On June 1, 2026, Vice Admiral Vineet McCarty took charge as the 20th Commander-in-Chief of the Andaman and Nicobar Command. It made the defence pages and not much else. Most people scrolled past it. I think that is a mistake, because this is quietly one of the most important chairs in the entire Indian military, and the reason has almost nothing to do with the islands themselves and everything to do with a narrow stretch of water far to their east.

---

One Commander, Three Services, One Job

First, what the ANC actually is, because it is unusual. Set up in 2001 and run out of Sri Vijaya Puram, the city we used to call Port Blair, it is India’s only fully unified command. The Army, the Navy and the Air Force, plus the Coast Guard, all sit under a single commander. Everywhere else in the country the three services run their own show and coordinate when they have to. Here, one person holds the lot.

That tells you the posting is not ceremonial. You only bother merging command like this when the geography demands a single, fast, joined-up response. So the obvious question is, what is the geography that justifies it.

---

China’s One Bad Dream, in Plain Numbers

Look at a map and the Andaman and Nicobar chain hangs off India’s east, stretching down toward the western mouth of the Strait of Malacca. Malacca is the narrow funnel between Malaysia and Indonesia that joins the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea. At its tightest it is under 3 kilometres across. And almost everything China needs has to squeeze through it.

Around 80% of China’s imported oil passes through that one strait. Close to two thirds of its entire seaborne trade goes through it as well. China buys most of the oil its economy burns from abroad, so when you do the maths, well over half of all the crude keeping Chinese factories running arrives through a gap a few kilometres wide that China does not control and cannot defend.

Back in 2003, President Hu Jintao gave this fear a name. He called it the Malacca Dilemma. The worry is simple. In a serious conflict, a rival could sit at that funnel and choke the supply without firing a single shot on Chinese soil. And India’s island chain sits right at the western end of it, like a cork resting in the neck of the bottle.

So the logic is simple. Whoever can watch, and if it ever came to it, choke that approach, holds real leverage over China. The Andaman and Nicobar Command is India’s forward lever for exactly that. That is why it gets a unified commander and a senior one.

---

The String of Pearls, Without the Jargon

You will hear the phrase String of Pearls thrown around. Strip the jargon and it is straightforward. Over the last two decades China has built, bought into, or leased a chain of ports that runs in a loop around the Indian Ocean, which happens to be a loop around India. Picture a necklace, with India’s neck inside it.

Gwadar in Pakistan, on the Arabian Sea. Hambantota in Sri Lanka, which Colombo could not repay the loans on and ended up handing to a Chinese company on a 99 year lease. Kyaukpyu in Myanmar, on the Bay of Bengal. And Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa, which is not a port India worries about so much as a base, China’s first proper overseas military base.

Officially these are commercial, just trade and shipping. But a port that can refuel a container ship can refuel a warship just as easily. One or two ports is business. A ring of them around your main rival, each one able to host a navy when needed, is a message. India read the message a long time ago.

---

India Is Not Just Sitting Inside the Necklace

Here is the part that does not get enough airtime. India saw the necklace forming and started building its own answer, the one people call the Necklace of Diamonds. The idea is simple. If China rings India with ports, India places its own friendly ports and access points around China’s trade routes, so the encirclement runs both ways.

The biggest one is Chabahar in Iran, a port India is developing itself. It sits just west of China’s Gwadar and gives India a road into Afghanistan and Central Asia that skips Pakistan completely. Then there is Duqm in Oman, where India has naval access, sitting neatly between China’s two western pearls, Djibouti and Gwadar. Further east is the clever one, Sabang in Indonesia, because Sabang sits right at the western mouth of the Strait of Malacca, almost next door to the Andamans. On top of that India has built up Agalega island in Mauritius, has an agreement for Assumption island in Seychelles, runs Sittwe port in Myanmar, and can refuel and rearm its warships at Changi in Singapore on the far side of Malacca. It has also placed coastal radars in the Maldives, Sri Lanka and Mauritius, simply to watch who is moving where.

So the Andaman command is the sharp end, but it is not the whole plan. India is quietly doing to China something close to what China tried to do to India, just with less money and far more focus on the choke points that actually matter.

---

What the Belt and Road Actually Looks Like on a Map

It also helps to know what China’s Belt and Road Initiative really is on the ground, not as a slogan. There are two halves to it. The belt is the overland half, a web of roads, railways and pipelines pushing west out of China through Central Asia and on toward Europe. The road, a little confusingly, is the sea half, the chain of ports around the Indian Ocean we just walked through. Between them, the project reaches into roughly 150 countries.

The piece that matters most for India is CPEC, the China Pakistan Economic Corridor, a project worth around 62 billion dollars. It runs all the way from Gwadar port on Pakistan’s Arabian Sea coast, north through the length of Pakistan, over the Karakoram mountains, and into Kashgar in China’s Xinjiang region. Roads, railways, pipelines and power plants, all stitched into one line on the map. The point of that line is to give China a way to move oil and goods between the Arabian Sea and its own west without depending on any strait at all.

---

Why China Bet the House on the Belt and Road

This is where the Belt and Road Initiative, the BRI, finally makes sense. We usually explain it as China spraying money across the developing world to buy influence. That is part of it. But underneath, a big chunk of the BRI is China trying to buy its way out of the Malacca Dilemma.

Think about it from Beijing’s chair. If your single biggest weakness is that most of your oil crawls through one narrow gap watched by the American and Indian navies, what do you do? You build other doors. The China to Myanmar pipelines carry oil and gas from Kyaukpyu straight overland into Yunnan, skipping Malacca entirely. The corridor through Pakistan to Gwadar is meant to give China a path from the Arabian Sea overland toward Xinjiang. Roads, railways, ports, pipelines. Every one of them is, in part, an insurance policy against that 2.8 kilometre gap.

---

One Thing I Want to Say, and It Is Just My Opinion

Building these islands up, the Great Nicobar project, merging the three services into one command, deepening the Quad, all of it is slow, expensive, and easy to attack politically. And here I want to be honest about something that frustrates me.

I do not think the opposition in India should oppose a thing simply because the ruling party is the one doing it. On everyday politics, the cost of living, jobs, governance, fight as hard as you like, that is the job and it should be done well. But on this, on securing our sea lanes and defending the approaches to our own ocean, the nation has to come before the party. When a genuinely good move for India gets attacked only because the other side made it, we all lose a little. This is my view, not a fact, and you are welcome to disagree in the box at the bottom. I would just rather we argue about how to secure these islands than about who gets the credit for it.