Japan's new agency for defense equipment procurement is tasked with utilizing advanced civilian technology for public purposes and needs to learn from the United States how to make procurement less costly and more efficient, its chief said.

Speaking at a think tank in Washington on Wednesday, Hideaki Watanabe, commissioner of the Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Agency, said a main challenge for the agency is to "secure a technological advantage" over other countries in the face of an increasingly uncertain security situation surrounding Japan.

The agency, part of the Defense Ministry, was established on Sunday. One of its tasks is to handle overseas transfers of weapons and other defense equipment under the relaxed arms export rules adopted by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's government last year, which marked a major shift from Japan's decades-old arms embargo policy.