ABOARD USS CARL VINSON >> Globally, there’s a lot going on with the Navy’s Large Scale Exercise 2021, and Hawaii, with island geography replicating that of the South and East China seas, has a key role in it.

The new exercise reaching across the Pacific, Atlantic and Mediterranean and spanning 17 times zones involves 25,000 sailors and Marines, aircraft carriers to submarines, and a whole lot of virtual input — all linked together.

In Hawaii alone, Large Scale Exercise has been extremely complex — a sign of the times, both present and future — as the U.S. military increasingly trains for the possibility of “high end” conflict with China and Russia, perhaps at the same time.

That future requires fast thinking, rapid movement and highly networked systems to avoid being targeted by sophisticated missiles and still be able to strike back with overwhelming force.

On Saturday, sailing in what’s known as the Hawaiian Islands Operating Area about 90 miles north of Oahu, the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson launched F-35C stealth fighters off its deck, practicing for what could someday entail — if deterrence fails — deep strikes into enemy territory.

The deployment by the San Diego-based flattop marks the first time in U.S. naval aviation history that a stealth strike fighter has been deployed operationally on an aircraft carrier.

Tilt-rotor CMV-22B Ospreys that can land like a helicopter are similarly on their first operational deployment as a replacement on the 1,092-foot carrier for older C-2 Greyhound turboprop aircraft.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday visited the Vinson Saturday, after starting the week in Norfolk, Va., to check on the progress of Large Scale Exercise.

“We’re trying to ensure that if we do get into a conflict, that we can fight across all regions simultaneously and present some vexing problems to any potential adversaries,” Gilday told reporters. He added that “we haven’t exercised at this scale in 40 years.”

As part of Large Scale Exercise, Hawaii Marines came ashore on Oahu and Kauai with reconnaissance elements followed by larger infantry formations moving in to rapidly seize and hold coastal areas and establish what are known as “expeditionary advanced bases.”

Ospreys, helicopters, Air Force C-17 cargo aircraft and big “landing craft air-cushion,” or LCAC hovercraft, were used to get Marines into position.

The Marines established defensive positions and remained concealed while setting up sensors to detect hostile military vessels and communicate that information to the big amphibious transport ship USS San Diego offshore.

As part of that distribution of forces, the Marines set up long-range weapons to strike targets at sea in support of the Navy.

“All of these actions helped create a network where all of these forces could talk with each other and share sensors to expand battlefield awareness and extend the reach and availability of weapons employment options,” said Marine Corps spokesman Maj. Kurt Stahl.

The Marine Corps will fire a Naval Strike Missile today in the Pacific to sink a vessel at sea, the Marine Corps Time reported.

The Marines believe employing such capabilities within what’s known as the first island chain linking Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines would create windows of localized air and maritime superiority.

Large Scale Exercise started Aug. 3 and ends Monday. The Carl Vinson carrier strike group will continue on as the only U.S. aircraft carrier deployed in the Pacific, the Navy said.

The carrier’s “air boss,” Cmdr. Tim Osborne, said about 70 airplanes are on board, a large contingent, but it’s the type of aircraft that makes a big difference.

“We are the platform that the air wing of the future is executing on,” he said.

Lockheed Martin said that advanced capability includes the F-35C, F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, EA-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft, E-2D Advanced Hawkeye early warning and CMV-22 — all of which bring greater lethality, maritime dominance and deterrence.

“It’s a massive increase in technology,” Osborne said.

F-35Cs, F/A-18s and EA-18Gs took off in quick succession during one air drill, shaking the big carrier deck with the force of both jet engines and the steam catapults that launch them.

Pilots place their hands up high on the “dashboard” until they are off the deck to avoid a physiological reaction that tricks the brain into thinking the aircraft is dropping as it rockets from zero to 190 mph in a couple seconds’ time.

Both real and computer-­generated elements, friendly and enemy, played into Large Scale Exercise.

“We can take geography, let’s say geography in Northeast Asia, and superimpose it wherever we want, where we have ships operating, let’s say a carrier strike group like the Carl Vinson strike group, or an amphibious ready group,” Gilday said. “And we can also add in virtual ships into that same battle space, and so it’s a much more robust, more realistic training.”

DefenseNews.com reported that the exercise would include a buildup of tensions into a crisis and war with impacts in the Pacific, Atlantic and European regions.

Bryan Clark, director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute and a former special assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations, said one reason for the global nature of the training “is the desire to see how the force handles the stress of aggression from China followed by Russia seeking to exploit the U.S. response in the Pacific to make gains in Europe.”

Another reason might be logistics, “in that these large LVC (live, virtual and constructive) events take a lot of hand-tooled electronic and organizational integration and mounting that effort multiple times for regional events is harder than doing it once for a global event,” he said.

The benefit of combining virtual and computer-generated training with live activity “is it enables the force to train and experiment more frequently because the costs are lower and the preparations less intense,” Clark said.

There are simulators for individual platforms, and the idea would be to join up operators in simulators with operators on computers or gaming consoles to practice procedures and develop new tactics, he said.

“I’m very encouraged with the performance I’ve seen in the past week or so by our fleets,” Gilday said. “And I’m encouraged, very encouraged, with where we are headed in the future. This is the way we need to train, not just live forces like Vinson, but also virtual forces as well that we can tie into our fleet and have much more robust, realistic training against a high-end threat.”