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Newsweek
23-07-2025
- Politics
- Newsweek
Photos Show US Ally Flexing Missile Power Amid China Threat
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Japan—a key United States ally in the Western Pacific—showcased its ship-sinking and air-defense capabilities during live-fire drills in Australia amid China's growing military threat. The live-fire events were part of Exercise Talisman Sabre 2025—an ongoing multinational war game involving the U.S. and 18 other countries from the Indo-Pacific, North America, and Europe—designed to test and rehearse capabilities in support of regional stability. Newsweek has reached out to the Chinese Defense Ministry for comment via email. Why It Matters China has expanded its military presence—particularly its navy—across the Western Pacific in recent years, raising alarms among the U.S. and its regional allies. It has also built up a large missile arsenal capable of striking Japan, including U.S. military bases located there. Japan—a key element of the U.S. island chain strategy to contain China in the Western Pacific—has been bolstering its defenses against potential Chinese aggression by upgrading its ship-killing weapons and acquiring advanced warships capable of intercepting missiles. Exercise Talisman Sabre 2025 has previously featured two live-fire events involving anti-ship missiles, including a strike on a maritime target by a U.S. land-based missile system. What To Know Photos released by the Australian military on Tuesday show that the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force conducted a "live-fire surface engagement" at the Beecroft Weapons Range in New South Wales, on the east coast of Australia, firing two Type 12 anti-ship missiles. A Type 12 anti-ship missile is launched by the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force at Beecroft Weapons Range near Jervis Bay in Australia on July 22, 2025. A Type 12 anti-ship missile is launched by the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force at Beecroft Weapons Range near Jervis Bay in Australia on July 22, 2025. PTE Alex Brown/Australian Department of Defense via AP The missiles were launched from a truck-mounted platform and flew toward a floating target located 18.6 miles offshore in Jervis Bay, following different trajectories. Exercise director, Australian Brigadier Damian Hill, said both missiles struck the target simultaneously. The Type 12 anti-ship missile is capable of hitting maritime targets approximately 124 miles away. An upgraded version—with a modified missile shape—extends the flight range to at least 559 miles, and eventually up to 745 miles, according to the specialist outlet Naval News. Prior to the anti-ship missile drill, the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force's Type 03 medium-range surface-to-air missile system conducted firing at the Shoalwater Bay Training Area in Queensland, northeastern Australia, on July 14, according to released footage and imagery. "Through anti-aircraft firing training targeting cruise missiles and other threats, we aim to enhance our firing capabilities while strengthening coordination with participating countries, including the United States and Australia," the Joint Staff of Japan's Defense Ministry said. The Type 03 surface-to-air missile is a land-based air defense system with a reported range of 31 miles, capable of engaging targets such as cruise missiles, fighter jets, and helicopters. What People Are Saying Lieutenant General Joel B. Vowell, deputy commanding general of the U.S. Army Pacific, said in a press release on July 13: "By rehearsing, by practicing together, by staying in tune with each other, we are providing that readiness to our armies, our navies, our air forces, our space forces, our cyber forces." Japan's defense white paper 2025 read: "China has been swiftly increasing its national defense expenditures, thereby extensively and rapidly enhancing its military capability in a qualitative and quantitative manner and intensifying its activities in the East China Sea, including around the Senkaku Islands, and the Pacific." The Senkaku Islands are an islet group in the East China Sea, ruled by Japan but claimed by both China and Taiwan as the Diaoyu Islands and the Diaoyutai Islands, respectively. A Type 03 medium-range surface-to-air missile is launched by the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force at Shoalwater Bay Training Area in Australia on July 14, 2025. A Type 03 medium-range surface-to-air missile is launched by the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force at Shoalwater Bay Training Area in Australia on July 14, 2025. Australian Department of Defense What Happens Next It remains to be seen whether additional live-fire drills will be conducted during Exercise Talisman Sabre 2025, which began on July 13 and is scheduled to conclude on August 4.
Time of India
22-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
USA and allies rehearse down under for a war with China
After jumping from half a dozen C-17A transport aircraft, US Army paratroopers dropped silently from the starry sky, their light-colored parachutes visible under the moonlight. The soldiers descended onto foreign soil and immediately began collecting their gear before beginning a 50 km march to seize their objective, an airfield. Hundreds of miles away, US Marines touched down at an entirely different airfield by MV-22B Osprey tiltrotor aircraft. As they poured out of the aircraft, they spread out to expand their perimeter, allowing follow-on aircraft to land and reinforce their position deep in enemy territory. Explore courses from Top Institutes in Select a Course Category Digital Marketing Design Thinking healthcare Healthcare Artificial Intelligence MCA Project Management Degree Technology Public Policy CXO Data Analytics Product Management others Operations Management Cybersecurity Finance Leadership Others PGDM Management Data Science MBA Data Science Skills you'll gain: Digital Marketing Strategy Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Social Media Marketing & Advertising Data Analytics & Measurement Duration: 24 Weeks Indian School of Business Professional Certificate Programme in Digital Marketing Starts on Jun 26, 2024 Get Details Skills you'll gain: Digital Marketing Strategies Customer Journey Mapping Paid Advertising Campaign Management Emerging Technologies in Digital Marketing Duration: 12 Weeks Indian School of Business Digital Marketing and Analytics Starts on May 14, 2024 Get Details Elsewhere along the coast, a fleet of naval and amphibious ships from the USA, Australia , Japan, and South Korea appeared out of the darkness like apparitions. A flotilla of landing craft and hovercraft shuttled troops, vehicles, and equipment from ship to shore, creating a lodgment. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like No annual fees for life UnionBank Credit Card Apply Now Undo These were all activities occurring around Australia as part of Exercise Talisman Sabre 2025, at sites stretching 5,300 km from east to west. This biennial exercise took place from July 13 to 27, 2025, and involved Australia, the USA, and 17 other nations. Returning participants were Canada, Fiji, France, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, South Korea, Tonga and the United Kingdom. Live Events There were five first-timers too: India, Singapore, Thailand, the Netherlands and Norway. Meanwhile, Malaysia and Vietnam joined as observers as they assessed whether to participate in two years' time. With more than 40,000 soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen involved, this was the largest-ever iteration of this important multilateral exercise. Brigadier Damian Hill, Talisman Sabre's exercise director, told that the wargames encompassed 80 training areas and bases. Participating were more than 150 aircraft and 30 ships. Hill described it as "the mini-Olympics" of military exercises. However, what was particularly interesting was the notional enemy in the exercise scenario. The adversary for all these troops was the fictitious People's Republic of Olvana. Readers may be forgiven if they have not visited or encountered Olvana before. After all, it is a made-up country that appears in the Decisive Action Training Environment (DATE) used by the US Army. DATE provides detailed background information about opposing forces in training activities. According to DATE, freely available on the US Army's website, the People's Republic of Olvana is a communist nation created in the mid-20th century. Its capital is a city named Shanghai, and Olvana has a population of 1.12 million people. The DATE framework describes it thus: "Today, Olvana's massive economy and modernising military have enabled it to become a regional hegemon capable of exerting tremendous pressure and influence throughout the region and across the globe." The backstory continued: "Olvana's military has been undergoing a push to modernise its equipment and transform the way it prepares for and executes military operations." "Olvana is a large country located in eastern Asia that borders three major bodies of water: the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea and the South China Sea," the description continued. The clincher is an accompanying map of Olvana, which shows it occupying the territory of modern China! There can be little doubt that this DATE "red force" accurately replicates the capabilities and location of China. Indeed, Olvana was the "enemy" during this and recent editions of Talisman Sabre. Whereas counter-insurgency warfare was once the bread and butter of previous Talisman Sabres, especially when Australia, the USA and partners were heavily engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq, now the exercise focus has swung soundly into rehearsing a conventional conflict against a peer adversary. There is one explanation for this switch in focus: the rising might of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) under the tutelage of Chairman Xi Jinping. Asked about Talisman Sabre 2025's connection to China, Hill said deterrence against the likes of Beijing "is not a specific objective of the exercise, but it's definitely part of the Defence Strategic Review and the National Defence Strategy that's been released by the Australian government, that we have a message of deterrence via denial. The exercise, like every activity that Defence does, contributes to the defense mission, which is to defend Australia and its national interests." The exercise director added: "The vast majority of the training is focused on us and how we work together." He said that "working out how the techniques and procedures work together... is really the real challenge. So, this is all about interoperability." The type of activities occurring is also informative. Battalion-sized parachute jumps after intercontinental flights, seizing airfields and conducting amphibious landings are all the kinds of operations one would expect in an Asia-Pacific context. Take the US Marine Corps , for example. Using KC-130J Hercules aircraft and Ospreys, the 2,500-strong Marine Rotational Force, Darwin (MRF-D), currently stationed in Darwin in northern Australia--bounded across the Outback to seize remote airstrips and establish forward arming and refueling points. First, members of MRF-D captured an airstrip at Timber Creek, some 375 miles south of Darwin. Next up was Nackeroo within the Bradshaw Training Area in the Northern Territory. Finally, MRF-D seized an airfield at Cloncurry in Queensland. These efforts were supposed to mimic the type of island-hopping campaign that typified the Pacific Campaign in World War II, as troops moved from one remote island to another. Significantly, the second seizure coincided with an important event on 15 July at Bradshaw. The activity was the first firing of the American land-based Typhon missile system, also called Mid-Range Capability ( MRC ), outside the USA. The MRC fired an SM-6 missile hundreds of miles to hit a target in the sea somewhere north of Australia. This event was conducted by the Hawaii-based 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force (MDTF) of the US Army. Colonel Wade Germann, Commander of the 3rd MDTF, stated, "The deployment of the MRC and successful execution of an SM-6 live fire against a maritime target is another significant step forward in our ability to deploy, integrate and command and control advanced land-based maritime strike capabilities." So, what was significant about this particular missile firing? Within the exercise scenario, the missile was fired to clear waters of enemy naval vessels around one of the notional "islands." In fact, this is how the USA and allies would operate in any war with China, occupying and defending important links in the so-called First Island Chain, such as islands in southern Japan, Taiwan or the Philippines. By holding these islands and bringing in mobile anti-ship missiles like the Typhon or the shorter-range NMESIS of the US Marines, the USA can create protective bubbles around these islands. Indeed, the missiles can target any PLA Navy warships attempting to penetrate the First Island Chain. The Typhon can fire either SM-6 or Tomahawk missiles against land or ship targets. Loaded with Tomahawks, for example, the Typhon can dominate waters within a 1,000-mile radius. A string of such batteries dispersed along the First Island Chain would greatly complicate the PLA's ability to break through into the Western Pacific. Therefore, this firing was one of the strongest deterrence signals against China to come out of Talisman Sabre 2025. Indeed, the flexibility and deployability of the MRC would pose serious problems for the PLA; it can be airlifted by C-17 aircraft into austere locations, for example. Certainly, the USA is concerned about China's aggressive behavior and its astounding build-up of the PLA. Weapons like the Typhon therefore help to deter Chinese aggression, especially now that the system has been demonstrated as being deployable to destinations as far away as Australia. Furthermore, the US Army moved another MRC battery to the Philippines in April 2024, and it remains there to this day. In January 2025, it relocated to another Philippine location. The US Army has not fired the MRC in the Philippines, something that China would consider extremely provocative, despite its own massive arsenal of missiles and its practice of occasionally firing them into the South China Sea or near Taiwan. Incidentally, a US Congressional Research Service report published in April stated this: "China considers the deployment of MRC batteries in the Philippines and the Indo-Pacific as potentially 'destabilizing' and that their presence in the region could lead to an 'arms race.' Given these reactions, it could be argued that MRC units are contributing to deterrence operations in the Indo-Pacific and might also play a similar role in other regions as well," the document concluded. The US Army said of the Australian firing of the SM-6 missile: "The live fire provided valuable insights and lessons learned that will inform the development and employment of future land-based maritime strike and strategic strike capabilities." It added that this weapon system can contribute to "regional security and stability." As well as Typhon, other weapons like the 1,700-mile-range long-range Dark Eagle hypersonic missile could help break down China's anti-access, area-denial strategy around Taiwan and in the South China Sea. This maiden firing of the Typhon west of the International Dateline was just one of 79 "firsts" planned to occur in Talisman Sabre 2025. Another first was Australia live-firing its newly delivered HIMARS rocket launchers on 14 July. Hill told ANI that Talisman Sabre's vast geographic scope aided realistic training. "Australia is vast, but nowhere near as vast as the region that we live in day to day. So, operating across the vast expanses of Australia is a way of us testing how we might operate in the region in times of need. The geography, the time, the space, the limited infrastructure, really test nations, especially from nations who may not have that same level of geography, but who may have to operate in the region. It really does test our ability to operate over vast distances," he shared. Even the aforementioned airborne parachute drop acts as a form of deterrence against China. Colonel Brian Weightman, commander of the 2nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne) of the US Army's 11th Airborne Division, told ANI that six C-17 aircraft dropped 323 Americans and a dozen German paratroopers into Australia after flying from Alaska. He spoke of his training mission thus: "To be able to do that with real violence and at speed is really impressive, and I think it should scare adversaries." He added, "To be able to directly deliver an infantry battalion with its command that is situationally aware and physically optimized onto a drop zone 7,000 miles away, means that you can really go anywhere in the world." Weightman's brigade is one of five airborne brigades in the US Army. He said his unit brings two advantages: the ability to move anywhere in the Indo-Pacific and to operate in the Arctic. "As I'm looking from the enemy's perspective, what we're able to do would absolutely scare me if I was the enemy of our country. And not just to the shores of a country, but to any place in that country." He continued, "No other capability, or no other formation, gives us that ability." Asked directly about the threat from China, Weightman replied, "You know, we're not training against a specific adversary. What we're training to do is to be interoperable with our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific." Yet he added, "If we're able to do that and mass power from anywhere to anywhere at scale, then we should be able to beat any adversary and keep the Indo-Pacific region open." The USA and UK both operated aircraft in tandem in the Timor Sea north of Australia, another example of deterrence and interoperability. In recent years, China has always sent a spy ship to Australia to monitor these wargames, although there has been no report of one so far. Exercise Talisman Sabre--the sum of innumerable moving parts, thousands of military personnel and powerful forces acting in concert--sends a powerful message of deterrence to bad actors like Olvana... and China.
