Indo-Pacific security cooperation is increasingly key for cultivating and improving defense relationships and capabilities, as strategic competition has intensified in the region in recent decades.
Since its founding in 1947, the United States Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM) has endeavored to build enduring alliances and partnerships to enhance the strength of regional forces and sustain peace. FORUM has chronicled such security cooperation since the magazine’s launch in 1975.
The U.S. strives to ensure regional security through such relationships and by promoting economic development of nations. The forward deployment of U.S. forces, which continued after the Cold War, has deterred military confrontation in hot spots including the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan, and the East China and South China seas, analysts said.
USINDOPACOM uses a full-spectrum approach to security cooperation, embracing interactions, programs and activities conducted with partner forces and their institutions, including exercises, training, armaments cooperation, information sharing and military sales.
Humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) operations are a cornerstone of this security cooperation. Among its early reports, FORUM noted that after Typhoon Olga struck the Philippines in 1976, U.S. military personnel evacuated more than 1,900 people and delivered more than 370,000 pounds of relief supplies, including 9,340 gallons of fuel. USINDOPACOM’s HADR missions have expanded, with U.S. forces responding to more than 45 natural disasters in 17 Indo-Pacific nations over the past three decades.
USINDOPACOM also provides education and training opportunities to help partner forces’ personnel enhance their professional skills. In 2022, for example, the U.S. Army established the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center (JPMRC) to enable the U.S. and its Allies and Partners to demonstrate combat-credible forces in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. With contributors from every U.S. military branch, the JPMRC has involved participants and observers from nations including Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mongolia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand and the United Kingdom.
To further training and build interoperability, USINDOPACOM and Allies and Partners conduct hundreds of large-scale recurring exercises, many of which have become increasingly multilateral in the past decade, as China’s increasingly aggressive territorial claims and activities, particularly in the East China and South China seas, have sparked new security challenges.
To counter such aggression and foster collaboration, the U.S. and its Allies and Partners created security mechanisms such as the Quadrilateral partnership, or Quad, among Australia, India, Japan and the U.S.; and the Australia, Japan and U.S. strategic dialogue. Such minilateral forums address practical challenges of strategic competition.
At the same time, the U.S. supports the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in shaping regional security relationships beyond the group’s 10 member states. Over the decades, ASEAN has built a range of platforms, such as the ASEAN Regional Forum, ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting Plus and Expanded ASEAN Maritime Forum, to promote dialogue with key regional powers and facilitate economic integration and nontraditional security cooperation.
Moving forward, USINDOPACOM seeks to continue enhancing security cooperation with Allies and Partners to sustain regional peace and achieve a shared vision of a world that is free, open, secure and prosperous.
