Gina Harkins – Military.com May 21, 2021
Tens of thousands of sailors and Marines will participate in the biggest U.S. naval exercise in a generation to test how the services will fight across vast distances as they prepare for possible conflict with China or Russia.
Aircraft carriers, submarines, planes, unmanned vessels, and about 25,000 personnel will participate in Large Scale Exercise 2021, which will begin in late summer. The massive exercise will span 17 time zones with sailors and Marines in the U.S., Africa, Europe and the Pacific joining
Live forces will participate in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
“LSE is more than just training, it is leveraging the integrated fighting power of multiple naval forces to share sensors, weapons, and platforms across all domains in contested environments, globally,” said Adm. Christopher Grady, commander of U.S. Fleet Forces, told Military.com in an email.
The exercise, he added, will be the first in a series “that will continue to push the envelope of what it means to be the superior maritime force.”
The Navy and Marine Corps are working more closely after decades of missions focused on the Middle East. As competition for influence builds with China and Russia, the Department of the Navy is shifting its focus from a largely land-based fight against terror groups to deterring aggression.
Three dozen units will participate in physical portions of the large-scale exercise, while more than 50 will join the exercise remotely, said Lt. Cmdr. Tabitha Klingensmith, with U.S. Fleet Forces Command. Participating units will include personnel from all three Marine expeditionary forces and sailors from the Navy’s Second, Third, Sixth, Seventh and Tenth fleets.
While the U.S. has held big naval exercises like Bold Alligator and Rim of the Pacific, Klingensmith said the training events are growing in scope and complexity. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday has referred to the upcoming large-scale exercise as the biggest naval training event in a generation.
That’s because combining live and virtual participants “will expand the playing field beyond what has ever been achieved in live-only exercises,” Klingensmith said.
“LSE 2021 will use technologies similar to what you see in virtual video gaming environments to expand the number of participants by linking commands and units around the globe virtually, thereby increasing the number of players, real and synthetic, to better replicate the realistic scale of scenarios the Navy and Marine Corps team is likely to face in the future,” she added.
The sailors and Marines participating will test several concepts they’re likely to encounter in a possible conflict with China. Scenarios will test the sailors and Marines’ ability to conduct distributed operations; expeditionary advanced-base operations; littoral operations in a contested environment; and command and control in a contested environment.
“We’ve been applying warfighting concepts like Distributed Maritime Operations … to fleet battle problems at the strike group level to rapidly advance organizational learning,” Grady said. “LSE 2021 is important because we will apply those lessons learned at-scale to further our employment of synchronized, integrated operations across all domains globally, to ensure we remain the superior maritime force in a high-end fight.”
The Navy and Marine Corps are finalizing details on the exercise, but Klingensmith said they plan to incorporate at least one unmanned platform — the Autonomous Littoral Connector, a surface vessel that can provide logistics support from shore to ship.
That’s traditionally a Navy mission, she said, but during the exercise it’ll be under the command and control of the Marine Corps. The 2021 updates to Commandant Gen. David Berger’s Force Design plans for the Marine Corps call for that service to — in partnership with the Navy — explore developing “littoral maneuver groups” to operate the future light amphibious warship.
At least now untold millions of Americans will know what they’ll be starving for this year. Soon they’ll be wondering what the country’s worth saving for, and maybe they should give the other side a try. It can’t be much worse and the chances of things improving must be better than under their captured DC regime.
Wasting money while wasting time.
This is getting tiresome and damn expensive. Worse still, one does it an the others feel they must. The UK worries about Russian ships in the English Channel, when there have always been Russian ships there, so the US Navy has to hold a planet wide drill which is certain to inspire Canada to scoot some Frigates around in the Azov Sea and New Zealand to hold fire drills off the Chinese coast.
Meanwhile the treasuries get more broke. Insanity!
This is a classic example of propaganda straight from Langley’s basement. The US is impotent, the Russians and probably the Chinese, can jam US ships and planes.
US Castries can’t operate in military theaters which they were designed for.
The idea behind aircraft carriers, is that they can be in a fallback position where they can project air power.
China, Russia, Iran & North Korea all have weapons/missiles that put carrier strike groups and their planes beyond the military theatres. Okay, they can use refueling, but this would be in the combat theater, not good if your refueling plane gets shot down and your useless prized F35’s end up ditching in the Pacific, because they’ve no fuel.
Take HMS Queen Lizzy, if this carrier were in the South China Sea and the Chinese started firing missiles at it, I’d give the carrier a 50% chance of surviving the first hour after the Chinese launched their missiles, 100s all aimed at the same rust bucket. Some will be stopped, but you only need a few strikes out of 100 missiles. Planes on the deck, in the hanger or in the air, most would be lost.
Just to set the naval balance in context. China now has more naval ships than the US, but the US has more tonnage and has more firepower. But don’t be fooled, these new Chinese naval ships are well made and very modern. While the US has the edge, they are spread all over the world. So I respect of China and its local interests, China is by far top dog and given that US carriers are redundant, I am just laughing with embarrassment over HMS Lizzy going to thr South China Sea.
Back in the 1970s, the American Admiral, Rickover, the “Father of nuclear navy,” had to answer this question before the U.S. Senate, “How long would our aircraft carriers survive in a battle against the Russian Navy?”
His response caused disillusionment, “Two or three days before they sink, maybe a week if they stay in the harbour.”
the last convulsions of babylonian
Leviathan (TPM Barnett, globalist jew)
The time of aircraft carriers is past – they have no use other than for bullying small nations without advanced weaponry.
An American military appreciation of a few years ago stated that in the event of all-out war, the US surface fleet would be gone in a matter of days.
Biggest Navy Exercise in a Generation Will Include 25,000 Personnel Across 17 Time Zones
I hope that they will have Naval Exercise as well with one or two Aircraft Carriers in the Caspian Sea, to show the Russkies that the US Navy can sail where ever it pleases ?
We are probably looking at the next Gulf of Tonkin incident.