risk insurers have factored in that judgment call exactly: the premiums for a passage through Bab el-Mandeb have increased to about half of one percent of a ship's hull value from about three-tenths of one percent prior to the latest escalation, which comes to an additional half a million dollars per voyage on a containership worth $100 million. Despite the absence of ships for the past two years, Chinese state carrier Cosco has decided that the count still works in favour of a return and is returning to the strait to resume a service that transports crude oil, including the riskiest routes, through Egypt.

A wider shift in trade routes is going on at the same time as the military posturing. This year, industry analysts have less reason to worry about securing new orders by tonnage than they do about having yards available to deliver them on time with more than eighty percent of new global orders going to Chinese shipyards so far this year. At the same time Beijing has been conducting tests of an Arctic route to Europe that would shave about twenty days off the journey time from a crisis, a buffer against exactly the type of chokepoint vulnerability that could be used by an adversary controlling the Bab el-Mandeb or the Strait of Malacca. As viewed collectively, the naval presence off Somalia, the client state on Pakistan's side gaining a foothold in the Horn of Africa, and the hard-power increase and gradual testing of the alternative shipping corridor all indicate one strategic philosophy: minimize reliance on a single route and maintain sufficient military resources to ensure the protection of existing routes.

This cannot be heard as background noise in India. In the Indian capital New Delhi, naval planners have been hard at work on the new rules for an era of active competition in waters which India regards as its sphere of influence instead of cooperation. The Indian Navy's strategy of building and delivering two-hundred ships by the mid-2030s, its recent commissioning of an indigenously built frigate, INS Mahendragiri, and repeated statements from the Navy leadership to keep a check on the Chinese and Pakistani operations all indicate that the Indian Navy has ceased to be a routine anti-piracy patrol force. The new Chinese fleet has a permanent rotation in the Horn of Africa with a new Pakistani partner just introduced in Somalia and heavily funded by Chinese military exports altering the equation for any power relying on the waters for its energy supplies and container trade. It's not so much a lesson of any one deployment as a lesson in a pattern: relying on outside partners for critical maritime capability whether submarines or training exercises is costly, and the only lasting solution is to establish sufficient indigenous naval and industrial capability that no one chokepoint or coalition can dictate terms. For Somalia, which finds itself between the Turkish trainers, Pakistani officers and Chinese capital, things are looking just as tight.