U.S. military forces in the Valiant Shield 2020 exercise in the Pacific Ocean included a simulated Tomahawk cruise missile attack by the USS Antietam, the U.S. Navy said on Monday.

The guided-missile cruiser, part of the strike group led by the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, successfully targeted land on the uninhabited Farallon de Medinilla range off the coast of Guam on Sunday.

The exercise demonstrated the ship's ability to "track, target, and engage threats to protect peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific, the Navy said in a statement.

"The TLAM [Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile] exercise, as part of the overall Valiant Shield 20 scenario, provides the entire Ronald Reagan Strike Group the opportunity to exercise critical war fighting skills," said Capt. Russell Caldwell, commander of the USS Antietam.

The exercise, Caldwell said, "helps the warfighter refine their tactical abilities to respond to a full range of military response options that are available in defense of our shared interests in the Asia Pacific region."

The 12-day biennial exercise of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command started Sept. 14 in Guam and at the Mariana Islands Range Complex, running through Sept. 25. Approximately 100 aircraft and about 11,000 personnel of the Navy, Army, Air Force and Marines are involved in training integration in a "blue water environment."

On Saturday, another Valiant Shield exercise sank the decommissioned frigate USS Curtis in a sequence of live ordnance and missiles fired from planes, cruisers and a submarine.

Chinese propaganda video shows bombers attacking what looks like Guam
Washington DC (UPI) Sep 21, 2020 - A new Chinese propaganda video borrows heavily from Hollywood and depicts an airstrike on an island some observers say resembles the U.S. base in Guam.

The two-minute production, released on Saturday by the Chinese People's Liberation Army on social media, depicts Chinese H-6 long-range bombers traveling over the Pacific Ocean. As dramatic music soars, a missile is fired at an unnamed island, prompting an explosion at the target.

The video offers no narration, but some observers noted that the pattern of aircraft landing strips on the attacked island resembles that of the U. S. air base on Guam, the South China Morning Post reported on Sunday.

The presentation suggests that it was produced as a warning to any country of base within the strike range of the bombers.

"The messages put out by the People's Republic of China propaganda machine threaten anyone who opposes China or the Communist Party," Drew Thompson, former U.S. Defense Department analyst said. He added that the video footage "warns that the PLA is prepared to use force to settle differences."

In 2019, China test fired a DF-26 ballistic missile, which has a range of 3,400 miles and has the capacity to strike U.S. military installations on Guam.

The video production does not identify the island being struck by the missile. It does, however, include brief scenes from Hollywood films. Footage is borrowed from "Transformers: Revenge of the Falcon," involving an attack on the U.S. air base at Diego Garcia, and "The Rock," an action film in which Alcatraz Island, in San Francisco Bay, is the target of a missile.

An unidentified source close to the PLA told the South China Morning Post that the Army's publicity department often borrows scenes from Hollywood films to make its propaganda look more spectacular.

"Almost all of the officers in the department grew up watching Hollywood movies, so in their minds, American war films have the coolest images," the source said.

China has recently increased its efforts on matters involving contested islands in the South China and East China Seas, and reinforced its demand that Taiwan be re-unified with the mainland country.

It is also building a new aircraft carrier, its third and the first with up-to-date technology.

"The vast capacity that China possesses when it comes to land-based ... cruise missiles and ground-based conventional missiles, and where they are headed with ground-based hypersonic missiles, represents an offensive threat throughout the region that is alarming not only to the United States but to all our allies and partners there as well," Adm. Philip Davidson, head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said on Thursday at a virtual forum of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance.

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