US troops and allies are working harder to understand each other during major Pacific exercises

US military exercises with allies in the Asia-Pacific region are getting bigger and more complex, reflecting growing security concerns amid tensions with China.

Large multinational exercises are nothing new, and communications have always been an important part of them, but as militaries add more troops and complexity to their drills, they are working harder to ensure they understand each other.

At the US-led exercise Cope North in February, overcoming language barriers was an area of focus. Begun in 1978, Cope North has become US Pacific Air Forces’ largest annual multilateral exercise, and Japanese, French, Australian, Canadian, and South Korean personnel joined in this year, operating from six airfields on three islands in the Central Pacific Ocean.

Despite their experience working together and similarities in their missions, each of those forces has different procedures for handling passengers, cargo, and flight operations and use different terminology when planning, executing, and evaluating their operations.

“That’s something that we’re learning as well, being able to overcome that communication barrier,” 1st Lt. Ariana Wilkinson, chief spokesperson for the 36th Wing at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam, told Pacific Daily News at the end of the exercise.

Like other recent Air Force exercises, Cope North focused on integrating and coordinating command and control and on skills related to agile combat employment, the US Air Force’s concept for dispersing forces to counter an attack on its bases. This year, for the first time, Cope North had a joint command structure in which US, Japanese, and Australian officers used a new command-and-control system and an integrated communications network.

That integration yielded more lessons about communicating. “Terminology is a part of it, you know, we’re separated sometimes by that common language,” Australian air force Group Capt. Kylie Green told Stars and Stripes early in the exercise.

A similar issue cropped up at Cobra Gold in Thailand in February and March. Begun in 1982 as a US-Thai exercise, Cobra Gold has grown to include more militaries and different service branches. While that growth allows for more complex and detailed training, a key lesson has been “being deliberate about not using acronyms, because we can confuse each other, even within our own militaries,” US Army Gen. Matthew McFarland said in an interview at the end of the exercise.

“So as we bring the joint and the multinational team together, [we are] being very deliberate about articulating what are the capability is or even how it functions,” McFarland added.

Cope North and Cobra Gold are held annually, and their size and frequency give participating militaries a lot of experience working together, but personnel turnover means many attendees are there for the first time. Exposure to that multinational environment can be valuable for newcomers, but communicating within it can also be tough.

First Lt. Sakae Yamanaka, a Japan Air Self-Defense Force fighter pilot, was a first-timer at Cope North this year. Dogfighting with US pilots was enjoyable, Yamanaka told the Pacific Daily News, but “very different to experience in English.”

Technology makes things easier. Commercial translation apps help with some interactions, like talking to local workers supporting the exercise. The US military’s focus on new tech is also producing language-specific innovations. Four US Air Force engineers were at Cope North this year as the first-ever deployed Scientist and Engineer Demand Force Team, or SEDFT, to work on developing solutions to technical problems.

One of their assignments was to find a faster way to translate speech during briefings. “With these marching orders, the SEDFT coded an entire secure translator app using AI to transcribe speech into text, providing real-time, ‘closed-captioning’ of a brief. Going as far as teaching the app Cope North-specific verbiage to catch all military jargon and output the correct interpretation,” the Air Force said in press release, adding that the project “took two days to complete.”

Technology can make translation easier, but human interpreters are still essential for navigating linguistic and cultural divides. The US military has drawn foreign-language speakers its own ranks for that task.

One such volunteer is Senior Airman Yayoi Brown, who normally works at a dining facility at Hurlburt Field in Florida. At Cope North, Brown used language skills she developed while growing up in Japan. “The most challenging part is definitely the terminology. While Japanese is my first language and I’m fluent in English, each job has different terminology and acronyms,” Brown said in a press release.

Another is Capt. Timothy John Nolan, a US Air Force MQ-9 pilot. Nolan volunteered as a Tagalog interpreter through the Language Enabled Airman Program and worked as both an interpreter and deputy officer in charge of the Joint Live Fly Cell during the US-Philippine exercise Cope Thunder in April.

"During Cope Thunder, I've had the opportunity to bridge those gaps by talking to the logistics guy and communicating with the driver, trying to tell them to make it a little bit easier for everybody," Nolan said in a press release. “Everybody here speaks English, but there are certain situations where there's a language barrier, and it can inhibit cooperation and coordination because we're not understanding each other."

Plane to sea

On April 24, the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt arrived for a port visit in Laem Chabang in eastern Thailand, where its crew hosted visitors, toured the country, and participated in community-service events.

The carrier, known as TR or “the Big Stick” after its namesake, has been operating around the region since deploying from San Diego at the head of Carrier Strike Group 9 on January 12.

At the end of January it conducted an exercise with the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson and the Japanese helicopter destroyer JS Ise in the Philippine Sea, south of Okinawa. It also trained with Japanese and South Korean warships in the East China Sea in early April.

Carrier visits to Thailand aren’t rare — USS Nimitz made a port call in April 2023, and TR visited in 2018 — but TR’s visit, and its deployment as a whole, is its first since it completed its 18-month docking planned incremental availability in March 2023.

During the DPIA, the carrier got several major upgrades, including a flight-deck refit. It can now operate with the F-35C fighter jet, the E-2D early-warning plane, and the CMV-22B tilt-rotor cargo aircraft, as well as future aircraft like the MQ-25 unmanned tanker.

TR didn’t deploy with CMV-22Bs, which were grounded for safety reasons at the time, or with F-35Cs, though F-35Cs operated from the carrier during the exercise at the end of January.

While TR was sailing into Laem Chabang, on almost the exact opposite side of the planet the aircraft carrier USS George Washington sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, heading south.

GW will replace USS Ronald Reagan as the US’s only forward-deployed aircraft carrier when it gets to Japan this fall, but for now it is taking part in Southern Seas 2024, during which it and its strike group will train with other militaries as they circumnavigate South America, sailing through the Strait of Magellan.

Southern Seas is an annual deployment that regularly sends big-deck warships around South America, but this year’s transit of full-size aircraft carrier comes at an auspicious time, as geopolitical tensions, climate change, and accidents with really big ships draw more attention to major maritime chokepoints, including the Panama and Suez canals.

Full-size US aircraft carriers can’t fit through the Panama Canal, making the Strait of Magellan the fastest way for those ships to sail between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The strait’s role as a transport corridor and the importance of the region around it for natural-resource exploitation and space monitoring have made US officials very concerned about what China is doing there.

Gen. Laura Richardson, who oversees US military activity around South America as head of US Southern Command, has repeatedly warned about China’s commercial investments and infrastructure projects in the region, especially a military-run space station in southern Argentina, saying they could allow China to track or even interfere with US military movements and may set the stage for a future Chinese military presence in the region.

In written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee in March, Richardson accused China of playing a “long game” with investments in “dual-use” facilities that Beijing portrays “as peaceful, but in fact, many serve as points of future multi-domain access for the [Chinese military] and strategic naval chokepoints.”

In Panama, Chinese state-owned enterprises, or SOEs, “continue to bid on projects related to the Panama Canal – a global strategic chokepoint,” Richardson wrote. “Meanwhile, in Argentina, another SOE is attempting to secure the rights to build dual-use maritime installations, which would support sustainment and power projection in proximity to the Strait of Magellan, the Drake Passage, and Antarctica.”

Such installations, Richardson added, “would dramatically improve” China’s “ability to access the Antarctic region and its fisheries and impact US strategic mobility to an area reserved for peace and science.”

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The Armed Forces of the Philippines said on April 28 that it was monitoring a Chinese-flagged research vessel northeast of the island province of Catanduanes during Balikatan, a major annual multinational exercise.

The AFP said attempts to contact the vessel through regular radio channels were unsuccessful, and on April 30 it said one of its aircraft had confirmed the presence of the vessel, which remained stationary and unresponsive. A Philippine official said a ship would be sent to intercept the Chinese vessel.

Three other Chinese vessels have been lingering around Philippine waters in the South China Sea, observing and at times interfering with Philippine, US, and French ships during Balikatan’s multilateral maritime exercise component, which is being held beyond the 12-mile limit of Philippine territorial waters (but still within Manila’s 200-mile exclusive economic zone) for the first time.

Those ships didn’t disturb the exercise, according to Col. Michael Logico, chief Philippine spokesman for Balikatan. "We went there for the purpose of conducting interoperability exercises. That was our mission and we were able to finish it,” Logico said Tuesday.