Article Posted on : - Jan 12, 2014

A file photo.

WASHINGTON (PTI): The US is going ahead with its Asia Pacific rebalance plan that it believes is essential for maintaining peace in the region and will also stay regionally engaged, US Army Chief General Raymond Odierno has said.

"We're rebalancing to the Asia Pacific, which is the defence strategic guidance that we developed at the beginning of 2012."

"But in addition to that, it is also about us staying engaged regionally," Odierno said on Tuesday.

He said the US Army is pushing forward with a concept of regionally aligned forces, where they align forces with the combatant commanders, whether it be in the Asia region, Africa, Middle East, Southern Command, in order to provide them the resources necessary for them to do their job.

"That's to prevent conflict, build security structures that allow us to be safe and continue to grow our economy as we move forward, allow us to help shape the environment for the future, and then, if necessary, and as a last resort, be prepared to win, if that's what we have to do in order to protect our own security," he said.

He said that the changes would be visible in this year itself but this entire process would unfold over a period of next five-six years.

The United States currently has somewhere between 84,000- 88,000 soldiers with the US Pacific command.

"That's quite an investment that we have in the Army that's available to the Pacific commander in order for him to prevent conflict, shape the environment within the Pacific command," he said.

Odierno said that they have adopted various means to achieve this goal.

"We're doing that through rotational presence. We're doing that from building partner capacity. We're doing that from building relationships throughout the region through several different exercises that we do on a regular basis.And we're going to continue to do that," he said.

The decorated General refused to blame countries like China and Russia on increasing cyber-attacks on the US.

"I'm not going to point fingers at China, Iran or Russia or anybody else, but it's about a capability that people can now exploit in order to try to gain advantages," he said.

And from a military perspective, it's about, how do we use that in order to - how do we understand that to protect our networks, to protect our systems? And how does that impact future warfare because it is going to impact future warfare and we have to understand that," he said.

Emphasising that the US has to recognise that this is a new form of people attempting potentially to influence what's going on in the United States, he said: "I think it's incumbent on us to improve our capability."

The US Army is preparing itself for any cyber-attack, he said.

Though the Army has some capability in dealing with cyber-attacks but there's some "very important and fundamental legal and policy issues" that have to be worked through, he said.

"And so for me, that's probably the most important thing," Odierno said.