Singapore: The United States’ Defence Secretary will encourage its commitment to defend Southeast Asian allies and invest in technologies to counter weapons meant to keep America out of the Pacific region.
In a gathering of defence leaders in Singapore, Defense Secretary Robert Gates Saturday said this year, the US has renewed his effort to improve military-to-military ties with China, but at the same time the US will work to balance Beijing’s development of anti-access arms, including ballistic missiles designed to hit aircraft carriers, a central weapon in America’s Pacific arsenal.
Gates’s reassured America’s Asian allies that the US did not intend to back out of the region as the Chinese military attempts to extend its reach and influence.
Although Gates acknowledged that the US Defense Department was in an era of budget cutbacks, he said less spending would not mean a reduced US commitment to Asia and the modernisation of new capabilities critical to the region.
“Many of those key modernisation programmes would address one of the principal security challenges we see growing over the horizon: the prospect that new and disruptive technologies and weapons could be employed to deny the US forces access to key sea routes and lines of communications,” Gates said.
In addition to China’s work on the anti-ship missiles, defense officials have pointed to Beijing’s buildup of its submarine fleet and development of the J-20 stealth fighter as examples of new technologies meant to challenge the US presence in Asia.
Chinese military officials have repeatedly said the US has exaggerated the threat from China, and that Beijing is not modernising its military in order to challenge the US.
But the US allies in the region are increasingly worried about what they see as China’s forcefulness toward its neighbours. For example, last year China claimed “indisputable sovereignty” in the South China Sea and increases harassment of fishing boats from Vietnam and other countries operating there.
The US officials believed that it is critical to reassure allies that America intends to remain a stabilizing force in Asia.
Despite the ongoing tensions in the Pacific, the US officials have emphasized that military ties with China, while fragile, are warming. Friday, Gates met with his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Liang Guanglie, and said the US and China must collaborate on “common strategic issues” including piracy, disaster relief and North Korea.
“I also believe it is critically important to maintain a dialogue in areas we disagree so we can have greater clarity about each others’ intentions,” Gates said during the meeting.
Those points of tension include US Naval operations in waters near China. While the Chinese believe the US Navy should limit its activities in the South China and Yellow seas, the US believed that its Navy must operate freely in international waters in order to maintain stability in the region and allow commerce to flow unimpeded.
Gates highlighted the Pentagon’s ongoing work on a new joint Air Force-Navy strategy aimed at ensuring that the US could continue to operate in the Pacific and defend its allies even if bases and naval ships close to China are threatened by missiles.
“These two military services are working together to develop a new concept of operations—called ‘Air-Sea Battle’—to ensure that America’s military will continue to be able to deploy, move, and strike over great distances in defense of our allies and vital interests,” Gates said.
Gates also sought to highlight efforts to expand the US presence in Asia, and Washington’s push beyond its traditional bases in South Korea and Japan. He said the US and Australian militaries plan to conduct more joint exercises and share more facilities. He also noted the US would deploy its new littoral combat ships to Singapore and preposition supplies in the city-state to improve its response to humanitarian disasters.
“We’ve taken a number of steps towards establishing a defense posture across the Asia-Pacific that is more geographically distributed, operationally resilient, and politically sustainable,” Gates said.
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