USS Carl Vinson, USS Ronald Reagan and HMS Queen Elizabeth led 14 other naval vessels from the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, New Zealand and the Netherlands in a joint exercise in the Philippine Sea after Oct. 3. And this was immediately followed by a recent voyage toward the edge of the South China Sea.
“China Times” based in Taiwan said that this is the most powerful “targeted joint military exercises” in recent times in the South China Sea. Some scholar analyzed that this is the largest display of military power since the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1996.
It was also reported that Taiwan’s former KMT legislator Lin Yu-fang believes that this move is intended to demonstrate the role of joint deterrence against China, and he speculated that the PLA’s continuous large-scale military aircraft around Taiwan should be a response to the six-nation military exercise.
And recently, a certain naval aviation brigade of the Southern Theater of the People’s Liberation Army conducted a multi-weapons precision strike exercise against sea targets at a maritime shooting range in the South China Sea to test the ability of pilots to “perform tasks under complex weather conditions”, according to the China Military View site backed by PLA on Oct. 12.
In the picture, Chinese JH-7 fighter-bombers formed a combat formation in the air and went straight to the sea target range.
After arriving at the designated airspace, the pilots took a variety of ways to strike the sea targets in turn, such as near-air bombing and dive strikes, firing several rockets, aerial artillery bombs, aerial training bombs and other mines.