Visiting United States Defence Secretary Lloyd J Austin, who met Prime Minister Narendra Modi Friday evening shortly after arriving on a three-day visit, met on Saturday met Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar besides National Security Adviser Ajit Doval for a comprehensive review of India-US defence and security ties. 

"We are keen to work together to realise the full potential of the India-US Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership," Singh said.

"Our discussions today focussed on our wide ranging defence cooperation and expanding military-to-military engagement across services, information sharing, cooperation in emerging sectors of defence, and mutual logistics support," Singh said.

"We reviewed the wide gamut of bilateral and multilateral exercises and agreed to pursue enhanced cooperation with the US Indo-Pacific Command, Central Command and Africa Command. Acknowledging that we have in place the foundational agreements, LEMOA, COMCASA and BECA, we discussed steps to be taken to realise their full potential for mutual benefit," he said.

"I conveyed my appreciation to Secretary Austin for participation of US in Aero India 2021 along with a business delegation. I invited US industry to take advantage of India’s liberalized foreign direct investment (FDI) policies in the defence sector. We both agreed that there are opportunities for collaboration in defence industry," Singh said.

He said: "The recent Leaders’ Summit of India, USA, Japan and Australia under the Quad framework emphasized our resolve to maintain a free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific region. We discussed the need for enhanced capacity building to address some of the non-traditional challenges such as oil spills and environment disasters, drug trafficking, Illegal, Unreported, Unregulated (IUU) fishing, etc."

Jaishankar tweeted: "Welcomed US @SecDef Lloyd Austin at MEA. A wide-ranging conversation on the global strategic situation. Look forward to working with him on enhancing our Strategic Partnership."