RIMPAC 2026 — the world's largest international maritime exercise — runs June 24 through July 31 with 30-plus nations operating from Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. The harbor phase currently underway involves tactical maritime operations, cyber exercises, and international helicopter warfighter exchanges. RIMPAC illustrates both the strength of island-based maritime security cooperation and the gap between major power exercise capacity and the operational reality facing Pacific island law enforcement agencies patrolling the same waters year-round with a fraction of the resources.
The U.S. Navy-led RIMPAC 2026 exercise, now in its harbor and shore phase at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, involves ships and submarines from more than 30 nations conducting tactical maritime operations, mass casualty medical exercises, persistent cyber exercises, and familiarization dives. The George Washington Carrier Strike Group — USS George Washington (CVN-73) with Carrier Air Wing 5, cruiser USS Robert Smalls, and destroyers USS Benfold and USS Shoup — concluded at-sea drills in the Philippine Sea before entering the harbor phase. Subject matter exchanges including an international helicopter warfighter exchange were held aboard aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt.
The scale of RIMPAC is itself significant for Hawaii: 30-plus nations, multiple carrier strike groups, submarines, and maritime patrol aircraft operating out of Pearl Harbor-Hickam simultaneously. The logistical, security, and coordination demands of RIMPAC on Hawaii's island infrastructure — a single harbor, limited shore support capacity, island supply chain for provisioning — are the same structural constraints that define Hawaii's public safety environment year-round.
RIMPAC participants include Pacific island partner nations whose own maritime law enforcement agencies bear day-to-day responsibility for the same waters where carrier strike groups exercise for six weeks. Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, and Marshall Islands — participants in Operation Irensia 2026 just weeks ago — patrol approximately 5+ million square kilometers of EEZ with patrol boat fleets that would be outgunned by a single RIMPAC exercise participant's support vessel.
ISPI's supply chain security research (WP-06) documents the maritime dimension of supply chain singularity: the shipping lanes that RIMPAC exercises protect strategically are the same lanes through which every essential commodity enters Pacific island communities. When those lanes are compromised — by weather, by criminal activity, by geopolitical disruption as in the Biketawa Declaration invocation of May 2026 — the Pacific island nations that participated in Operation Irensia lack the organic capacity to independently protect their own supply chain maritime access.
RIMPAC's value is not only in the tactical maritime training it produces. It is in the relationships, interoperability standards, and communication protocols that 30-plus nations develop over six weeks of joint operations. These relationships are the infrastructure that makes Operation Irensia and similar smaller-scale exercises more effective when they follow. The challenge ISPI documents is that the relationship infrastructure RIMPAC builds at the major power level needs a parallel institutional investment at the island law enforcement level — connecting Pacific island border agencies to the same interoperability networks through sustained engagement, not annual exercises alone.
RIMPAC is hosted at Pearl Harbor — an island base on an island state. The logistical reality of sustaining the world's largest maritime exercise from an island location is itself a demonstration of island infrastructure capacity when adequately resourced. Indian Ocean SIDS maritime security cooperation — coordinated through the Indian Ocean Rim Association — faces the same interoperability gap between major power naval capacity and small island state maritime law enforcement. The Samoa Pathway's maritime security provisions identify capacity building for SIDS maritime law enforcement as a priority area.