Prakash Gopal

Navy veteran, Lecturer Maritime Security ANCORS @UOW, Non-Resident Fellow @USSC, Academic Fellow @AIinstitute, ship driver, PhD @UOW, Dad who plaits

[Frank Scott @Franksquarerig]

HMS Trincomalee is also India (built by Wadia in Mumbai).
@MukulAsthana5 arranged visit by #INSTarangini cadets in 2005 & am sure some of those bright young officers imagined cutting her out & sailing her back to India!

[Prakash Gopal @FathomsOne]

Hmmm….very Trumpesque, Truth Social vibes here.
All that’s missing is “THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO……”!

[Snehesh Alex Philip @sneheshphilip]

Splendid ops by the Indian Navy to rescue an Iranian vessel and Iranian crew

P8I and the Sea Guardians gave constant surveillance as INS Kolkata closed in on the hijacked fishing vessel

MARCOS got dropped from a C-17

https://t.co/tuVkALWhO0

[Prakash Gopal @FathomsOne]

@Kim_HDarragh @CSDR_India @AusIndiaCentre @AusHCIndia @AIinstitute Go Kim!!

[Frank Scott @Franksquarerig]

Indian Army Airborne Medical Team is Korean War is something that Hegseth & MAGA & Co would consider of no value - not least because some of those in the photo have beards - Shock - Horror!!!

[CSDR @CSDR_India]

🚨PUBLICATION ALERT🚨

Delighted to release our third report in a series of five from our joint project with @DefenceUwa on 'Enhancing Australia-India Underwater Domain Awareness (UDA) Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific'.

🔗https://t.co/veiMB2nZBG

🔺This report examines the development of uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs) in 🇦🇺 & 🇮🇳 & the case for bilateral cooperation in the undersea domain.
🔺The authors, RAdm Puneet Chadha (Retd) & @FathomsOne argue that the two national ecosystems are complementary rather than competitive, & that a phased, capability-driven partnership that begins with benign & civil applications is more likely to endure than early collaboration in sensitive undersea warfare technologies.
🔺The authors propose a framework built on four concurrent pillars: operational cooperation, technological collaboration, industrial partnership, & institutional coordination. They sequence them across near-term, medium-term, & long-term horizons & set out eleven policy recommendations to advance them.

@CGIPerth @dfat @HappymonJacob @LtGenHooda @Harpoonleader @DrTLeeBrown @fionaconsidine5
@abiyoung @Gaurav_SNI @SRaimedhi @Kim_HDarragh @AusHCIndia @HCICanberra @indiannavy @UOW

[Prakash Gopal @FathomsOne]

If there’s one thing to be read on this site today, let it be this.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

[Frank Scott @Franksquarerig]

I cannot understand why Trump wants Nobel Peace Prize, Nor how he could possibly think he could be in the running for it.
Truly Bizarre rant which beats anything that any parody account could come up with

[Prakash Gopal @FathomsOne]

Next: Trump will sanction the US for buying Russian oil. “Rules-based order”?

[Shiv Aroor @ShivAroor]

Can’t make this up—After slapping tariffs on half the world for buying Russian oil, Trump agrees to buy Russian oil.

[John Hemmings @JohnHemmings2]

When you rely on the other guy for shipping…

[Prakash Gopal @FathomsOne]

@nilanthis @hahussain Looks like something out of a health plan brochure. If true, it has significant ramifications, particularly for Pakistan. It has a severe “preexisting condition.”

[Prakash Gopal @FathomsOne]

Well done, Philippines! Continuing to call out a bully for coercion--at sea or in public forums such as this--requires courage.

[Department of National Defense - Philippines @dndphl]

MAHIYA NAMAN KAYO | Secretary of National Defense Gilberto C. Teodoro, Jr. responded to a note from the Chinese side during the Seoul Defense Dialogue (SDD) 2026 in Seoul, Republic of Korea.

#DNDPHL #DiKaPasisiil #SDD2026

[Arun Golaya @Arun_Golaya]

India just cleared ₹1.1 lakh cr of defence buys. AoN accorded. 98% Indian industry. Good headline.

The Navy headline that actually matters is the indigenous Marine Gas Turbines. This could be HUGE or it could be a damp squib depending on where it goes from here on.

“Design, development and subsequent procurement” must *mean* all three words.
Design: Indian reference design, Indian IP, Indian test data. Not a licensed drawing with a new nameplate.
Development: hot-section metallurgy, controls, marinisation, shock, salt, endurance. The ugly slog years. Not a nice looking brochure.
Procurement: a production order large enough that a company will actually tool up. One prototype does not create an industry. A class of ships does.

If any of those three is missing, we will be back to import substitution theatre.

If this becomes a real engine programme, it is Atmanirbharta. If it becomes a committee + imported core + a “Make in India” sticker, we would have just lost an opportunity.

Propulsion is the last big choke-point. Every delay in an indigenous MGT is not an engineering delay. It is a sovereignty delay that shows up ten years later as a possible constraint. That is why it may be better to even accept the delay rather than compromise on the end aim. Tough choice.

Though I am sure, the @indiannavy has things well worked out, IMHO Marine gas turbines will need a programme, not a captive project: private yards that will fit them, MSMEs that will make blades, casings, controls & test rigs and a Navy that is allowed to be an impatient customer instead of a polite committee member.

The moment (and *if*) the only ‘industry partner’ turns out to be from amongst the ‘usual suspects’, the cow path has already been surveyed for being paved. Atmanirbharta in propulsion will be real only when more than one Indian factory can be pushed….and pushed hard.

My one question to *serving* officers (not to veterans like me on panels and not even those serving in the technical directorates) for them to ponder on….
When the first indigenous MGT is offered to a ship class, will you accept a slightly lower “brochure” number in exchange for control over the spares, the upgrades and the next hull? Or will the staff requirement still be written so that only the foreign engines can “meet it”?

That single choice will decide whether yesterday’s DAC note was transformational or just better asphalt on the same trail.

(PS: For the trail -asphalt analogy see my post a few days ago about ‘paving a cow path’).

[Kim Heriot-Darragh @Kim_HDarragh]

I think 🇦🇺 still looks for the risk-free option in things because we had it good for so long. Most options involve risk now, and it’s a matter of choosing which kinds we can live with. Iain’s piece was a nice read from that perspective.

https://t.co/8CGbkSb8gK

[Prakash Gopal @FathomsOne]

Not an economist and so perhaps a simplistic take. Is the quality of life of an average citizen better as a result of this number?

[Business Standard @bsindia]

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has applauded the citizens for the 7.8% GDP growth rate, calling the feat particularly impressive.

Stressing on 'Swadeshi' and self-reliance, he further asked people not to go for foreign holidays, host weddings abroad, or buy gold unless necessary.

Details: https://t.co/s9Sda9NAge

#PMModi #NarendraModi #GDP #IndiaGDP #IndianEconomy

[Prakash Gopal @FathomsOne]

India's mission in Australia should be careful of headlining the phrase "One Nation".

[India in Australia @HCICanberra]

One Nation, Many Hosts 🇮🇳

Under India’s BRICS Chairship, engagements across more than 25 cities reflected the country’s rich diversity, federal spirit and collective commitment to advancing the BRICS agenda.

Watch how States across India came together to contribute to #BRICS2026.

@meaindia @pmoindia @narendramodi @DrSJaishankar @nageshsinghIFS @DDNewslive @PIB_India @airnewsalerts
#BRICSIndia2026 #IndiaBRICSChairship

[Prakash Gopal @FathomsOne]

There are many reasons why the USS Abraham Lincoln should (finally!) enter a port. Advancing the US-Thailand alliance would not be one of them.

https://t.co/DQaQNek7GS

[Prakash Gopal @FathomsOne]

@nilanthis @YusufDFI A minor but important technical detail: The IWT does not fall within the ambit of UNCLOS. The PCA acts as a secretariat for the Court of Arbitration pertaining to the IWT, which has nothing to do with the law of the sea.