U.S. and Japan Practice Sinking Warships as Pacific Anti‑Ship Missile Race Intensifies
Japanese and U.S. forces fired live Type 12 and Harpoon anti‑ship missiles to sink a decommissioned U.S. warship during RIMPAC 2026, rehearsing long‑range strikes on naval targets in the Pacific. With Australia, Canada, Italy, New Zealand and Spain also participating, the drills show how quickly the region is shifting toward a warfighting model built around killing ships at distance — and how little room for miscalculation that leaves in contested seas.
A retired U.S. Navy amphibious assault ship went to the bottom of the Pacific this week for a reason that matters far beyond target practice. During the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) 2026 exercise, Japanese and U.S. forces conducted a live‑fire sinking exercise (SINKEX), launching Japan’s Type 12 and America’s Harpoon anti‑ship missiles against the decommissioned USS Peleliu. The goal was simple and stark: prove that allied missiles can find and destroy a major warship at range.
The SINKEX, held in waters near Hawaii, formed part of a broader multinational drill that brought together forces from Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Spain and the United States. While RIMPAC has always been about interoperability, this year’s focus on coordinated anti‑ship fires points to a region where the central question in a crisis would be who can kill whose ships first – and at what political cost.
For the crews involved, the exercise is more than an engineering test. Missile teams, sensor operators and command staffs are rehearsing complex kill chains: detecting, identifying, targeting and engaging a moving naval vessel under realistic conditions. That means integrating maritime patrol aircraft, surface ships, submarines and land‑based launchers, while managing the risk that a misidentified contact or mis‑timed launch in real life could turn a standoff into a shooting war.
The Type 12 and Harpoon systems used against the Peleliu represent different strands of the same trend. Japan is extending the range and flexibility of its Type 12 family, part of a broader push to develop what Tokyo calls “counterstrike” capabilities after decades of focusing on strictly defensive posture. The Harpoon, long a staple of U.S. and allied arsenals, remains a benchmark sub‑sonic anti‑ship weapon available from ships, submarines and aircraft. Firing them together at a common hulk is a way of demonstrating that, in wartime, allied salvos could overwhelm an adversary’s defenses through sheer volume and directional complexity.
Strategically, the message is hard to miss in Beijing. China fields a growing fleet of surface combatants and the world’s largest navy by hull count, backed by an expanding arsenal of anti‑ship ballistic and cruise missiles aimed at keeping U.S. and allied forces at a distance. RIMPAC’s live‑fire drills are about convincing China that any attempt to push into contested waters or encircle Taiwan would run into a wall of allied missiles from multiple vectors – U.S. warships and bombers, Japanese coastal batteries, Australian platforms and beyond.
For Pacific island states and commercial shipping operators, the trend carries a more unsettling implication: the seas they rely on for trade and fisheries are being mapped and weaponized as engagement zones. In a future crisis, long‑range anti‑ship systems like those fired at Peleliu would not only target destroyers and carriers, but could force merchant traffic and fishing fleets to reroute or risk becoming collateral in ambiguous engagements.
The drill also exposes how dependent U.S. strategy has become on partners with credible strike capabilities of their own. Japan’s willingness to field and exercise land‑based anti‑ship missiles is central to U.S. concepts that envision a chain of allied launchers hemming in Chinese naval movements from the first island chain. For Tokyo, that comes with domestic political and legal debates over how far it can go from a constitutionally constrained force toward an explicitly deterrent one.
A key insight from RIMPAC 2026 is that in the Western Pacific, deterrence is increasingly measured in kilometers of missile range and the number of launchers that can be synchronized across flags, not just in the tonnage of ships in port.
The next signals to watch will be Japan’s concrete deployment plans for extended‑range Type 12 batteries across its southwest islands, any decisions by other RIMPAC participants to acquire or base similar systems, and how China adjusts its naval operating patterns or missile tests in response. As both sides of the Pacific sharpen tools designed to sink ships quickly, crisis management will depend on whether political leaders can keep pace with the speed at which their militaries can now trade blows.
Sources
- OSINT