The US will sharpen its “military edge” in Asia and the Pacific in order to remain a dominant power in a region feeling the effects of China’s rising military might, US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said on Thursday.
Carter made the pledge in a speech aboard the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson in port in San Diego, California.
The Pentagon chief described what he called the next phase of a US pivot to Asia — a rebalancing of US security commitments after years of heavy focus on the Middle East.
Photo: AP
His speech, aimed at reassuring allies unsettled by China’s behavior in the South China Sea, came three days after he made remarks at a nuclear missile base in North Dakota about rebuilding the nuclear force.
Those comments prompted a strong reaction from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which issued a statement saying it had interpreted Carter’s statement as a declared intention to lower the threshold for using nuclear weapons.
Carter said the Pentagon would make its attack submarines more lethal and spend more to build undersea drones that can operate in shallower waters where submarines cannot.
“The United States will continue to sharpen our military edge so we remain the most powerful military in the region and the security partner of choice,” he said.
“We’re going to have a few surprises as well,” he added, describing them only as “leap-ahead investments.”
With a broad complaint that China is “sometimes behaving aggressively,” Carter alluded to Beijing’s building of artificial islands in disputed areas of the South China Sea.
“Beijing sometimes appears to want to pick and choose which principles it wants to benefit from and which it prefers to try to undercut,” he said. “For example, the universal right to freedom of navigation that allows China’s ships and aircraft to transit safely and peacefully is the same right that Beijing criticizes other countries for exercising in the region, but principles are not like that. They apply to everyone, and every nation, equally.”
Carter’s speech was meant to set the scene for a meeting yesterday in Hawaii with his ASEAN counterparts.
On Carter’s flight from San Diego to Hawaii later on Thursday, a senior defense official aboard the plane told reporters that Carter expects to hear concerns from some Southeast Asian ministers, including those from Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines, about the threat they perceive from an expected return of extremists who have been fighting for the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the Pentagon, said “hundreds” of Islamic State fighters have returned to Southeast Asia from Syria and Iraq and said up to 1,000 more might return as the extremist group faces increased military pressure.
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