The Navy’s draft environmental impact statement on continued training in the Pacific proposes more frequent use of nearshore areas such as Kaneohe Bay and Marine Corps Training Area Bellows, along with new activities that include training in ocean mine warfare.
The service has a federal operating permit for what it calls the Hawaii-California Training and Testing Study Area that expires in 2025, and is required to submit an EIS as part of the renewal process.
Under the new permit, the Navy is requesting a “special use” airspace in Southern California, expansion of an underwater training range near San Clemente Island, and installation and maintenance of ocean mine warfare training areas off both Hawaii and Southern California.
The four-volume EIS draft released Friday is posted online and notes a Feb. 11 deadline for public comment. The Navy is taking comments online and will hold public meetings in both Hawaii and California.
According to a Navy news release, “While the overall boundaries of the Hawaii Study Area have not changed from the 2018 (Hawaii-California Training and Testing EIS and Overseas EIS), nearshore areas, such as Kaneohe Bay or Marine Corps Training Area Bellows, are proposed to be used more frequently or for new training or testing activities, such as mine warfare training.”
The Pentagon considers the Pacific to be its most critical theater of operations amid tension with China, and Oahu serves as a key hub for operations in the region and the headquarters of the vast Pacific Fleet.
The Navy also hosts the biennial Rim of the Pacific Exercise — the world’s largest naval war game — in the Hawaiian islands and off San Diego, and has been stepping up training year-round with allied countries in the region.
However, the Navy also is facing increased scrutiny of its environmental record in the Pacific, and especially in Hawaii as it continues cleanup operations at its underground Red Hill facility, a World War II-era fuel farm that sits just 100 feet above a critical aquifer most of Honolulu relies on for drinking water.
In November 2021, a fuel leak entered the Navy’s Oahu water system that serves 93,000 people, a number of whom reported health issues they blamed on contaminated tap water.
A recent Navy proposal to increase firing practice on Kaula, a small islet off Kauai that’s home to nesting seabirds and endangered Hawaiian monk seals, also has sparked outrage. The state of Hawaii and the Navy have been at odds over who owns the island, with the state declaring it a seabird sanctuary and pushing for the Navy to abandon it as a training ground.
For its part, the Navy says it doesn’t expect that increasing training will significantly impact the 18 bird species known to nest there.
The draft EIS includes analysis of how noise — particularly underwater sonar — from its various systems could impact the environment. Other concerns raised by environmentalists include Navy vessels hitting and injuring marine animals, especially whales.
The National Marine Fisheries Service authorizes the Navy an “incidental take” — a calculation of the number of times the government believes Navy operations could result in marine life getting harassed, injured or killed in a certain area, even if sailors are working to mitigate the encounters.
The Navy’s current operating permit initially allowed up to three large whales to be killed in ship strikes, or fatal collisions at sea. As of 2024, the Navy had hit that limit.
In 2021, the Navy announced it would review its policies after an Australian navy destroyer participating in a multinational exercise off California unknowingly dragged two dead fin whales under the ship’s hull into San Diego, where the animals had to be dislodged from the vessel.
The federal Endangered Species Act requires the government to reevaluate its data if new information or factors it hadn’t considered come to light. As a result of the San Diego incident, the Navy last year said it would provide extra training to prevent whale strikes, but also requested that NMFS retroactively amend its operating permit for Hawaii and California to allow for more fatal collisions with large whales, from three to five.
Other concerns have been raised over military sinking exercises the Navy calls SINKEX. The service has conducted the exercises for decades to give sailors the opportunity to use their weapons on real targets — something the Navy doesn’t have the opportunity to do as often as other military branches.
The target vessels have to be defueled and scrubbed of potential toxic chemicals in a series of costly procedures laid out by the Environmental Protection Agency. But critics argue there hasn’t been enough study of what happens after the ships sink to the ocean floor.
The Navy imposed a moratorium on SINKEX training in 2010 while conducting a review of the program, weighing its benefits, costs and potential environmental impacts. In 2011, the Sierra Club and other groups filed a lawsuit against the EPA alleging that it failed to prevent the SINKEX program from exposing the ocean to toxic chemicals.
The training resumed in 2012 with three decommissioned vessels sunk off Kauai during that year’s RIMPAC, and the plaintiff groups dropped their complaint in 2013 due to lack of funding.
In Hawaii, sinking exercises are required to be conducted at least 50 nautical miles from shore and in waters at a depth of at least 6,000 feet. Navy officials have argued the sunken ships turn into reefs and habitat for sea life below. But they also admit they haven’t actually checked on those shipwrecks because they are at a depth that “precludes them from long-term monitoring.”
The U.S. military isn’t the only one facing scrutiny in the Pacific. China currently has the world’s largest navy by ship count and is trying to build it larger, with hopes of being capable of launching an invasion of Taiwan.
In the South China Sea, a critical waterway that more than a third of all trade moves through, the Chinese military has built bases over disputed reefs and atolls and used “maritime militia” — ostensibly civilian vessels tasked with staking out disputed territory and harassing ocean workers from other countries.
Scientists have raised concerns that these activities have severe environmental impacts, but Chinese forces have chased off researchers trying to study them.
Last year in a speech in Waikiki, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said there is a “direct correlation between the presence of maritime militia vessels and reef damage,” calling the effects on biodiversity and the environment “as possibly already irreversible.”
