US, Allies, Working on New Basing Opportunities in Indo-Pacific: DOD Official

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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.”

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.”