Asia (bbabo.net), - U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said his country's armed forces are building more "lethal forces" in the Asia-Pacific region (APR) as part of efforts to ensure that China does not dominate here " the way he intends,” reports Bloomberg today, December 4.

“China is the only country with both the will and the ability to change this region and the international order in accordance with its authoritarian preferences,” the Pentagon chief argued at the Ronald Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California last Saturday. “So let me be clear – we won’t let that happen.”

Austin said the US will "maintain and hone" its combat edge and strengthen its military presence "to create a more lethal, mobile and distributed force grouping."

At the same time, he referred to the latest B-21 stealth bomber, introduced the day before, on December 2, as a "key element of the deterrence strategy" in the Asia-Pacific region, and indicated that the United States was charting "the best path forward for Australia" so that this American an ally in the region "obtained a nuclear submarine as soon as possible".

Minister Austin's speech actually became a new warning shot at Beijing and President Xi Jinping personally, despite the fact that the United States verbally seeks to prevent tensions in its relations with China from getting out of control, Bloomberg notes.

In its latest report on the military power of Asia's largest power, released late last month, the Joe Biden administration said that China intends to build the most powerful army in the world by 2049, the centenary of the proclamation of the PRC.

Austin outlined other "deterrence measures" in the Asia-Pacific region, saying the Pentagon has focused on the region as a major theater of operations, including seeking faster troop mobilization and investing in military building, allied logistics .

As bbabo.net reported, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Beijing's military budget has been increasing for 27 consecutive years. China currently has two aircraft carriers, hundreds of long-range and medium-range ballistic missiles, thousands of warplanes, and a navy that outnumbers even the US in terms of surface and underwater platforms. Meanwhile, China's nuclear arsenal is growing exponentially. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Celestial Empire has about 350 nuclear warheads, twice as many as during the Cold War. US intelligence predicts that by 2027 this stock could double again to 700. New mines for nuclear missiles are being built in the northwest of the country.

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