By Andrew Thornebrooke
February 10, 2023Updated: February 10, 2023
The Royal Australian
Navy guided-missile frigate HMAS Parramatta (left) is underway with the U.S.
Navy amphibious assault ship USS America, the Ticonderoga-class guided-missile
cruiser USS Bunker Hill, and the Arleigh-Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS
Barry in the Indo-Pacific region in this undated file photo. (U.S. Navy photo
by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Nicholas Huynh/Released)
The United States is
working closely with its allies and partners across the Indo-Pacific region to develop new basing
opportunities and increase interoperability across their forces, according to a
Department of Defense official.
The nation is working to
scale its defensive and logistical infrastructure to contend with a rapidly
shifting threat environment, according to Assistant Secretary of Defense Mara
Karlin.
“When we step back, we
see a rate and scale of change that is meaningfully different in the
Indo-Pacific and that’s across the board,” Karlin said during a Feb. 10 talk
with the Brookings Institution, a D.C.-based think tank.
“The rate of change and
the scale of change is dramatically different in the Indo-Pacific than there
was 10 years ago.”
Karlin said that U.S.
allies and partners are investing in their militaries and working closely with
the United States at a scale not previously seen in the region.
Among the notable
examples, she pointed to the United States’ cooperation with Australia.
The two nations reached
an agreement to base U.S. Marines in northern Australia just under 11 years
ago, in 2012, and now the two powers are working hand-in-glove through the
AUKUS agreement to provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines from the
United States and the UK.
Similarly, Karlin noted
Japan’s recent historic commitment to double its military budget and commit to
increased military cooperation with the United States and others in a manner
unseen since World War II.
“Japan is going to
establish a permanent joint headquarters that will work with us on command and
control and make us all even more interoperable,” Karlin said.
“We’re going to expand
how we’re sharing facilities in Japan, we’re going to increase exercises, and
that includes exercises in Japan’s southwest islands.”
She also said that the
United States and its allies and partners were seeking to engage in
collaborative demonstrations of next-generation technologies including
hypersonic and autonomous systems.
“In the Indo-Pacific we
are building and deepening our alliances and partnerships,” Karlin said.
“You increasingly see cognizance
and concurrence of how the threat environment has changed, and you see a need
and a desire by our allies and our partners across the Indo-Pacific … about the
need to focus and collaborate on what we are all doing there to ensure security
and stability.”
Communist China Rapidly Expanding Regional Presence
The effort is part of a
broader strategy by the United States and its allies to expand their
Indo-pacific coordination to contend with the growing threat posed by communist
China.
Bruce Jones, director of
Brookings’ Project on International Order and Strategy, said that the region
was vital to the commercial interests of both the United States and China, and
that China’s rapid expansion through the Pacific included efforts to lay the
groundwork for new overseas military bases.
“The big change … is that
China has extremely rapidly expanding interests in these waters,” Jones said.
“This is a place where
China is interested in laying the foundation, both diplomatic and logistical,
for new basing.”
Jones added that the
region is home to the largest reservoir of rare earth minerals and that,
because China was “entirely dependent” on the flow of commercial goods through
the Pacific Ocean, it was likely to become more aggressive in pursuing its
interests there.
He added that the Philippine
Sea is most likely the location of a future conflict between the United States
and China and that the control of the Luzon strait between Taiwan and the
Philippines would likely become a major issue in the coming years.
This would present
something of a crisis for the United States, which has relied on shipping
routes through the region for more than a century.
“Since the Second World
War, the United States has maintained a set of critical naval assets, and
logistics, and air capabilities across a northern arc of the Pacific from the
Hawaiian Islands out to the north Pacific Ocean to Guam and Palau and
northwards to Japan and further east to the Philippine Sea,” Jones said.
“That’s been absolutely
crucial to U.S. power projection in Asia as well as the Middle East, and the
Pacific Ocean has been crucial to the United States in commercial terms for
more than a century.”
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