U.S. Intel Helped India Rout China in 2022 Border Clash: Sources
India was able to repel a Chinese military incursion in contested border territory in the high Himalayas late last year due to unprecedented intelligence-sharing with the U.S. military, U.S. News has learned, an act that caught China’s People’s Liberation Army forces off-guard, enraged Beijing and appears to have forced the Chinese Communist Party to reconsider its approach to land grabs along its borders.
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Several current and former analysts and officials, some speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed details of the encounter as well as the American role, to include unprecedented support the U.S. military provided to India on the ground – the fruits of a new era of cooperation between the two powers in recognition of their shared ambitions to push back on Chinese expansionism.
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The source familiar with the assessment of this intelligence – deemed to be highly reliable – says the U.S. government in the weeks before the encounter was fully cognizant that China was carrying out test exercises in the region to see if it could seize a new foothold in the remote mountain passes there or in other territory to which both China and India lay claim.
Several hundred PLA troops operating on the Chinese side planned to see if they could move forward and stay along the part of the border that is not officially demarcated as they have done in the past, most notably
in 2020 in the Galwan Valley, several thousand miles to the west, the last time the two militaries clashed. That brawl caused a dozen or more deaths on both sides.
But unlike the previous encounters, the Indian forces identified the Chinese positions using the intelligence provided by the U.S. and maneuvered to intercept them.
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“This will definitely rattle the Chinese because they will have not experienced this before, and they perhaps had a sense of superiority that they were able to do this with different skirmishes in the past,” the source says. “This time they did not hold the advantage like they did before.”