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SECNAV Braithwaite Calls for New U.S. 1st Fleet Near Indian, Pacific Oceans - USNI News
This post has been updated to include additional comments from Secretary Braithwaite and a subsequent statement from a Navy spokesman. Navy Secretary Kenneth Braithwaite called for the Navy to establish a new numbered fleet closer to the border of the Indian and Pacific Oceans – perhaps out of...
news.usni.org
Navy Secretary Kenneth Braithwaite called for the Navy to establish a new numbered fleet closer to the border of the Indian and Pacific Oceans – perhaps out of Singapore – to more fully address the naval challenges in the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command area of the world.
The SECNAV said he hadn’t had a chance to talk to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller about the plan but had otherwise “crossed all the other T’s and dotted all the other I’s.”
“We want to stand up a new numbered fleet. And we want to put that numbered fleet in the crossroads between the Indian and the Pacific oceans, and we’re really going to have an Indo-PACOM footprint,” he said.
“We can’t just rely on the 7th Fleet in Japan. 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 ever to get in any kind of a dust-up,” Braithwaite continued.
“More importantly, it can provide a much more formidable deterrence. So we’re going to create the First Fleet, and we’re going to put it, if not Singapore right out of the chocks, we’re going to look to make it more expeditionary-oriented and move it across the Pacific until it is where our allies and partners see that it could best assist them as well as to assist us.”
(More at link)
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