Article Posted on : - Oct 04, 2012

WASHINGTON (PTI): Apart from consolidating its defence trade with India, the US is now moving towards technology sharing and co-production, a top Pentagon official has said.

"We're moving well beyond purely defence trade with India, towards technology sharing and coproduction," Deputy Secretary of Defence, Ashton Carter, told a Washington think-tank on Wednesday.

Early this year, Carter was entrusted by Defence Secretary, Leon Panetta, to remove bureaucratic hurdles in defence trade with India.

"We're deepening our security cooperation, technology sharing and defence trade with India, another state so important to our rebalance and, we believe, to the broader security and prosperity of the 21st century," Carter said.

"We believe that given the inherent links between India and the United States -- in values, in political philosophy -- that the only limit to our cooperation with India should be our independent strategic decisions, because any two states can differ, not bureaucratic obstacles," he said.

"So I personally am working daily to remove those obstacles," said the top Pentagon official in his address on China's military challenge at the Woodrow Wilson Centre, an eminent American think-tank.

In his remarks, Carter emphasised that America's presence in the Asia Pacific region provides stability to the region.

"The stability provided in important measure by the United States military presence in the region helped first Japan and South Korea to rise and prosper, then Southeast Asia to rise and prosper, and now, yes, China and, in a different way, India to rise and prosper," he said.

"Working with all of them, we intend to continue to play that positive, pivotal, stabilising role. That's what the rebalance is all about," Carter said.