US destroyer and PLA warship team up on drill
First joint anti-piracy exercise is acclaimed as a success and is seen to have symbolic significance
Sino-US military exchanges reached a significant high-water mark this week with the first joint anti-piracy exercises between the two navies.
Both militaries confirmed yesterday that the five-hour exercise took place in the Gulf of Aden on Monday - a day before Defence Minister General Liang Guanglie , met his US counterpart, Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, in Beijing and pledged to expand such contact.
Liang said the People's Liberation Army and the Pentagon should enhance co-operation in non-traditional areas, including anti-piracy efforts and medical rescues - something Washington has been pushing for some time. "This will inject new meaning into military-to-military ties," Liang said during Panetta's first visit to Beijing.
Previous exercises had been limited to search-and-rescue and coastguard operations.
A statement from the Bahrain-based US Fifth Fleet referred to Monday's "unique" operation, which saw the guided missile destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill team up with the PLA naval frigate Yiyang, a modern multi-role warship. They staged a mock boarding, search and seizure operation on a suspected pirate vessel.
"The focus was on bilateral interoperability in detecting, boarding and searching suspected vessels as well as the ability of both Chinese and American naval assets to respond to pirated vessels," the US statement said. "Executing the boarding side-by-side as a combined US-Chinese team, the team successfully searched the vessel and provided assistance to the role-playing mariners."