Darwin [Australia], July 22 : After jumping from half a dozen C-17A transport aircraft, US Army paratroopers dropped silently from the starry sky, their light-colored parachutes visible under the moonlight. The soldiers descended onto foreign soil and immediately began collecting their gear before beginning a 50 km march to seize their objective, an airfield.
Hundreds of miles away, US Marines touched down at an entirely different airfield by MV-22B Osprey tiltrotor aircraft. As they poured out of the aircraft, they spread out to expand their perimeter, allowing follow-on aircraft to land and reinforce their position deep in enemy territory.
Elsewhere along the coast, a fleet of naval and amphibious ships from the USA, Australia, Japan, and South Korea appeared out of the darkness like apparitions. A flotilla of landing craft and hovercraft shuttled troops, vehicles, and equipment from ship to shore, creating a lodgment.
These were all activities occurring around Australia as part of Exercise Talisman Sabre 2025, at sites stretching 5,300 km from east to west. This biennial exercise took place from July 13 to 27, 2025, and involved Australia, the USA, and 17 other nations.
Returning participants were Canada, Fiji, France, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, South Korea, Tonga and the United Kingdom.
There were five first-timers too: India, Singapore, Thailand, the Netherlands and Norway. Meanwhile, Malaysia and Vietnam joined as observers as they assessed whether to participate in two years' time.
With more than 40,000 soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen involved, this was the largest-ever iteration of this important multilateral exercise. Brigadier Damian Hill, Talisman Sabre's exercise director, toldthat the wargames encompassed 80 training areas and bases. Participating were more than 150 aircraft and 30 ships. Hill described it as "the mini-Olympics" of military exercises.
However, what was particularly interesting was the notional enemy in the exercise scenario. The adversary for all these troops was the fictitious People's Republic of Olvana. Readers may be forgiven if they have not visited or encountered Olvana before. After all, it is a made-up country that appears in the Decisive Action Training Environment (DATE) used by the US Army. DATE provides detailed background information about opposing forces in training activities.
According to DATE, freely available on the US Army's website, the People's Republic of Olvana is a communist nation created in the mid-20th century. Its capital is a city named Shanghai, and Olvana has a population of 1.12 million people. The DATE framework describes it thus: "Today, Olvana's massive economy and modernising military have enabled it to become a regional hegemon capable of exerting tremendous pressure and influence throughout the region and across the globe."
The backstory continued: "Olvana's military has been undergoing a push to modernise its equipment and transform the way it prepares for and executes military operations."
"Olvana is a large country located in eastern Asia that borders three major bodies of water: the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea and the South China Sea," the description continued. The clincher is an accompanying map of Olvana, which shows it occupying the territory of modern China! There can be little doubt that this DATE "red force" accurately replicates the capabilities and location of China. Indeed, Olvana was the "enemy" during this and recent editions of Talisman Sabre.
Whereas counter-insurgency warfare was once the bread and butter of previous Talisman Sabres, especially when Australia, the USA and partners were heavily engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq, now the exercise focus has swung soundly into rehearsing a conventional conflict against a peer adversary.
There is one explanation for this switch in focus: the rising might of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) under the tutelage of Chairman Xi Jinping.
Asked about Talisman Sabre 2025's connection to China, Hill said deterrence against the likes of Beijing "is not a specific objective of the exercise, but it's definitely part of the Defence Strategic Review and the National Defence Strategy that's been released by the Australian government, that we have a message of deterrence via denial. The exercise, like every activity that Defence does, contributes to the defense mission, which is to defend Australia and its national interests."
The exercise director added: "The vast majority of the training is focused on us and how we work together." He said that "working out how the techniques and procedures work together... is really the real challenge. So, this is all about interoperability."
The type of activities occurring is also informative. Battalion-sized parachute jumps after intercontinental flights, seizing airfields and conducting amphibious landings are all the kinds of operations one would expect in an Asia-Pacific context.
Take the US Marine Corps, for example. Using KC-130J Hercules aircraft and Ospreys, the 2,500-strong Marine Rotational Force, Darwin (MRF-D), currently stationed in Darwin in northern Australiabounded across the Outback to seize remote airstrips and establish forward arming and refueling points.
First, members of MRF-D captured an airstrip at Timber Creek, some 375 miles south of Darwin. Next up was Nackeroo within the Bradshaw Training Area in the Northern Territory. Finally, MRF-D seized an airfield at Cloncurry in Queensland.
These efforts were supposed to mimic the type of island-hopping campaign that typified the Pacific Campaign in World War II, as troops moved from one remote island to another. Significantly, the second seizure coincided with an important event on 15 July at Bradshaw. The activity was the first firing of the American land-based Typhon missile system, also called Mid-Range Capability (MRC), outside the USA.
The MRC fired an SM-6 missile hundreds of miles to hit a target in the sea somewhere north of Australia. This event was conducted by the Hawaii-based 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force (MDTF) of the US Army.
Colonel Wade Germann, Commander of the 3rd MDTF, stated, "The deployment of the MRC and successful execution of an SM-6 live fire against a maritime target is another significant step forward in our ability to deploy, integrate and command and control advanced land-based maritime strike capabilities."
So, what was significant about this particular missile firing? Within the exercise scenario, the missile was fired to clear waters of enemy naval vessels around one of the notional "islands." In fact, this is how the USA and allies would operate in any war with China, occupying and defending important links in the so-called First Island Chain, such as islands in southern Japan, Taiwan or the Philippines.
By holding these islands and bringing in mobile anti-ship missiles like the Typhon or the shorter-range NMESIS of the US Marines, the USA can create protective bubbles around these islands. Indeed, the missiles can target any PLA Navy warships attempting to penetrate the First Island Chain.
The Typhon can fire either SM-6 or Tomahawk missiles against land or ship targets. Loaded with Tomahawks, for example, the Typhon can dominate waters within a 1,000-mile radius. A string of such batteries dispersed along the First Island Chain would greatly complicate the PLA's ability to break through into the Western Pacific.
Therefore, this firing was one of the strongest deterrence signals against China to come out of Talisman Sabre 2025. Indeed, the flexibility and deployability of the MRC would pose serious problems for the PLA; it can be airlifted by C-17 aircraft into austere locations, for example.
Certainly, the USA is concerned about China's aggressive behavior and its astounding build-up of the PLA. Weapons like the Typhon therefore help to deter Chinese aggression, especially now that the system has been demonstrated as being deployable to destinations as far away as Australia. Furthermore, the US Army moved another MRC battery to the Philippines in April 2024, and it remains there to this day. In January 2025, it relocated to another Philippine location.
The US Army has not fired the MRC in the Philippines, something that China would consider extremely provocative, despite its own massive arsenal of missiles and its practice of occasionally firing them into the South China Sea or near Taiwan.
Incidentally, a US Congressional Research Service report published in April stated this: "China considers the deployment of MRC batteries in the Philippines and the Indo-Pacific as potentially 'destabilizing' and that their presence in the region could lead to an 'arms race.' Given these reactions, it could be argued that MRC units are contributing to deterrence operations in the Indo-Pacific and might also play a similar role in other regions as well," the document concluded.
The US Army said of the Australian firing of the SM-6 missile: "The live fire provided valuable insights and lessons learned that will inform the development and employment of future land-based maritime strike and strategic strike capabilities." It added that this weapon system can contribute to "regional security and stability." As well as Typhon, other weapons like the 1,700-mile-range long-range Dark Eagle hypersonic missile could help break down China's anti-access, area-denial strategy around Taiwan and in the South China Sea.
This maiden firing of the Typhon west of the International Dateline was just one of 79 "firsts" planned to occur in Talisman Sabre 2025. Another first was Australia live-firing its newly delivered HIMARS rocket launchers on 14 July.
Hill toldthat Talisman Sabre's vast geographic scope aided realistic training. "Australia is vast, but nowhere near as vast as the region that we live in day to day. So, operating across the vast expanses of Australia is a way of us testing how we might operate in the region in times of need. The geography, the time, the space, the limited infrastructure, really test nations, especially from nations who may not have that same level of geography, but who may have to operate in the region. It really does test our ability to operate over vast distances," he shared.
Even the aforementioned airborne parachute drop acts as a form of deterrence against China. Colonel Brian Weightman, commander of the 2nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne) of the US Army's 11th Airborne Division, toldthat six C-17 aircraft dropped 323 Americans and a dozen German paratroopers into Australia after flying from Alaska. He spoke of his training mission thus: "To be able to do that with real violence and at speed is really impressive, and I think it should scare adversaries."
He added, "To be able to directly deliver an infantry battalion with its command that is situationally aware and physically optimized onto a drop zone 7,000 miles away, means that you can really go anywhere in the world."
Weightman's brigade is one of five airborne brigades in the US Army. He said his unit brings two advantages: the ability to move anywhere in the Indo-Pacific and to operate in the Arctic. "As I'm looking from the enemy's perspective, what we're able to do would absolutely scare me if I was the enemy of our country. And not just to the shores of a country, but to any place in that country." He continued, "No other capability, or no other formation, gives us that ability."
Asked directly about the threat from China, Weightman replied, "You know, we're not training against a specific adversary. What we're training to do is to be interoperable with our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific." Yet he added, "If we're able to do that and mass power from anywhere to anywhere at scale, then we should be able to beat any adversary and keep the Indo-Pacific region open."
The USA and UK both operated aircraft in tandem in the Timor Sea north of Australia, another example of deterrence and interoperability. In recent years, China has always sent a spy ship to Australia to monitor these wargames, although there has been no report of one so far.
Exercise Talisman Sabrethe sum of innumerable moving parts, thousands of military personnel and powerful forces acting in concertsends a powerful message of deterrence to bad actors like Olvana... and China.
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