US Aircraft Carrier Holds 'Warfighting' Drills on China's Doorstep

Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content.
A United States nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was conducting operations in the contested South China Sea, the Navy said, to showcase its ability to maintain warfighting advantages.
Newsweek has contacted the Chinese defense and foreign ministries for comment by email.
Why It Matters
A naval strike group led by USS Nimitz—the oldest U.S. aircraft carrier in active service—has been operating in the South China Sea, where sovereignty claims by several countries overlap, since late May as part of its regularly scheduled deployment to the western Pacific.
Meanwhile, China has deployed both of its two operational aircraft carriers to waters beyond the First Island Chain—an island defense line formed by Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines as part of a U.S. maritime containment strategy intended to restrict China's naval activities.
What To Know
The Nimitz Carrier Strike Group conducted "maritime security operations"—including flight operations, maritime strike exercises, and tactical training between surface and air units—in the South China Sea on Wednesday, according to the aircraft carrier's public affairs officer.
A United States Navy F/A-18E fighter jet launches from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz in the South China Sea on June 5, 2025.
A United States Navy F/A-18E fighter jet launches from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz in the South China Sea on June 5, 2025.
Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Apprentice Franklyn Guage/U.S. Navy
"Carrier operations in the South China Sea are part of the U.S. Navy's routine presence in the Indo-Pacific," the press release stated. U.S. warships frequently operate in the South China Sea to maintain freedom of navigation, challenging excessive maritime claims by regional countries.
Rear Admiral Fred Goldhammer, commander of the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group, said the deployment aims to build proficiency and conduct flight operations supporting the "full spectrum of operations," adding that the unit operates "wherever international law allows."
The Nimitz's deployment in the South China Sea follows a warning from U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth about China's threats in the Indo-Pacific region. He said the East Asian power seeks nothing less than hegemony and is increasingly willing to resort to force.
In response to Hegseth's remarks on the South China Sea, the Chinese Foreign Ministry accused the U.S. of being the "primary factor" undermining peace and stability, while claiming that there has never been any problem with freedom of navigation and overflight.
A United States Navy F/A-18E fighter jet launches from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz in the South China Sea on June 6, 2025.
A United States Navy F/A-18E fighter jet launches from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz in the South China Sea on June 6, 2025.
Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Matthew C. Wolf/U.S. Navy
What People Are Saying
Rear Admiral Fred Goldhammer, commander of the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group, said in a press release on Wednesday: "We are doing more than ever to strengthen peace, stability, and deterrence across the Indo-Pacific."
The public affairs officer of USS Nimitz said in a press release on Wednesday: "The operations include both day and night flight evolutions. These activities support maritime security, enhance interoperability with regional partners, and maintain the U.S. Navy's ability to project power across the theater."
An unnamed spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on June 1: "China has always been committed to working with countries concerned to properly handle differences through dialogue and consultation, while safeguarding China's territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests in accordance with laws and regulations."
What Happens Next
It remains to be seen whether the Nimitz will head toward the broader western Pacific after concluding its operations in the South China Sea to counter the two Chinese aircraft carriers.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

National Geographic

9 hours ago

• National Geographic

The city of 700 languages

New York is the most linguistically diverse city on the planet. Can it stay that way? Bringing with them the languages of their homelands, immigrants newly arrived by ship at Ellis Island await official processing and approval to reach their destination—New York City, already in sight. Photograph by Ullstein Bild via Getty Images Seke is an endangered language originally spoken in five villages of northern Nepal, but its future may depend on a handful of vertical villages: apartment buildings in the middle of Brooklyn, New York. How did a little-documented, oral-only language used by no more than 700 people in the high Himalaya come to the concrete jungle? Rasmina Gurung, in her 20s one of Seke's youngest speakers, learned the language from her grandmother in the village but soon moved to the country's capital, Kathmandu, and eventually New York—where she estimates at least a quarter of her people have ended up. Here they join speakers of dozens of other endangered languages from across the Himalaya, all forming new communities while getting by in an ever evolving mix of Nepali, Tibetan, English, and their own embattled mother tongues. But New York City—the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world—may be hitting peak diversity. Its 700-plus languages represent over 10 percent of the global total. Though largely invisible (and inaudible) to outsiders, the city's languages are from all over. Many immigrants have arrived in just the past few decades from linguistic hot spots such as the Himalaya, West Africa, insular Southeast Asia, and heavily Indigenous zones of Latin America. Today, however, many of the forces that brought people together are beginning to pull them apart. (More than 300 languages are spoken along this NYC street.) Across its five boroughs, New York's rich linguistic diversity is impossible to miss in its streets, shops, and signage—from Arabic and Hindi advertising to the Bengali, Chinese, and Spanish words for 'freedom' on a single mural. Photographs by Ismail Ferdous Chinese signage, Sunset Park, Brooklyn Photograph by Ismail Ferdous Given accelerating language loss even in the languages' homelands, threats to immigration, and the rising costs of city life, time may be running out. The remarkable linguistic convergence in New York and similar cities could vanish fast, before there has even been time to document or support it. This urgency is what drives the work of the Endangered Language Alliance, the organization I co-direct, which has started to map this landscape. At stake is an unprecedented set of cultural, scientific, educational, and even economic possibilities. Never before have linguists and speakers been so well positioned to document languages for which few if any records exist while also pushing for their maintenance and revitalization. Just as exceptional are the artistic, musical, and culinary possibilities, as worldviews from around the globe come together and share space. (The Māori saved their language from extinction. Here's how.) The ever growing city eventually demolished most of its elevated train lines, such as this one in Jamaica, Queens, as part of an effort to expand the subway system. Photograph by Robert Walker, The New York Times/Redux Irwin Sanchez, a chef and poet in Queens who speaks Nahuatl, once the language of the Aztec, makes tacos, moles, and tamales with the words' original meanings in mind. Husniya Khujamyorova, a speaker of Wakhi from Tajikistan, creates some of the very first children's books for speakers of six Pamiri languages—all now represented along Brooklyn's own Silk Road. Ibrahima Traore, who made it from Guinea to the Lower East Side, teaches N'ko, a pioneering West African writing system, and pushes for its use in every new technology. Boris Sandler, a Yiddish-speaking writer born in Moldova, contributes in his own way, novel after novel, to the miraculous rebirth of Yiddish in New York. Lenape, the original language of the land the city is built on, is also being revived against all the odds. From its last stronghold in rural Ontario, where there is just a single native speaker, a new generation of activists is bringing the language to a wider audience. One of them was Karen Mosko, who before she passed away would come down once a month to teach the language in Manhattan—'the place where we get bows' in Lenape. And then there's Rasmina Gurung, the young Seke speaker. For seven years she has been documenting the language in both Nepal and New York with dozens of hours of recordings, many transcribed and translated, as well as a growing dictionary. But now elders are passing away and taking the language with them. Questions about immigration and asylum hang over the community's future. Housing is increasingly challenging, and their village-like cohesion may not last. (How do you save a language from extinction? With creative thinking—and some help from Wikipedia.) Bengali, Kensington, Brooklyn Photograph by Ismail Ferdous Spanish, Sunset Park, Brooklyn Photograph by Ismail Ferdous Hindi and Malayalam, St. George, Staten Island Photograph by Ismail Ferdous Spanish, University Heights, the Bronx Photograph by Ismail Ferdous Over the past decades, by chance, Gurung's Brooklyn neighborhood has become a place where people from around the world establish hometown associations, religious institutions, restaurants, and a range of other businesses and spaces—forming radically different worlds that now dwell side by side. Just minutes from the Seke vertical village you can hear Ghanaian churchgoers speaking Twi, Azerbaijani barbers speaking Juhuri, and Uber drivers gathering over kebabs and whiskey and chatting in Uzbek. Auto body shops, informal commuter or 'dollar' vans, mosques, and bars ring with the sounds of African, Asian, European, Caribbean, and Latin American languages. For all the unrealized potential, Babel—not the biblical myth but the contemporary reality—has been working in cities like New York to an extraordinary degree. Now is the moment to understand, appreciate, and defend it. (Hawaii's Native language nearly vanished—this is the fight to bring it back.) A version of this story appears in the July 2025 issue of National Geographic magazine. Ross Perlin is a linguist and author of Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York.

Business Insider

16 hours ago

• Business Insider

I'm a mom of 5 and thought work would get easier as the kids got older. I was wrong.

I'm a mom of five kids ranging from ages 5 to 17. I thought having teens would be easier than having toddlers for my career. Turns out teens are even more demanding, and I need to give myself grace. As the mother of five kids, four of whom were born in six years, I have spent all of my 17 years of parenting working from home in some capacity. And in those 17 years, I've been successful under the definition of a capitalist viewpoint. The first year I hit a profit with my writing business was the same year I birthed my fourth child. I went viral, was interviewed by Good Morning America, and churned out work at a rate that left many people wondering how I did it all, considering my oldest child was only 6 and my husband worked several jobs. I struggled to balance it all, but I remember thinking that that time in my life, full of babies, toddlers, and preschoolers, would be the hardest part of my life. I just had to make it through, and then I could coast. I was so terribly wrong. I get less done with teens and tweens in the house Now that most of my kids are tweens and teens, I find myself in the weeds of parenting all over again, but this time I'm somehow even more exhausted, confused, and overwhelmed. Instead of dealing with potty training and tantrums, I'm dealing with teen drivers, volatile emotions, and big life decisions. I feel frustrated and guilty, like I'm doing something wrong for somehow being less productive as the mother of older kids. I think part of it is that when they were small, there was a routine that let me get some work done. There were daily nap times I could count on, movies I could turn on, or playdates I could schedule. But with teens, I am never off the clock. I'm always a text away, and with a teen driver, I feel like I can't not be available 24/7. Also, older kids take up more space, are louder, and have more intense needs than I anticipated. Every day feels like a circus show of juggling, and I'm kind of holding my breath and hoping I'll have enough breathing room to manage any work. While a cartoon and snuggles could suffice with a toddler, teenagers require 50 memes, a thoughtful conversation, and probably Chick-fil-A to connect. I feel a pressure to be emotionally available in a way I didn't when they were younger, and that makes it hard to switch back and forth to work mode when working from home. I want to embrace it all I don't want to be resentful of being "interrupted," and of course, I want to be there for my kids and hear all the details and be available for their lives. I want to be that person for them, and I'm all too aware how fast and fleeting it all is, and I could lose one of them next year to college. You know the guilt heaped on moms of young kids about how fast it all goes, so you better soak it in? Well, as a mom of teens, that guilt is magnified by about a million because this is exactly the time they were talking about — we're living the slow slippage of our kids out of our lives daily. I want to embrace it, soak it in, and be here for it. But I also have to pay my bills, and I don't know how to do both right now. I'm trying some new things, like getting noise-cancelling headphones, setting more firm boundaries about when I can and can't be interrupted, and trying to shift more of my morning chores to later in the day so I have more work time. The pressures and intensity of this stage feel a lot like the new parent stage all over again, only without the cute baby to cuddle. I still have plenty of sleepless nights, too — watching your child on Life360 is the new baby monitor. Maybe I just need to give myself the same amount of grace (and coffee) as I did back then.

New York Post

a day ago

• New York Post

Former US fighter pilot claims he nearly collided with UFO in ‘wildest experience' he's ever had

A former US combat fighter pilot claims a UFO encounter he had while zipping around in the sky at 30,000 feet was one of the 'wildest experiences' he's had in his seasoned military career. Maj. Ryan Bodenheimer, a former ace of the US Air Force Thunderbirds and F-15E combat fighter pilot, recounted on his YouTube channel earlier this month how he came close to almost colliding with a UFO shaped like a 'perfect rectangle' while on a training mission in southern Wyoming. Bodenheimer alleged that he was flying during the day at about 30,000 feet in the sky, at a speed of 400 knots (460 mph), when a 'bright object' caught his attention off in the distance, 'out of nowhere.' 4 US Air Force Maj. Ryan Bodenheimer, United States Air Force Thunderbirds pilot #2 speaks with JROTC students at Vanden High School, Fairfield, Calif., on May 5, 2017. U.S. Air Force However, Bodenheimer realized that the object was on a 'collision course' with his aircraft. 'I put my hand on the control stick, I'm about to turn off the autopilot, and then I realized we weren't going to hit, and all of a sudden it came more into view, and it was a rectangular shape,' he said. 'This was like essentially a perfect rectangle.' He claims the object appeared to be '30 to 40 feet' high, with 'bright white' along the outside edges that looked to be 'glowing' and a clear center. 'I know it sounds like I'm talking about a delicious pastry, but this was the wildest experience I've ever had,' the former fighter pilot said. Bodenheimer, for a moment, theorized that the object could be a weather balloon, but he claimed that it didn't look like anything he had ever seen in the sky before. 4 Bodenheimer alleged that he was flying during the day at about 30,000 feet in the sky, at a speed of 400 knots (460 mph), when a 'bright object' caught his attention off in the distance, 'out of nowhere.' Youtube / Max Afterburner 'There's no wings on this thing, no exhaust. The edges were so bright they were pulsing. Aerodynamically, this thing shouldn't be going at close to 400 knots. For a rectangle to be flying through the air was a wild experience,' he said. He said that he wasn't picking up any signal on his radar and wasn't experiencing any radio interference as it kept pace with his jet at 400 knots just a short distance away. 'It really was defying any type of aeronautical laws that I've learned,' Bodenheimer shared. The suspected UFO then 'zooms off,' and Bodenheimer said he called into air traffic control to report the encounter. 4 Bodenheimer claims the object appeared to be '30 to 40 feet' high, with 'bright white' along the outside edges that looked to be 'glowing' and a clear center. Air Force Thunderbirds 4 Bodenheimer maneuvers his F-16 Fighting Falcon on the flight line at Langley Air Force Base, Va., on April 24, 2016. U.S. Air Force After telling the controller what happened, he said there was a 'dead silence' before they told the fighter pilot they'd have other aircraft be on the lookout for the object. 'I never heard anything about it [after],' the former fighter pilot said. However, he did do some searching of his own and said there was a report filed that day on an 'anomalous object' spotted in his area. Bodenheimer said for years he never wanted to discuss his two run-ins with UFOs after worrying about the 'stigma' around other pilots who have shared their encounters. However, the pilot-turned-YouTuber said that since the stigma has dissipated, he is more comfortable opening up about his experience, with more reports of military pilots encountering UFO-like objects in the sky over the last two decades. Southern Wyoming is notoriously known for having some of the most UFO sightings in the country, according to the Cowboy State Daily. The city of Cheyenne, which is home to Warren Air Force Base, has had over 50 reported aerial phenomena, out of the state's 421 sightings since 1995.