The IN-USN EOD Exercise 2026 gets underway at Southern Naval Command, Kochi, on 10 August and runs through 14 August, bringing together specialist diving and Explosive Ordnance Disposal teams from the Indian Navy and the US Navy for a five-day bilateral engagement. The exercise is billed as a push to strengthen interoperability and deepen professional cooperation between the two services' EOD specialists.

Inside the IN-USN EOD Exercise 2026 programme

The five days combine Subject Matter Expert Exchanges, cross-training, equipment demonstrations and scenario-based practical drills.

Divers and EOD technicians from both navies work through these serials together rather than in parallel tracks, a structure meant to force early contact between the two teams' working methods. Contemporary EOD methodologies, emerging technologies and current best practices sit at the centre of the exchange, alongside a look at how each side approaches capability development, operational concepts and employment philosophy.

What the exercise is meant to produce

Collaborative learning and operational synergy are the stated goals. Personnel who train together tend to respond better once a live EOD tasking turns complex.

A partnership two decades in the making

Indian Navy and US Navy EOD teams have run joint Salvage and EOD exercises since 2005. The August engagement marks the eighth edition, a fixture on both navies' training calendar rather than a one-off gesture.

Earlier editions of the series, run under the SALVEX name, have typically paired an Indian Navy diving support vessel with a US Navy rescue and salvage ship, with US divers drawn from Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit One working alongside their Indian Navy counterparts. This year's edition is expected to broadly follow that pattern.

Southern Naval Command's role as a training hub

Kochi hosts the Southern Naval Command's Diving School, part of the wider training infrastructure the Command runs alongside its warfare and seamanship schools.

That existing base of divers and instructors is one reason the exercise, like Operation Southern Readiness and the MH-60R Seahawk handover earlier this year, keeps returning to the same stretch of the Kerala coast.

A live tasking for Kochi's EOD teams

Southern Naval Command's own EOD teams have had cause to put those skills to work outside the exercise calendar too. Divers from Kochi carried out one of the more demanding real-world taskings of recent years in May, extracting an unexploded missile warhead lodged inside a fuel tank aboard the foreign tanker MT Olympic Life after it was flagged through the Information Fusion Centre-Indian Ocean Region, the kind of live scenario that IN-USN EOD Exercise 2026 is designed to prepare teams for.