The Disaster Management Exchange (DME) is one of the key security coordination events the U.S. conducts with the PLA each year; the DME has matured from basic visits and briefings into a substantive exchange that uses table top and practical field exchanges to focus and facilitate risk reduction and interaction between the U.S. Army and the PLA.
Transcript
For China’s tsunamis, earthquakes and floods are all disasters that are affecting the Indo-Pacific region with increasing frequency. It’s not a question of if the United States and China will be requested to provide a disaster response, it’s a matter of when such a request will come. We must focus on learning, but we must also focus on exchanging ideas, opinions and cultures.
This exchange brings us together. And it brings us together to understand the best ways to work with each other and with other nations to support just such a request. No one nation can do it all by themselves, and the best results, we know from experience, are achieved by working together.