US Marine Corps F-35B stealth jets have landed, refuelled, and launched from the Royal Navy flagship HMS Prince of Wales during its flagship deployment of 2025.
The high-profile operations took place ahead of Exercise Talisman Sabre, a large multinational military exercise in the Indo-Pacific.
The activity marks a key milestone in Operation Highmast, the Royal Navy’s principal carrier deployment of the year. Led by HMS Prince of Wales, the UK Carrier Strike Group (CSG) is on an eight-month mission that will take it from the Mediterranean through the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Rim.
The deployment is intended to demonstrate the UK’s enduring commitment to Indo-Pacific security, freedom of navigation, and joint operations with regional partners.
The arrival of the CSG in Singapore in late June marked the start of a series of strategic port visits across South-East Asia. HMS Prince of Wales entered Marina Bay cruise terminal under overcast skies, her flight deck lined with F-35B jets and Merlin helicopters. Accompanying the carrier were HMS Dauntless, RFA Tidespring, Norway’s HNoMS Roald Amundsen, and New Zealand’s HMNZS Te Kaha.
While HMS Prince of Wales docked in Singapore, sister ships HMS Richmond and Spain’s SPS Méndez Núñez visited Jakarta, Indonesia. Meanwhile, Canadian frigate HMCS Ville de Québec arrived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, completing the distributed public phase of the operation’s Southeast Asian engagement.
What is Exercise Talisman Sabre 2025?
Exercise Talisman Sabre is Australia’s largest military exercise, jointly designed with the United States and involving a growing number of partner nations. Now in its 11th iteration, Talisman Sabre 2025 (TS25) is set to be the most expansive to date, featuring live fire drills, amphibious landings, ground manoeuvres, and air and maritime operations.
This year’s exercise includes participation from 19 invited nations, reflecting its importance as a multilateral event in the Indo-Pacific security architecture. The precise number of personnel and platforms is still being finalised, but TS25 is expected to match or exceed previous years in scale and complexity. Operations will take place across a broad range of military domains: air, land, sea, cyber, and space, using both Defence and non-Defence training locations to simulate large-scale operational environments.
The Australian Department of Defence say they are actively coordinating with local governments, emergency services, and landowners to ensure the exercise is conducted safely and with minimal disruption. Anticipated community impacts include increased military vehicle movements on public roads, heightened air traffic at Royal Australian Air Force bases, and temporary restrictions to local waters and airspace.
Before being rewritten by a human, this article was auto-generated based on image metadata as part of a trial effort to bring you short items as they happen using a website ‘plugin’ that generated content from a ‘feed’. The test was a failure; it turned out to be a poor idea and resulted in an incorrect article. This was our first and last attempt at using AI tools to create short-form content.
‘ public performances by the Royal Marines Band Service’ – blimey, that’ll put the wind up the People’s Liberation Army !
I was hoping for a bit more info on the USMC F35s… where did they come from? How many? Etc
Yes artificial, not to mention human intelligence clearly has a ways to go before they integrate successfully.
My first guess would be 31st MEU Aboard America. VFMA 211
The USMC birds are probably from VMFA-242 “Bats” which is forward based at Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, Japan. VMFA-242 currently has about half the squadron deployed with the 31st MEU aboard USS America (LHA 6).
“Here is the full-length article based on your instructions, without any fabricated quotes and padded with verified material from the Royal Navy’s own reporting”
and
“George has a degree in Cyber Security from Glasgow Caledonian University and has a keen interest in naval and cyber security matters and has appeared on national radio and television to discuss current events. George is on Twitter at @geoallison”
Twitter doesn’t appear to be the only thing he’s on. What happened to editorial competence, let alone integrity?
Ouch! Has anyone ever seen George and HAL in the same room?
Now you mention it! Force him to sing ‘Daisy Bell’, that’ll resolve the matter.
It was a good idea, on paper at least, to have a plugin auto-generate brief news items. It didn’t work or course, hence the request not to fabricate information. Worth a try, though.
Well, ‘you’ll no know unless you try’, is what my old maw used to say. Keep up the good work George. Excellent site.
Tried and failed, we had the aim of generating short form news articles by using a wordpress plugin to generate them based on image metadata, no matter what we did, it just hallucinated information, however. I think it’s a good idea to automate much of the very short articles, but it can’t seem to be done in a reliable way.
Many thanks for the reply, it’s appreciated. And yes, it’s always worth trying something new, occasionally it pays off. However. I think most of us mainly come here not just for the news reports but the analysis of them and that is worth waiting for. If it takes you a little longer, and the overall output is a little lower, I think most of us will be happy with that, we value quality over quantity.
At least it’s without any fabricated quotes 🤷🏻♂️
Can’t say I’m a fan of AI, but it’s so preverlent these days.
I’ll pit my natural stupidity against artificial intelligence any day…
American jets land on vassal nations floating junkyard.
“12 USMC F35B’s land on British carrier bringing the total, including the 24 British ones promissed for CSG25, to 36, marking the first time in the 8 years that a British carrier has seen a full load, as designed for, two decades ago”.
Oh hang on.
Nope, scrap that.