Five hundred years ago, the Portuguese conquered the Indian Ocean with a dozen ships. In the 21st century, the U.S. Navy may find itself hard-pressed to maintain control of the same sea lanes with every vessel it can spare for that distant, difficult theater. If there is one region of the globe in which naval actions and broader U.S. involvement in crises approach a certainty, it's the greater Indian Ocean, including contiguous waters from the Persian Gulf to the Java Sea and the deep littoral areas that harbor over a third of humanity, a fateful concentration of energy and mineral supplies, and a stupendous capacity for violence, local and international.

http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2006/03/1813970