Military leaders from 19 countries hold secret Sydney meeting
Melbourne, Aug. 14 (PTI): Top military brass of 19 countries, including India and the US, had a "secret meeting" in Sydney in the run up to an Asia-Pacific summit in the city next month, the Australian Army Chief revealed today.
The presence of the military leaders in Sydney at the same time and at the same venue last week for the fifth Pacific Armies Chiefs Conference was considered too risky to publicise, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.
"We were aware that there's a lot going on in Sydney and we didn't want to make a fuss," Lt Gen Peter Leahy told ABC in reference to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Sydney on September 8-9, which will be attended by leaders of 21 countries including US President George W Bush.
The military leaders got together to discuss regional and global security issues. They discussed the types of new missions modern armies have to carry out, and ways to improve their performance, the report said.
Leahy said the complexity of modern security environments make for some real issues.
"We're ... working in areas that we perhaps haven't planned to work in, for example the work that we've all been doing to assist the disaster relief, some of the humanitarian operations, the peacekeeping operations, and those sorts of things as well as what we're pretty well prepared to do as the conventional operations," he said.
The military leaders who attended the conference were from Australia, India, the United States, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, Japan, South Korea, Mongolia, Nepal, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Tonga, and Vietnam.
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