'Ultimately it's a sovereign decision for Australia to make, but we're certainly not deterred in our cooperation with Australia,' he said.ДЄ spokesperson for the Defence Department said it was finalising work on the review of the port lease ordered by the federal government earlier this year. Mr Goldman told the ABC he understood the federalВ government 'is taking a very hard look at. Mr Shoebridge said he considered any increased risk is mitigated by the deterrent effectВ the military power brings the region.Д®xperts including Mr Shoebridge say the controversial lease of the Darwin port to Chinese company Landbridge presents an obvious 'constraint'В onВ expansion of the US presence in the Top End. 'The problem with those sorts of places is that they're also places you would target in a conflict, particularly if you're a large power like China which has the capability to do that.' 'The United States military has got large concentrations of forces in a small number of places,' he said. He said the military build-up in Australia's north was not without risk. Michael Shoebridge, the director of defence, strategy and national security at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said northern Australia was becoming anotherВ staging point for US personnel, logistics and resources in the Asia Pacific. There were only 200 marines in the first rotational force in 2012, a year after President Obama's visit to the NT marked a new chapter in US-Australian military co-operation.ДЄt its peak in 2019, 2,500 troops rotated through Darwin on six-month deployments, along with a suite of aircraft, weapons, and vehicles.ДЄs well as war-fighting exercises, the rotationВ includes a mock natural disaster response scenario -В 'Exercise Crocodile Response' wasВ held this year in June, with the NT'sВ Tiwi islands standing in for an Indo-Pacific location. 'I can see only getting bigger, more integrated, more ambitious and better in the future,' he said.ДЄsked if a permanent presence of marines in the Top End was a possibility, Mr Goldman said he didn't want to get ahead of the discussions still underway.Д«ut, he said, 'certainly anything's possible, including that.' From hundreds to thousands over a decade In an interview with the ABC,В the US's Charges d'Affaires in Australia, Michael Goldman, said talks on the subject were ongoing. The AUKUS announcement has fuelled more speculation about possible expansion of the marines' presence in the Top End, which Defence Minister Peter Dutton has already said he would like to see. 'There's absolutely no doubt in my mind, that we would be able to work together. 'The ability of the Marine Rotational Force-Darwin and the ADF to conduct this exercise during a pandemic is testament to the strength of our partnership,' he said. The US's force commander in Darwin, Colonel David Banning, said this year's record-setting effortВ - executed as the pandemic continued and changed - was a display of the enhanced 'interoperability' between the two forces that the rotation was set up to achieve. Last year's Koolendong training exercise was smaller,В affected by the onset of the COVID-19В pandemic.

The wargames wrapped up only days before the bombshell announcement of the historic AUKUS security pact, signed between the US, Australia and the United Kingdom after years of intensifying diplomatic tensions with China.

This year'sВ Exercise Koolendong was the largest combined training exercise since then-US President Barack Obama announced the formation of the Marine Rotational Force-Darwin during a visit to the NT in 2011. In the tropical Top End dry season, more than 2,000 military personnel from the United States and Australia fought side-by-sideВ in a live-fire war-fighting exercise on a cattle station-turned-military training ground 600 kilometres south-west of Darwin.

Massive Howitzer guns blasted high-velocity shells, armoured personnel carriers and tanks trundled across blazing hot scrub-land and rockets and war planes roared overhead.

Darwin project hack