The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson and thousands of crew members sailed away from Pearl Harbor on Friday as ships continued to depart Hawaii and the 26th Rim of the Pacific exercise.
The world’s largest international maritime exercise, held every two years,
officially ended Thursday following more than a month of training events conducted in and around the Hawaiian Islands and Southern California.
Twenty-five nations,
46 surface ships, five submarines, 17 land forces and more than 200 aircraft and 25,000 personnel participated in the prestigious interoperability exercise.
Skills practiced ranged from disaster relief and maritime security operations to sea control and complex war-fighting, and included amphibious operations,
gunnery, missile, anti-submarine and air defense exercises, as well as counterpiracy operations, mine clearance operations, explosive ordnance disposal and diving and salvage operations, the Navy said.
Vice Adm. John D. Alexander, who led RIMPAC and is commander of the U.S. 3rd Fleet, said multinational
operations are complicated.
“It takes skill to assemble an international team and have it be successful,” he said in a news release. “Throughout the duration of the exercise, from the planning conferences to the ships returning to port, this team proved they work great together and can adapt quickly to a dynamic environment.”
China was disinvited
from RIMPAC late in the planning process but sent an auxiliary general intelligence spy ship anyway that operated off Hawaii in international waters.
The Virginia-class attack submarines USS
Hawaii and USS Illinois, along with the Los Angeles-class submarine USS Olympia — all out of Pearl Harbor — participated in RIMPAC.
The Olympia fired a Harpoon anti-ship cruise missile — something not done by a U.S. submarine in 20 years. The submarine force plans to reintroduce the Harpoon system into its arsenal, the Navy said.
“Today’s highly capable navies and adversary countries, the competitive countries that we are in power competition (with), have extremely good surface ships with very capable missile systems themselves,” Rear Adm. Daryl Caudle, commander of Submarine Force Pacific Fleet, said in a release.
The Harpoon “worked perfectly, went into cruise, and hit the decommissioned ex-USS
Racine dead center,” Caudle said. “The system worked as designed.”
The Navy said RIMPAC exercises inject over
$50 million into Hawaii’s economy. Navy Region Hawaii said Friday that as a matter of operational policy, it could
not discuss remaining RIMPAC ship departure dates.