In a show of force seen as a response to China’s rising military influence in the Indo-Pacific region, America, India, and Japan have each deployed their largest warship for a trilateral naval exercise.

“To a significant extent, this year’s Exercise Malabar is connected to China’s increasing submarine forays into the Indian Ocean,” naval analyst Collin Koh told TODAY.

“Exercise participants all share convergences on the undersea challenge posed by the Chinese, not just in the Indian Ocean but also across the Indo-Pacific region,” added the research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

“Given the continued strategic and economic importance of the Indian Ocean to all these major powers, it would have been expected to see this collective worry about how China’s submarine activity could seriously impinge upon both civilian and naval shipping plying through the regional waters.”