 |
| US Marines disembark an Osprey during training in Australia |
Matthew L. Schehl,
Marine Corps Times
The U.S. still plans to send 2,500 Marines to Australia each year — but that large of a rotation won’t happen until at least 2020.
American and Australian officials are still slogging through the details of sending a full Marine air-ground task force Down Under some five years after President Obama announced plans to send 2,500 Marines there annually starting in 2016.
The task force, known as Marine Rotational Force-Darwin, spends about six months of each year deployed to Australia's Northern Territory. The Marines began deploying there soon after the Obama administration announced its Pacific pivot, a policy that reoriented resources after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to counter China's rise.
Australian defense officials declined to say exactly why the timeline was pushed back, but confirmed they’re working with the U.S. to bring a full MAGTF through Darwin "by around 2020."
"Each year the U.S. and Australia work closely together to determine the exact size and composition of each rotation in addition to the activities that the Marine Rotational Force-Darwin will undertake during their six-month deployment to the region," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
There are currently 1,250 Marines in Australia. The rotations have expanded to a battalion landing team since the first company-size deployment — about 200 Marines — in April 2012.
Since then, there have been about six rounds of negotiations between the countries as officials hammer out how costs should be shared and facilities used, said Andrew Shearer, a former Australian national security adviser who's now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
“What seems to have happened is basically those negotiations have bogged down pretty badly,” he said. “I think that’s quite unfortunate.”
While another 1,250 more Marines in Australia aren't likely to tip the strategic balance in the western Pacific, Shearer said delaying the plan sends the wrong signal at a time when tensions are growing in the South China Sea.
Read the full story at DefenseNews