Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday and Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy Russell Smith traveled to Hawaii to take part in Large Scale Exercise 2021 and engage with Sailors and Marines in the area, Aug. 13-16.
Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Adm. Mike Gilday and Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy (MCPON) Russell Smith traveled to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, August 13-16, to take part in Large Scale Exercise (LSE) 2021 and engage with Sailors and Marines in the area.
"We're trying to ensure that if we do get into a conflict, we can fight across all regions simultaneously and present some vexing problems to any potential adversary," Gilday said. "We want to come from many different vectors, not just on the sea, but in the air, under the sea, on the land, in space and in cyberspace. Our Navy fights as a Fleet and that's what we're practicing here in LSE 2021."
The two-week globally integrated exercise, which concluded Monday, involved approximately 25,000 Sailors and Marines, spanned five U.S. numbered fleets, three Marine Expeditionary Forces, and 17 time zones.
"We haven't exercised at this scale in 40 years and I'm very impressed with the performance of our Fleets," Gilday said. "This is the way we want to train - not just live forces, but virtual ones that we can tie into our Fleet and have much more robust training against a high-end threat. I'm encouraged about where we're heading in the future."
While in Pearl Harbor, CNO and MCPON also flew USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) and visited the forward-deployed U.S. 3rd Fleet expeditionary Maritime Operations Center to observe how they integrated into the exercise.
"Without a doubt, the warfighting concepts we tested during LSE - distributed maritime operations, expeditionary advanced base operations and logistics in a contested environment - are foundational to how we will fight in the future," said Gilday. "This exercise leveraged everything we have in the toolkit to present a very formidable threat to anybody that might try to hold our interests at risk."
CNO and MCPON also visited the Pacific Missile Range Facility to watch LSE21 experimentation events, observed naval integration at Marine Corps Base Kaneohe Bay, and met with Sailors assigned to Cyber Operations-Integrated Planning Elements (CO-IPE).
"Our Sailors truly are our asymmetric advantage against any threat," Smith said. "Seeing their contribution to LSE 2021 was truly inspiring."
