A two-day series of maritime drills by the U.S., Australian and Philippine navies this week in the South China Sea drew a response by China’s navy with a demonstration of its own.

Four Chinese coast guard vessels entered Japan’s territorial waters near the disputed Senkaku Islands, marking the second such incursion this year amid ongoing tensions between Tokyo and Beijing.

Japan tracked four Chinese warships transiting a strategic waterway near Okinawa, a move that followed U.S.-Philippine military drills near a contested South China Sea atoll that drew complaints from Beijing.

The latest U.S. defense policy signals that Congress expects deeper cooperation with America’s friends and allies across the Indo-Pacific to counter an increasingly assertive China, according to defense experts.

Japan’s military buildup in the southwestern Nansei region is sending a message to an increasingly aggressive China that it will defend its economic interests and its people, according to defense experts.

The Chinese military is in the midst of a “historic military buildup” that has made the U.S. homeland “increasingly vulnerable,” according to the latest edition of a Pentagon report on the capabilities of the Chinese military

Japan is considering whether to sell surface-to-air missiles to the Philippines as Tokyo moves to loosen export restrictions and respond to rising security threats in the region, according to a local media report.