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WASHINGTON – The United States Secretary of the Navy has asked the Navy to establish a new fleet closer to the intersection of the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
“We can’t just trust the Seventh Fleet in Japan,” Kenneth Braithwaite said Tuesday (November 17) at the annual Naval Submarine League symposium, which is held virtually.
His comments were published in USNI News, the magazine of the United States Naval Institute.
“We want to build a new numbered fleet,” he said. “And we want to put that numbered fleet at the crossroads between the Indian and Pacific oceans, and we’re really going to have an Indo-Pacom footprint.”
“We have to look to our other allies and partners like Singapore, like India, and actually put a numbered fleet where it would be extremely relevant if, God forbid, we were to get into some kind of fight,” he said. said.
“More importantly, it can provide a much more formidable deterrent,” he added.
Braithwaite said he had not spoken to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller about the plan, but otherwise “crossed all the other T’s and dialed all the others.”
“So we are going to create the First Fleet,” he said. “And we’re going to put it, if not Singapore, we’re going to look to make it more expedition-oriented and move it across the Pacific until that’s where our allies and partners see that it could better help them as well as help us.”
Braithwaite said he will travel to India in the coming weeks to discuss security challenges and how the U.S. and Indian navies could help each other.
The United States alone could not stand up to China, and Pacific and world nations needed to help roll back Beijing militarily and economically if there was a chance that deterrence would work, he stressed.
His comments came even as the US Pacific Fleet tweeted an image of the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group joining phase two of the annual Malabar naval exercises in the northern Arabian Sea alongside the navies of Australia, India. and Japan, on November 17. They form the group called Quad – short for Quadrilateral Security Dialogue.
Analysts said the First Fleet plan tells China that the United States will not leave the region, but is getting closer.
“Send allies the same message that we stay and not only through words but actions,” said Dr. Aparna Pande, researcher and director of the Initiative on the Future of India and South Asia, in the Hudson Institute in Washington.
“The Indo Pacific is here to stay for the US military, as can be seen from the gradual progression: Fonops (South China Sea Freedom of Navigation Operations) and Allied Capacity Building,” said Dr. . Bread of.
“Pacom became Indo Pacom; there have been logistics agreements with countries in the region, including India; and this week the Malabar exercises with the Quad.”
Derek Grossman, a senior defense analyst at RAND who focuses on Indo-Pacific and national security policy, tweeted that the US Navy plans to “double the ‘Indo’ portion of the Indo-Pacific.”
“If the United States Navy goes ahead with the establishment of a First Fleet in the Indian Ocean Region, it will reaffirm that Washington continues to view Asia’s strategy through an ‘Indo-Pacific’ lens, that is, not just focusing on the Western Pacific, “Mr. Grossman told The Straits Times.
“The United States is likely to seek to leverage the Indian Ocean region as part of a strategy to compete with and counter China, and more importantly, India is increasingly favorable to such an approach.”
Currently, the United States Navy’s Seventh Fleet operates from Japan, covering a vast space to the border between India and Pakistan.
Adding a First Fleet, which the Navy has had on the books as “inactive” since it was active only from after World War II through the early 1970s, would ease some of the tension on the Seventh Fleet and allow the Two fleet commanders pay more attention to fewer allies and partners and less geographic space, USNI said.
But Mr. Braithwaite did not provide details on the proposed First Fleet strength, or how operations would be differentiated or coordinated with the Seventh Fleet.
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