The long advertised joint drills involving three US aircraft carriers is currently taking place:
Three U.S. aircraft carriers steam in formation in the East Sea, leading South Korean and U.S. warships during the allies’ joint naval exercise on Nov. 12, 2017, in this photo provided by South Korea’s Navy. (Yonhap)
The Reagan, the flag ship of the 7th Fleet’s Carrier Strike Group 5, was conducting a combined exercise with two other supercarriers — the USS Nimitz and the USS Theodore Roosevelt — in the Korea Theater of Operations (KTO) and was also joined by South Korea’s naval ships.
“There’s an advantage to operate together, in that combined three carriers really create a tremendous amount of combat power very flexible and create a lot of options for our national leadership,” Rear Adm. Marc Dalton, commander of the Reagan strike unit, said in an interview at the ship’s “flag bridge,” which commands a view of the whole flight deck.
He would not reveal the exact location of the carrier.
According to an informed source, it was transiting the waters 50 nautical miles, or 92 kilometers, south of the Northern Limit Line (NLL), the de-facto inter-Korean sea border, and 40 nautical miles north of Ulleung Island.
It’s unusual for the Japan-based carrier to sail so close to the NLL. It’s unprecedented for the South’s Navy to train with three U.S. flattops at the same time.
The last time three U.S. carriers were mobilized for joint drills in the Western Pacific was in 2007 near Guam.
The current training is apparently a warning message to the North’s Kim Jong-un regime and a way to put pressure on it. [Yonhap]
You can read the rest at the link, but this is a tremendous amount of fire power sitting such a short distance from North Korea. Hopefully a strong message was sent to the Kim regime.
That’s a nice cluster of carrier groups you have there.
It would be a shame if something happened to them just as we do our open-air over-sea nuclear test we have been promising.