Here are some of the weapons the US and its allies fired to sink 2 ex-warships during RIMPAC 2024

Type 12 surface-to-ship missiles

Alongside the US Army, Japan Ground Self Defense Force (JGSDF) soldiers also deployed missiles from land, launching their own version of a truck-mounted anti-ship munition called the Type 12 surface-to-ship missile (SSM).

Developed by Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the Type 12 SSM features improvements from its predecessor, the Type 88 SSM, with shorter reload times and reduced lifecycle costs. With a range of over 100 nautical miles, the newer Type 12 SSM is equipped with an inertial navigation system with mid-course GPS guidance and terrain mapping to direct the missile to its target.

Col. Michael Rose, the commander of the US Army’s 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force, said the US and Japanese Army have “complementary capabilities” that were highlighted in the joint sinking exercise.

Rose said the interoperability between US forces and allied nations like Japan gives them an “asymmetric advantage” over adversaries. Such interoperability becomes paramount, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region amid rising tensions with China.

China previously participated in RIMPAC, but it has not been invited back for years now.

“There was this outreach to China, and definitely the US and its allies and partners were essentially burned by the Chinese taking advantage of it … as an opportunity to essentially collect intelligence and to try and get more acceptance of what should be considered unacceptable behavior,” Markus Garlauskas, who is the director of the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council, told Voice of America.

Now, the RIMPAC exercise is, in many ways, seen as a deterrence message to China.

Garlauskas said that the widely-attended naval warfare exercise, which even included non-Pacific nations like the UK, Brazil, and Israel, might cause China to reconsider a potential invasion of Taiwan, a region it views as a breakaway province that should be under Beijing’s control.

He said that “they’re not just going to be facing the United States in the country they’re targeting, but they’re potentially going to have to deal with a response from a wide range of countries that have common interests in deterring and confronting Chinese aggression as threats to a free and open Indo-Pacific.”