Mière, Christian Le

Abstract
The announcement of a reformed US defence strategy by President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta in early January 2012 confirmed a pivot towards the Asia-Pacific as commitments to war fighting in the Middle East and Central Asia subside. Obama, Panetta and General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, briefed reporters on 5 January on America’s new strategic guidance document, ‘Sustaining US Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense’. The product of a review of US defence priorities ‘at a moment of transition’ for the nation, the document notes that the United States will ‘of necessity rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region’. The principle of the Asia pivot was also signalled by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a November 2011 Foreign Policy article in which she noted that ‘one of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will … be to lock in a substantially increased investment – diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise – in the Asia-Pacific region’.
While ‘Sustaining US Leadership’ did not delve into the specifics of the Asia pivot, some of those particulars are now coming into focus, particularly for the US Navy and Marine Corps. In an article in the December 2011 edition of Proceedings, new Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenart noted that the US Navy will ‘station several of our newest littoral combat ships at Singapore’s naval facility’, following on from an announcement made by then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates at the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in June. Greenart also put forward the possibility that by 2025 P-8A Poseidon aircraft or ‘unmanned broad area maritime surveillance aerial vehicles’ could be deployed periodically to the Philippines or Thailand ‘to help those nations with maritime domain awareness’.
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