Onboard the USS Carl Vinson: U.S. naval forces in Hawaii for live, virtual training exercises
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By Annalisa Burgos
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Hawaii (KITV) — Multiple U.S. Navy fleets are taking part in the new “Large Scale Exercise 2021” in Hawaii and the surrounding area this month. It’s a live and virtual training to prepare modern maritime security operations.
I went aboard the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson about 100 miles north of Hawaii, a floating city is sailing across the Pacific with more than 7,000 sailors and 70 aircraft on missions, from F/A-18 fighter attack jets, to Ospreys that are part helicopter part plane, to F-35 stealth fighters — the first time the military’s most advanced aircraft has deployed with a carrier strike group.
Select media got a rare look inside one of the Navy’s most powerful and technologically advanced battleships and meet the people who run it. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday explains the importance of the exercise.
“We want to come across to any potential adversary is a distributed fleet, it’s a big ocean, the Pacific a lot of That’s a lot. That’s a lot of battle space. So we want to come at a potential adversary from many different vectors, not just on the sea, but in the air, under the sea, on the land, the Marine Corps, in space and in cyberspace. So that’s how we’re training in this live virtual exercise across all those domains, leveraging everything we have in the toolkit, to prevent to present a very formidable threat to anybody that that might try to hold our interests at risks,” he said.
When asked about Hawaii’s significance to overall naval strategy, and concerns some residents about military presence on the island, Gilday said, “The State of Hawaii is an incredibly gracious partner for the United States Navy. So we have more than 10,000 sailors and 15,000 more than 15,000 civilian sailors who live and work on on the islands, and we’re part of the community.”
“Hawaii has been and will continue to be a key strategic piece of geography for the United States in the region. And so positioning ships and aircraft and forces out of Hawaii gives us gives us a leap ahead with respect to you know, comparatively if we had to, if we had to deploy those forces out of San Diego or the Pacific Northwest and so this is a we are we are blessed with this geography. And we’re proud. We’re proud partners with both state of Hawaii,” he said.
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