The United States has disclosed plan to send 1,200 Marines to Australia in coming weeks amid increasing tensions between Western nations and China over COVID-19.
The was disclosed by Minister for Defence, Linda Reynolds.
Reynolds said, “The deployment demonstrated Australia’s close defence relationship with the United States.”
The main force will begin arriving in Darwin in early June but an advance party of 54 Marines has been stationed in the Northern Territory for two months.
The deployment of Marine Rotational Force, which was earlier scheduled in March, was jointly postponed by the US and Australian governments due to the coronavirus pandemic.
That month US Defense Secretary Mark Esper barred almost all official movement overseas for military personnel.
According to Reynolds, all Marines will undergo 14 days of quarantine when they touch down in Australia and be submitted to a rigorous coronavirus testing regime.
“This year’s rotation had originally been scheduled to involve 2,500 Marines, about the same number of troops who were stationed in Darwin last year,” she said.
“The risk of spreading COVID-19 into vulnerable remote Aboriginal communities was also considered too great for the rotation to go ahead.
“The troops will already have been in isolation for a fortnight since arriving at their staging base in Okinawa, Japan,” she added.
“Each Marine will be screened for COVID-19 four days before departing Japan and tested again in Darwin before and after quarantine,” she concluded.
