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14 nations to take part in Indonesian-US war games
The "Garuda Shield" joint training will see militaries from 14 countries, including the United Kingdom, Australia and Japan.
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he annual military exercises between the Indonesian and United States armies will include more than a dozen countries this year, officials said Sunday, as tensions with China continue to spike in the region.
The "Garuda Shield" joint training will see militaries from 14 countries – including the United Kingdom, Australia and Japan – participate in ground drills and beach-landing exercises from August 1-14 in Indonesia's South Sumatra archipelago and the East of Borneo island, the Indonesian Army said.
A US official said an estimated 3,000 soldiers will participate in the event.
This year's expansion of military cooperation signals an increase in defense ties between the US and some Asia Pacific nations, with tensions flaring in the disputed waters.
The region abuts up to the flashpoint South China Sea – a vital waterway that Beijing claims almost in its entirety, and has been a key point of contention between several Southeast Asian nations and China during annual meetings.
But Ian Francis, chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation at the US embassy in Jakarta, called the expanded war games a "natural outgrowth of the Indonesian Military's [TNI] continuing capability and their willingness to work more broadly with partners".
"This really demonstrates that the US has a growing security cooperation relationship with Indonesia," he told AFP.
A full list of participating countries has not yet been released.
The announcement comes after a visit to Jakarta last month by Admiral John Aquilino, who leads the Indo-Pacific command – which oversees all US military activities in the region.
In a statement last month, the Army Education and Training Development Command's Training director Brig. Gen. Haryanto said the participating countries would include the UK, Canada, Papua New Guinea, Timor Leste, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore and Japan.
Indonesia is not officially a claimant in the South China Sea dispute, but the tensions ensnare Southeast Asia's 10-country regional bloc in annual meetings with Beijing.
In a letter last year, China protested against the predominantly land-based Garuda Shield military exercises last August.
Last year’s exercises took place during a months-long standoff that drove China to tell Indonesia to stop drilling for oil and natural gas in maritime territory that both countries regard as their own in the South China Sea.
Indonesia says the southern end of the South China Sea is its exclusive economic zone under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and named the area as the North Natuna Sea in 2017.
China objected to the name change and insists the waterway is within its expansive territorial claim in the South China Sea that it marks with a U-shaped "nine-dash line," a boundary found to have no legal basis by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague in 2016.
