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The Federal Government is preparing for a substantial expansion in military co-operation with the United States that could result in thousands more American troops training and transiting through Australia.
Defence Minister Robert Hill yesterday said the Government was ready to step up joint exercises with US forces, to allow the Americans to conduct their own training operations within Australia and to expand facilities for US Navy ship crews to be rotated through Australian ports.
Senator Hill dismissed recent speculation that Washington would ask permission to establish bases in Australia to reposition some of its large troop deployments in Japan and South Korea.
But he told The Age that the Government was ready to be "cooperative and helpful" in providing greater access as part of a continuing review by Washington of the positioning of its forces in Asia and around the world.
Senator Hill met US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz at the weekend on the sidelines of a regional security conference in Singapore, but said the issue of bases had not been raised.
Mr Wolfowitz told the conference that the US military was reviewing its "worldwide footprint" to recognise advances in technology and the need for greater force mobility. But he rejected a report in the Los Angeles Times last week that plans were being drawn up to move troops from bases in north Asia to Australia, Singapore and Malaysia.
"Maybe somebody down at the eighth level of the bureaucracy had dreamed up the idea of moving all our resources from Okinawa to Australia, but I can assure you that's not going to happen," he said.
Senator Hill said the Pentagon review was expected to lead to a request for greater military co-operation with Australia, which already hosts key US intelligence facilities.
"They will look for increased exercises and the use of some of our facilities for exercising either jointly or it might even be some of their own exercises," he said.
"We provide extensive facilities for Singapore and Singapore even prepositions equipment in Australia for its own exercises. So if the Americans asked us, it would be hard for us to offer them less than what we've offered Singapore."
Senator Hill also flagged the likely expansion of a program under which American warships use Australia as a transit point to rotate crews, who are flown in and out of the country to avoid the ships having to return tothe US.
The first so-called "sea swap" took place in Perth earlier this year, with a US ship transiting from the Persian Gulf. A second is planned later in the year.
"These are the sort of ways in which we can facilitate what they call their 'transformation of military affairs' - which basically means with new capabilities you don't have to have such mass (of troops), on the ground, forward-deployed. We would seek to be co-operative and helpful," Senator Hill said.
"We see that as the way the world is going, particularly with one global superpower, but we think people have misunderstood what that means and translated into the old way, which is large, permanent bases."
Many of the proposed changes were driven by economics and the extent to which weapons systems had reduced the need for large formations of troops. "It's a different way of doing business," he said.
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