Why the Pacific is full of warships right now

July is peak travel season, and not just for school friends you haven’t seen since graduation but who are now flooding your feed with ‘candid’ snaps in their Santorini whites. But also for warships heading to the Pacific for naval exercises. 

First, there’s China and Russia, who are now wrapping up their annual three-day Joint Sea drills in the South China Sea – they also steamed a separate patrol through the Sea and out across the broader western and northern Pacific.

For the exercises, a Chinese destroyer took the lead, accompanied by six smaller vessels (half each from China and Russia) – they got busy with live-fire drills, reconnaissance, search and rescue, and joint air defence activities.

Not to be outdone, the US has gathered 28 other nations for the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercises, the world’s largest. They started out in 1971 among the ‘Five Eyes’ (🇦🇺🇨🇦🇳🇿🇬🇧🇺🇸) and have since run every two years, expanding to European allies plus partners like Colombia and Indonesia.

This year, the Avengers-style drills run for five weeks from June 27th to August 1st, with 40 surface ships, three subs, 14 national land forces, 150 aircraft, and 25,000 personnel. They’ll simulate anti-submarine warfare, multi-ship surface warfare, and multinational amphibious landings.

So why conduct exercises?

They’re basically dress rehearsals for a war. Nothing gets close to the real thing, but the idea is to at least try, using real-life scenarios, firing real-life munitions, and even sinking real-life ships (decommissioned).

It’s all about ensuring combat readiness, trialling new tech and tactics, and gathering new data for models and war games, all while sending signals to your foes (who are always watching – that’s partly the point).

Then why conduct combined exercises?

The official reasons often stress ‘interoperability’ between friendly forces. It’s even in this year’s RIMPAC theme: ‘Partners: Integrated and Prepared’. 

And that’s really about figuring how friends with different equipment, procedures, and even languages can work together if needed, whether for:

• Peace-time missions like surveilling illegal fishing, enforcing sanctions, and responding to natural disasters, or
• Worst case scenarios, like war. 

But often the more important – if unstated – reason behind these joint drills is around publicly flexing an advantage that very few countries really have: alliances.

And then why conduct combined naval exercises?

Folks are still writing 60,000-word PhDs arguing over the modern role of a navy, but its three basic goals still hold: i) to project or deter power, ii) to secure marine resources, and iii) to secure the 80% of global trade that goes via sea.

And if you think about it, each of these three naval goals above is under pressure right now. Take just one example for each:

• i) China’s stated aim of “reunification” with Taiwan, or
• ii) Disputes over the South China Sea’s fish and energy resources, or
• iii) Continued Houthi attacks on civilian container ships.

So navies and alliances really go to the heart of a country’s ability to shape the world, or at least to stop others from shaping it first.

And that’s what these rival exercises are getting at in the Pacific this week.

INTRIGUE’S TAKE

We’ve barely scratched the surface here. You could also look at how:

• Countries have long used exercises as cover for the real thing, like the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia or the Russian invasion of Ukraine
• Countries have also mistaken exercises for the real thing, like when America’s Able Archer reportedly spooked the Soviets in 1983, and
• Countries have long used exercises to preview the real thing, like when the US debuted its new anti-sub aircraft at RIMPAC in 2012.

So when the stakes are that high, you inevitably get everyone watching everyone else, and doing so quite openly: eg, Japan’s joint chiefs basically narrated this year’s China-Russia exercises with constant press releases.

But you can bet they’ll all be doing it less openly, too: those antenna-clad ‘fishing trawlers’ suddenly eager to catch nearby mahimahi; those ‘survey aircraft’ suddenly fascinated by the local rock formations; and those ‘meteorological instruments’ suddenly riveted by regional rainfall levels.

Also worth noting:

• The joint China-Russia drills kicked off shortly after the US, Japan and South Korea held their first-ever ‘Freedom Edge’ exercises nearby.
• China was invited to participate in RIMPAC in 2014 and 2016. The US then uninvited it in 2018, after evidence emerged China had militarised features in the South China Sea (contrary to promises).
• A US aircraft was shot down by friendly fire at RIMPAC in 1996. The incident was put down to human error and all crew survived.