For several years, maritime domain awareness has been a quiet success story of U.S.-India defense cooperation. It proved that when both countries have similar platforms and share information, they can monitor and deter activity across the oceans and seas.

The next step is harder and more important: to build a distributed sensor network that connects both nations to sense, decide, and act.

Last year’s Malabar exercise, hosted in the Western Pacific near Guam, brought together the four Quad navies in another demonstration of growing operational familiarity. The real opportunity now is to translate this cooperation into a trusted and persistent sensor network.

A sensor network is distributed across platforms like aircraft, ships, satellites, unmanned systems, all connected through secure communications to provide a full operational picture. Each platform, with its array of sensors, is a node in a network collecting information. When these data streams are fused, they create an operational real-time picture that is tough to spoof.

Viewed another way, a sensor network acts like a nervous system, detecting and anticipating threats early enough to guide effective reactions. The Department of War rightly states that “success will go to the side that transforms vast amounts of data from distributed sensors and weapons systems across multiple domains into actionable information for better, faster decision making.”

China already understands the crucial importance of these networks. Its Transparent Ocean........

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