The two-week exercise will involve more than 10 countries, around 2,000 American troops and as many Indonesian soldiers, according to the US embassy in Indonesia.
Japan, Australia and Singapore will join the drills, while countries including India, South Korea, Papua New Guinea, Canada, France and the UK will observe.
The exercise is “an important expression of the multilateral cooperation that is ongoing between armies and land power, and the joint force across the Indo-Pacific,” General Charles Flynn, commander of the US Army Pacific, told Nikkei recently.
“Increasing the inter-operability between our multinational partners, as we’re training, as we’re building readiness, and as the relationships between the countries, the armies, the units and the individuals – and the leaders that are there – it’s so vital,” Flynn said.
Japan’s Ground Self-Defence Force will fully participate in Garuda Shield for the first time. Japanese forces will join American and Indonesian troops on a long-distance flight on American aircraft from Guam before parachuting onto the Baturaja training area on Sumatra for land-based drills.
Flynn said he invited Japan to join at a greater level shortly after the 2021 exercise, to which Tokyo sent an observer. “It’s a great example of US, Indonesian, Japanese cooperation and collaboration” to increase Japan’s participation, Flynn said.
The exercise comes amid tensions between the US and China in the South China Sea. At an event held this past Tuesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, Ely Ratner, assistant US secretary of defence for Indo-Pacific security affairs, said there has been a dramatic increase in Chinese military ships and aircraft acting aggressively toward other forces in the region.
If the People’s Liberation Army “continues this pattern of behaviour, it is only a matter of time before there is a major incident or accident in the region,” Ratner said.
While the focus of Indo-Pacific security has generally been on naval and air forces, Flynn said that the Indo-Pacific region contains a quarter of the world’s land mass and that many Asian militaries are heavy on ground forces.
“Land power, armies, working together, I often refer to it as ‘the security architecture that binds the region together,’ because of the central role that armies play in protecting the national sovereignty of those countries in the region,” he said.