The Philippines will take part for the first time in Cope North, a large-scale air exercise with the U.S. and four other nations in the western Pacific.
Philippine airmen will join more than 1,800 personnel from the U.S., Japan, Australia, South Korea and New Zealand for the exercise, which runs Feb. 10-26 out of Andersen Air Force Base, Guam.
Cope North 2016 will begin with a two-day, table-top humanitarian and disaster-relief exercise. Focus will then shift to fighter-versus-fighter air combat tactics, air-to-ground strike missions and large-force employment training, an Air Force statement said.
Five Philippine Air Force planners will assist with humanitarian assistance and disaster response drills on Rota and Tinian islands, setting up a base and medical center and conducting combat search-and-rescue drills in the exercise’s first week, said 1st Lt. Christen Ornella, Pacific Air Forces spokeswoman.
“This is the largest Cope North to date with more aircraft than ever,” she said of the exercise, which began in 1978 as a quarterly bilateral exercise at Misawa Air Base, Japan, and moved to Guam in 1999.
Seventy-four aircraft from the U.S., 22 from Japan, nine from Australia and one from South Korea will take part in the event. The U.S. aircraft, which will come from bases in mainland Japan, Okinawa, Alaska, Guam and the continental U.S., include F-15 and F-16 fighters, B-52 bombers and C-130 cargo planes, Ornella said.
The 353rd Combat Training Squadron from Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, participating in the exercise for the first time this year, will conduct multilateral survival training, the statement said.
U.S., Japan navies conduct war games near Guam
The destroyers Mustin and McCampbell are exercising with about half a dozen Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force ships and training to hunt submarines and engage incoming fighters, according to a Wednesday press release.
The exercises will also include a maritime patrol aircraft, several EA-18G Growlers designed for electronic warfare attacks, and a submarine. The release did not specify if the sub was American.
Guam Exercise, or GUAMEX, is an annual exercise with the JMSDF. Japan is taking a more assertive role in regional security. Japan, led by its Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, is revisiting its constitution and weighing changes that would allow Japan to take part in combat operations with coalition partners like the U.S.
Japan has one of the world's largest navies, with more than 120 ships to include destroyers, amphibs and attack submarines. Japan's latest moves signal that those ships could sail with U.S. ships and task forces, like the forward-deployed carrier strike group based in Japan.
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