Rebalancing and Indonesia

US Pacific Presence Will Force Jakarta To Choose

As announced by then-US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last year, the military dimension of the US rebalancing, or pivot, to Asia will likely influence the region’s geostrategic landscape.

More US forces, including 60 percent of naval assets, will be transferred into the Pacific theater with rotational deployments in Australia, Singapore, Guam and Hawaii. This is in conjunction with China’s expanding military power as a potential US adversary.

As the military focus of US rebalancing is going to be on the maritime domain, Indonesia’s strategic calculus could become more complicated. Three of the world’s critical maritime choke points — the straits of Malacca, Sunda and Lombok — are in the archipelago. While the Strait of Malacca is partially administered by Singapore and Malaysia, the Sunda and Lombok straits lie entirely within Indonesian waters and sea lanes.

Soon, these waterways will be transited more frequently by US forces rotating between the Indian and Pacific oceans, now called the “Indo-Pacific,” particularly to Australia. More pressure will be felt as the Indian and Chinese navies increase their presence in the Indo-Pacific through these choke points to protect their commercial interests and energy security.

India’s trade with East Asia amounts to more than 30 percent of its total. Meanwhile, apart from being Africa’s largest trading partner, China also imports about 80 percent of its oil from the Middle East and Africa. Combined with Southeast Asia’s own maritime force modernization, this could lead to a saturation of regional waters.

A higher concentration of foreign maritime forces along the choke points could increase the risk of incidents at sea. Either by purpose or chance, foreign maritime forces could exploit the situation to conduct intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) activities against opposing forces. During wartime, these choke points could become more contested.

As an alternative to the Air-Sea Battle concept, the US strategic discourse has mooted the possibility of “offshore control” to interdict an adversary’s shipping. Interdicting such shipping would be more feasible along these narrow choke points than on the open ocean.

These rather daunting scenarios would not bode well for Indonesia as a coastal state. Refusing to draw a wedge between Washington and Beijing, the last thing Jakarta wants is a Sino-US conflict being waged on its turf. At the moment, Jakarta seems to enjoy playing with both sides and exploiting the situation to its own advantage.

The US has helped Indonesia build surveillance systems along the straits of Malacca and Makassar, while China has proposed similar systems along the straits of Karimata, Sunda and Lombok. Washington also has agreed to resume full military cooperation with Jakarta, including selling lethal arms, once considered taboo by the US Congress.

With Beijing, Jakarta has started unprecedented maritime cooperation in naval armaments, shipbuilding and oceanography, in addition to economic assistance.

But this situation cannot last indefinitely. Being at the crossroads of the Indo-Pacific, the archipelago could be caught in the crossfire should the Sino-American relationship deteriorate into armed confrontation. Jakarta then could face three difficult choices.

■Jakarta could tacitly align with the US. This would entail military support for Indonesia in return for increased US military access to Indonesian waters. Indonesia’s role, if any, would be limited to ISR activities in coalition with US forces.

However, increased US military access and presence in Indonesian waters could prod China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) to expand operations into the archipelago, especially submarine operations. But mounting effective anti-submarine warfare against the PLAN would be challenging, as the archipelago hosts many deep straits and channels for submarines to slip through.

■Jakarta could enter Beijing’s maritime orbit. Apart from being its largest trading partner, Beijing has become an alternative as Jakarta’s “all-weather” defense partner. Returning the favor would mean acquiescence to Beijing’s demands, including keeping relations with Washington and its allies at arm’s length.

This could prompt the US and allied forces to conduct intrusive maritime operations within Indonesian waters, but an Indonesian response to this breach of sovereignty could trigger inadvertent confrontation.

■Jakarta is neutral. But Indonesia’s limited military capacity could be thinly stretched to strictly implement the 1994 San Remo Manual on Armed Conflicts at Sea, which forbids hostile actions between belligerent forces in neutral waters. Failure to implement these provisions could cost Jakarta its neutralist credibility. But remaining idle would put Indonesian assets and property at risk of collateral damage.

Jakarta is not alone in this predicament, but it is in the nation’s interest to ponder these choices sooner rather than later. Choosing “the least bad” option would at least keep it strategically engaged in the big power game. And most important, this could help Jakarta adjust its geostrategic planning early on.

Ristian Atriandi Supriyanto is a research analyst with the Maritime Security Program at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Defense News

Navy Pivots Training to Match Pacific Transition

The U.S. Navy’s multi-national exercises in the Pacific theater are growing in size and taking on new dimensions due to the U.S. military’s overall strategic re-balance or “pivot” to the region, service officials explained.

US Navy's Air-Sea Battle Illustration

Although many of the multi-national exercises currently underway have been growing in recent years, the U.S. military’s strategic focus on the area is having a profound impact upon training activities there, Navy officials acknowledge.

The Navy’s Pacific pivot means that the service will base as much as 60-percent of its fleet in the region, work to strengthen ties with regional partners and place up to four Littoral Combat Ship vessels on rotational deployments through Singapore.

The ongoing Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training, or CARAT, exercise, now in its 19th year, has been steadily growing larger over the years and taking on a broader scope of activities. CARAT is a nine-country series of bilateral exercises between the U.S. and Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, and East Timor, Navy officials said.

The exercise is designed to enhance maritime security skills and interoperability among participating forces through a series of joint exercises which include communications activities, aircraft monitoring drills and visit, board, search and seizure drills, among other things.

In particular, the presence of the LCS allows for joint collaborative activities in shallow water previously not possible in these kinds of exercises. The recently-completed CARAT Malaysia marked the LCS’ first time participating in this series of bilateral naval exercises, Navy officials indicated.

CARAT Malaysia included the USS Freedom, an LCS, as well as the guided-missile destroyer USS Curtis Wilbur, the amphibious dock landing ship USS Tortuga, and the rescue and salvage ship USNS Safeguard, said Lt. Anthony Falvo, spokesman, U.S. Pacific Fleet.

“The Pacific re-balance is allowing us to do things we have not been able to do in the past. Some of our allies were looking for something a little more compatible with what they had. The LCS allows us to better train and adapt to our partner navies who have been operating smaller, shallow-draft platforms for years,” said Falvo.

Unlike the deep draft known to accompany some of the U.S. Navy’s larger ships, the LCS can more readily and easily interoperate in shallow water with ships from allied navies such as the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand and others, Falvo explained.

“The LCS is opening a whole new world for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, as it allows the U.S. Navy access to ports and waters that have been hard for us to access previously due to deep-draft platforms and ships. With her shallow draft, the LCS platform allows us the ability to engage potential shore-based threats from as little as 13 feet of water,” Falvo added.

The CARAT drills, happening now with the Philippine Navy and the USS Fitzgerald along with some other ships, also help the U.S. establish and refine operations with partner nations. Being able to operate and address threats close to shore — in close coordination with regional allies – is a key part of the Navy’s pacific re-balance or emphasis.

The Pacific fleet is also participating in its 8th annual so-called Pacific Partnership humanitarian exercise, a multi-national disaster relief exercise designed to increase capabilities in the region for countries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines and East Timor, among others.

Pacific Partnership has also grown in scope and size. The exercise included eight partner nations and eight NGOs in 2006, and last year’s mission included 13 partner nations, 28 NGOs, four U.S. agencies and a joint effort across the Department of Defense, Falvo said.

Also, Pacific Partnership 2013 will be the first mission where our partner nations lead individual phases, he explained.

“Australia will lead in Papua New Guinea, New Zealand will lead in both Kiribati and Solomon Islands, while the United States leads in Samoa, Tonga, and the Marshall Islands. Sharing of lead responsibilities and logistical resourcing among partner nations will keep this mission sustainable in light of future fiscal challenges,” he added.

DoD Buzz

Why Pentagon Must Embrace Transformation, This Time

Military transformation boasts several fathers, including Andy Marshall (Yoda) of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, Andy Krepinevich of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (a Marshall acolyte) and the late Vice Adm. Art Cebrowski of the Office of Force Transformation (OFT), but relatively few children. The OFT built the M80 Stiletto (pictured above) and some in the Pentagon believe the combination of UAVs, satellite targeting and data fusion cobbled together over the last decade comprise an accidental transformational capability. Rob Holzer, a former colleague of mine who went on to work for the one Pentagon office charged with pushing transformation forward in the face of a very unfriendly (or to be kind, cautious) military, argues it’s time for the US defense enterprise to finally and truly embrace transformation. The Editor.

M80 Stiletto. Designed for swarming, riverine, littoral ops.

The U.S. military must quickly come to grips with the inescapable fact that fundamental changes to the entire defense structure are looming — just as similar changes loomed little more than a decade ago before the events of 9/11 upended the strategic landscape. These changes could be far more disruptive than the reforms initially planned during former-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure and may be even more critical to long-term U.S. national security interests than the “Accidental Transformation” brought about during the protracted and irregular warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Facing the dire prospect of long-term budgetary austerity at home, while at the same time confronting strategic uncertainty and growing risks abroad, the U.S. military must embrace the process of fundamental change that was derailed by the decade of war. In a word, that process is called transformation.

While the concept of transformation became distorted so that it often simultaneously meant everything and nothing — and most damaging — was too closely associated with former-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure at the Pentagon — the fundamentals of the concept hold even more import for the U.S. military today.

Transformation’s previous application was stymied since its implementation took place in an ad hoc fashion in response to urgent issues arising from battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. This “Accidental Transformation” still achieved notable breakthroughs in terms of exponential use of unmanned systems; robots; greater reliance on human factors in irregular warfare, and development of integrated warfighting networks and expanded use of network analytics to gain insights into terrorist organizations. Today however, transformation writ-large is a strategic imperative that the department ignores at its own peril.

At its core, transformation is about instilling a process of continual change in the U.S. military. It is about creating “maneuver space” so that dramatically new ideas and concepts can be prototyped and experimented with by the operational forces. This is not modernization or selected enhancements to existing programs. It is not about “things” so much as identifying a set of “big ideas” that will in turn yield leap-ahead technologies and capabilities. These ideas will then inject significant changes in current military organizational culture and doctrine. It is also about empowering junior officers to challenge the status quo and enabling them to pursue new ideas and concepts. That is where the true value of transformation as a strategy can take root.

Transformation is not about definitions, doctrine or master plans. It is not about compiling lists of programs to axe, although undeniably some weapon systems will have to go in order to free-up funding to invest in what capabilities come next. There is no magical end point that yields a transformed military. Instead the entire defense establishment must adopt a transformation strategy so it can fundamentally re-think and re-position itself to confront a host of adversaries adapting and innovating at rates much faster and much more dynamically than our institutions have grown accustomed to understanding.

Marginal change in defense will no longer suffice given the giant laundry list of strategic challenges facing the Defense Department in coming years. Glancing at a cursory list of global issues looming just over the horizon reveal the stark magnitude of the range of festering problems with which the U.S. military must deal. These extend from coping with rapidly rising powers like China, India and Brazil, to feeling its way through the aftershocks of the Arab Spring (including today’s widening proxy war in Syria), to responding to more frequent natural disasters and population migrations. Intertwined across all of these international issues are the twin problems of increasingly sophisticated military capabilities (ballistic missiles, precision munitions, cyber, WMD?) in the hands of more second tier states and non-state actors. In short, while state-on-state conflict may be in decline, mayhem across the globe is poised to explode.

The current Strategic Choices and Management Review (SCMR) directed by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and the upcoming congressionally-mandated Quadrennial Defense Review provide robust, near-term opportunities to begin implementing transformational change across the entire defense establishment. Transformation and not marginal changes will produce the agile, flexible, lean and technologically advanced force that defense leaders continue to call for. If as Secretary Hagel says “everything is on the table,” then the development of a comprehensive Transformation agenda calling for significant change and restructuring should be the output of these strategic reviews.

The likely imposition of another $1 trillion in cuts to Pentagon spending over the next decade, via sequestration, only bolsters the immediate need to dramatically transform defense. Now is the time to rethink defense for the 21st Century and shed the leaden vestiges of Industrial Age military organization, process and procurement.

If we are truly facing a historic fiscal correction, one that leaders like JCS Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey say will last for five to seven years — or even longer — then only a bold strategy of transformation will yield the degree of change required to meet this unsettling future. Dempsey has urgently called for undertaking “unpopular but unavoidable institutional reforms” that include shedding excess equipment and bases, reforming how weapons and services are procured and reducing redundancy across the military services. That sounds a lot like the same strategic objectives that transformation advocates strove to implement back in 2000-2001.

Today’s strategic challenges are not unlike those that prevailed prior to the tragic events of September 11, 2001. When then-presidential candidate George W. Bush delivered his “Period of Consequences” speech at The Citadel in September 1999, he called the transformation of the U.S. military a massive, but important undertaking, since the Department was still too organized to meet Cold War threats and not Information Age battles. In an eerie echo of today’s oft-heard mantra, Bush also cited the need to create forces that were smaller, more agile and less cumbersome that currently in existence. Marginal improvements were to be avoided and new technologies and strategies would be emphasized.

To help guide the magnitude of the changes being considered, the Bush Administration created the Office of Force Transformation within the Pentagon which reported directly to Secretary Rumsfeld. The Secretary tapped the visionary admiral, Art Cebrowski, to lead this new entity. As president of the Naval War College, Cebrowski had articulated for the Navy a concept called Network Centric Warfare. The emphasis was on the NETWORK rather than the CENTRIC part (which many critics failed to fully comprehend) with the net result being a networked force was a much more effective force.

With OFT, Cebrowski argued that the Defense Department was entering a new era of military competition, driven by information-age dynamics, which called for fundamental changes in how the U.S. military was organized, trained and equipped. The future was about “the small, the fast and the many,” to quote Cebrowski, and generating these new capabilities would necessarily come by dispensing with those capabilities that were “fewer, larger and slower.”

However, the prolonged campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan—and the focus they rightly demanded—sapped the energy from Transformation’s agenda and it brought it to a bureaucratic halt. This is not to imply that significant tactical and operational innovation did not take place—it most certainly did in the form of new types of units, great gains in ISR, irregular warfare doctrine, the advancement of SOF and much deeper cultural knowledge and understanding. But these achievements were not of the scale or magnitude once considered part of the Transformation agenda.

Cebrowski’s argument holds even more value given the stark choices confronting the Pentagon today and seems to reflect what current defense leaders are seeking to implement in light of both an uncertain strategic environment and an austere budget climate. Secretary Hagel’s exhortation that the department can’t continue “tweaking or chipping away” current capabilities, processes or organization but instead must tackle the harder issue of creating entirely new entities for the 21st Century is entirely within the transformation agenda.

Change is always hard. The future is always uncertain. But now is the time to press ahead with the transformational change that the department has put off for far too long. We can’t afford to wait another decade for transformation. The time is now.

Robert Holzer is senior national security manager for Gryphon Technologies TeamBlue and former director of outreach for the Pentagon’s now shuttered Office of Force Transformation.

US Missile Shield Threatens Balance in Asia-Pacific Region

SINGAPORE, June 1 (RIA Novosti) – The United States move to send a missile shield to the Pacific island of Guam could upset the strategic balance of power in the Asia-Pacific Region, a Russian defense official said on Saturday.

Speaking at the security conference Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov said: “We are concerned about the unilateral deployment of anti-ballistic missile defense elements [in the Asia-Pacific Region]. We believe such actions could undermine the foundation of the strategic balance and lead to a polarization of powers in the region.”

Antonov said “firm guarantees” were needed to prove that “the missile shield potential is adequate to the declared goals and will not upset global and regional balances.”

In April, the Pentagon said it was deploying a missile defense shield to the western Pacific island of Guam, a US territory, to protect the US and its allies in response to increasingly hostile rhetoric from North Korea.

The Russian defense official said Russia believes peace in the region should be based on a dialogue, cooperation and confidence, and warned against a military buildup.

“Russia calls for fulfilling the principle of integrity of security in the region when security of each country goes hand in hand with everyone’s security, when all the participating countries stop strengthening own security at the expense of the security of others,” he said.

RIA Novosti

US to deploy more cutting-edge military tech in face of China's military growth

SINGAPORE: Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said Saturday that the United States would live up to its promise and deploy more cutting-edge military technology in Asia and the Pacific, even in an age of austerity.

F/A-18 taking off from USS Nimitz when joining military drills in the area

Speaking a week before a summit meeting in California between President Barack Obama and China's new leader, Xi Jinping, Hagel sought to reassure Washington's nervous Asian allies - who are concerned about China's expanding naval activities - that the United States would maintain its presence in the region.

At the same, in a speech here at the International Institute for Strategic Studies' annual conference, Hagel stressed the need for more talks between the U.S. and Chinese militaries to build trust and reduce the risk of miscalculation at a time of mounting rivalry.

Overall, he said, the United States would keep its "decisive military edge," an oblique but distinct reference to U.S. military superiority. China has announced an 11.2 percent increase in military spending this year, part of its rapid military modernization.

He stressed that new technologies would entail spending fewer resources in a smarter way, saying that the Navy had launched an experimental drone from an aircraft carrier last month for the first time. It was feat, he said, that ushered in a new era of naval aviation. Unstated - but understood by many in the audience - was that China last year put into service its first aircraft carrier, an old Ukrainian vessel refitted by the Chinese.

Hagel also said the United States would deploy a solid-state laser aboard the naval vessel the Ponce next year. He said it would provide "an affordable answer" to counter "threats like missiles, swarming small boats and remotely piloted aircraft."

He said that the first of four littoral combat ships to rotate through Singapore had recently arrived and that he would visit the ship, the Freedom, on Sunday. The littoral combat ship is a new class of speedy war vessels that can operate on the ocean and in shallow coastal waters. Each costs $700 million, the Pentagon says.

After his speech, Hagel was challenged during a question-and-answer session by a Chinese delegate to the conference who said that she and China were not convinced that the United States wanted a "comprehensive" relationship with China. The new U.S. policy in Asia and the Pacific amounted to containment of China, said the delegate, Maj. Gen. Yao Yunzhu, director of the Center for China-America Defense Relations at the Academy of Military Science in Beijing.

Hagel responded that Washington wanted more transparency in military dealings with China.

"You have to talk to each other, be direct with each other, be inclusive," he said.

In a feisty address that opened the conference, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung of Vietnam laid bare the rising regional tensions by repeatedly lamenting the lack of trust between China and its neighbors, and between China and the United States, although he did not mention China by name.

Regional organizations are supposed to take care of such tensions, he said, but what is "still missing is strategic trust in the implementation of these arrangements."

As evidence of the problems, several diplomats from U.S. allies said they were concerned about a new map of the South China Sea that was issued this week by Sinomaps Press, the Chinese mapping authority.

Beijing has long claimed the islands and land "features" within what it calls a nine-dash line drawn decades ago on maps of the South China Sea, a vital trade route where China is growing more assertive.

About 80 percent of the South China Sea is inside that line, which was drawn up by China in 1947 before the Communist takeover. The boundary is not recognized by any other country but has been the basis of China's territorial claims to islands like the Scarborough Shoal, which it effectively seized from the Philippines last year.

The new map, according to Asian diplomats who have seen it, takes a further step and redesignates the nine-dash line as a national boundary. Its release was delayed from late last year so that it could be formally authorized by the Chinese senior leadership, according to a senior Asian diplomat, who declined to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Wu Shicun, a Chinese official at the conference, denied that the new map showed national boundaries. Instead, he said, it showed new lines around the Diaoyu islands, a group in the East China Sea that Japan, which calls them the Senkaku, nationalized in September, leading Beijing to claim them for itself.

At the time, China said the line around the islands was drawn in accordance with Chinese law. A recent Pentagon report said they do not comport with the U.S. Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Wu, who heads the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, said Saturday that the new map was needed because there had not been an official map of the South China Sea and the East China Sea drawn for about 20 years.

The Economic Times

U.S. rebalance to Asia-Pacific gaining steam, Pentagon chief says

(Reuters) - The U.S. military will devote more air power, ground troops and high-tech weaponry to the Asia-Pacific region as it moves ahead with a strategic rebalance, the U.S. defense chief said on Saturday in a speech that accused China of cyber incursions.

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel speaks during the first plenary session of the 12th International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) Asia Security Summit: The Shangri-La Dialogue, in Singapore June 1, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/Edgar Su

In remarks laying out his vision for regional security, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel assured allies and partners at the annual Shangri-La Security Dialogue in Singapore that the United States was fully able to continue its strategic pivot to the region despite budget constraints at home.

"It would be unwise and short-sighted to conclude ... that our commitment to the rebalance cannot be sustained," he said in prepared remarks, noting the United States represented 40 percent of global defense spending even under the "most extreme budget scenarios."

Hagel sketched out some of the region's thorniest security issues, including North Korea's effort to develop nuclear weapons and missiles, competing territorial claims in the seas around China and disruptive activity in space and cyberspace.

While noting U.S. concerns about cyber intrusions linked to the Chinese government and military, Hagel underscored his belief that resolving many regional security issues would require closer cooperation between Washington and Beijing.

"Building a positive and constructive relationship with China is ... an essential part of America's rebalance to Asia," he said. "While the U.S. and China will have our differences ... the key is for those differences to be addressed on the basis of a continuous and respectful dialogue."

On Friday, Hagel said cyber threats posed a "quiet, stealthy, insidious" danger to the United States and other nations, and called for "rules of the road" to guide behavior and avoid conflict on global computer networks.

CHINA QUESTIONS U.S. MILITARY FOCUS

In questions and answers after Hagel's speech, Chinese Major General Yao Yunzhu, an expert on U.S.-China defense relations, asked the Pentagon chief what the United States could do to reassure China it really wants a positive relationship when it is focusing so many military resources on the region.

"That's really the whole point behind closer military-to-military relationships," Hagel said. "We don't want miscalculations and misunderstandings and misinterpretations. And the only way you do that is you talk to each other, you have to be direct with each other ... And I think we're on track with that."

Hagel outlined numerous military contacts between the two countries over the past year and said the United States encouraged the responsible rise of China and other powers because they would have a vested stake in regional stability.

The speech to the Asian security summit was Hagel's first as defense secretary. But as a U.S. senator he was an early supporter of the event, led the U.S. congressional delegation to the inaugural session and has addressed the group several times.

Hagel emphasized U.S. efforts to deepen ties with allies and partners in the region through both bilateral and multilateral engagement. He announced he was inviting defense ministers from the ASEAN grouping of nations to a first-ever U.S.-hosted meeting in Hawaii next year.

"Relationships, trust and confidence are what matter most ... in the region," Hagel said.

The U.S. defense chief used the speech to underscore his long experience with Asia - from his military service in Vietnam, to business travels in China as a cell phone executive to later visits to the region as a U.S. senator.

"What I took away from all these experiences was a firm belief that the arc of the 21st century would be shaped by events here in Asia," Hagel said, adding that was clear the United States would need to rebalance its resources toward the region once it ended its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hagel's predecessor, Leon Panetta, told the Shangri-La gathering last year that the United States would commit 60 percent of its naval forces to the Asia-Pacific by 2020, a shift of about eight ships from the current deployment.

Building on that, Hagel told the conference the U.S. Air Force would commit 60 percent of its overseas-based aircraft and airmen to the region - about the same level as now - while U.S. Army troops and Marines would resume their Asia-Pacific roles as they draw down following the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hagel said in the future the Pentagon would "prioritize deployments" of its most advanced weapons systems to the Pacific, including the radar-evading F-22 Raptor jet fighter, the stealth F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the Virginia-class fast attack submarine.

He indicated the region could soon see other advanced systems as well, noting the Navy planned to deploy a directed energy laser weapon on the USS Ponce next year and last month successfully launched an experimental jet drone from an aircraft carrier for the first time.

"Combined with new concepts, doctrine and plans that integrate these new technologies and other game-changing capabilities, we will ensure freedom of action throughout the region well into the future," Hagel said.

(Reporting By David Alexander; Editing by Michael Perry)

Reuters