South China Sea

During a visit to Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, this past weekend, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was asked about the Pentagon's strategy focus shift to the Pacific and the role that port city might play in helping alleviate tensions in the South China Sea. His answer:

The new defense strategy that we have put in place for the United States represents a number of key elements that will be tested in the Asia-Pacific region.

One of those principles in our strategy is the ability to be agile, to be quickly deployable, to be flexible, and to be on the cutting edge of technology.  And in a region as large as the Asia-Pacific region, agility is going to be extremely important in terms of our ability to be able to move quickly.

And another principle obviously is the one that I spoke to in the Shangri-la Dialogue, which is that we are rebalancing our forces to the Asia-Pacific region so that in the future, 60 percent of our forces will be located in this region.

For that reason, it will be particularly important to be able to work with partners like Vietnam, to be able to use harbors like this as we move our ships from our ports on the West Coast, ports or stations here in the Pacific.

In addition, we are stressing our effort to try to develop partnerships with countries in this region to develop their capabilities so that they can better defend and secure themselves.  And for that to happen, it is very important that we be able to protect key maritime rights for all nations in the South China Sea and elsewhere.  That’s why we think it’s very important to work on -- with the ASEAN nations on a code of conduct that all nations in this region -- all nations in this region -- can abide by.

And the last point is that to do this we need to obviously build a stronger defense relationship with countries like Vietnam and elsewhere so that we can help provide them the training assistance and whatever they need to try to improve their capabilities to be part of the family of nations in this great region that can advance security and prosperity for all.