'US partnering with India to enable it play broader stabilising role in Indo-Pacific'

Washington: The US wants to make sure that it is partnering with India in its defence modernisation plans and to better enable it to play a "broader stabilising role" in the strategic Indo-Pacific region, according to a senior Pentagon official. The Biden administration has taken several steps to strengthen the India-US defence relationship since it assumed power in January 2021.

"As India is taking a look at how it accelerates its own defence modernisation, in order to expand the role that it already plays as what I would describe as a net security provider in the Indian Ocean region, but more broadly in the Indo-Pacific, the United States wants to make sure that we are partnering with India to better enable it to play that broader stabilising role in the region," the senior defence official told PTI on Saturday.

"We have been very focused on ways that we are advancing interoperability between the US and the Indian military," the official from the Pentagon said on condition of anonymity.

"Obviously, the signature initiative I would highlight here is the tri-service exercise that we have between, which from our view is better equipping both of our militaries to be prepared for the kinds of challenges we will face in the future, which will require joint responses on both sides," the official said. The official, however, refrained from describing the kind of responses that the two countries would have to their common challenges, amidst China's aggressive.

The militaries of the two countries have coordinated in the past during several natural disasters. "A lot of the exercises we're talking about are really focused on a lot of the disasters and other kinds of crises that we would see happening all of the time in the Indo-Pacific region," the official said.