BANDUNG, Indonesia, Aug 31 (Reuters) \u2013 The United States and Indonesia launched their annual joint military exercises on Monday, the first since announcing a new defence partnership this year, with drills \u200bfrom tactical airborne jumps and missile firing to jungle training \u200cand cyber defence.<\/p>\n
\u201cSuper Garuda Shield\u201d, held annually since 2006, will run until September 11 and include more than 4,700 personnel, with 13 other countries taking part including Japan, South Korea, Australia and Canada.<\/p>\n
The exercises will take place in several regions \u200cof \u200bIndonesia and will include infiltration drills, firing \u2060of stinger missiles, jungle training \u2060and naval manoeuvres.<\/p>\n
This edition comes after the two countries\u2019 defence ministers signed a major defence cooperation partnership in April, which Jakarta has said will include U.S. support in its military modernisation initiatives \u200band training of its troops.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are not just meeting for another annual training cycle. We are writing a historic new chapter in \u2060our bilateral relationship,\u201d Major General Patrick \u2060Ellis, U.S. Army Commanding General of the 4th Infantry \u200bDivision, said in a speech opening the exercises in Bandung.<\/p>\n
Indonesia has long \u200bmaintained a foreign policy of non-alignment, with President Prabowo Subianto \u200cvowing to befriend all nations and maintain good ties with both the United States and China.<\/p>\n
Indonesia earlier this month agreed to boost its military ties with Beijing during a visit by China\u2019s foreign and defence \u2060ministers.<\/p>\n
Super Garuda Shield will also include humanitarian disaster relief efforts.<\/p>\n
Natural disasters like earthquakes and landslides are common in Indonesia, an archipelago of 17,000 islands \u2060and more than 100 \u200cactive volcanoes that sits on the seismically\u00a0active \u201cPacific Ring \u2060of Fire\u201d. A 7.7-magnitude quake earlier this month \u200bin East \u200cNusa Tenggara killed more than 100 people.<\/p>\n
An ongoing \u200bbattle for \u2060Indonesia has also been wildfires that burned nearly 95,000 hectares (234,750 acres) of land in July, almost doubling the damage done in the previous six months, with haze blanketing the region and causing respiratory problems and school closures.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Dicky Nawazaki in Bandung and Stanley Widianto in Jakarta; Editing \u200bby Martin Petty)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BANDUNG, Indonesia, Aug 31 (Reuters) \u2013 The United States and Indonesia launched their annual joint military exercises on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":831930,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-831929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=831929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831929\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/831930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=831929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=831929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=831929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}