French Navy Launches La Perouse 2025 Exercise in the East Indian Ocean

The multinational La Perouse exercise, held every two years, has commenced in the eastern Indian Ocean near the Indonesian archipelago. Nine French allied and partner navies are taking part, with a focus on training to secure strategic maritime routes in the Indo-Pacific, News.az reports citing foreign media.

The La Perouse exercise is led by France and centered around the French CSG (also called TF 473) – currently on deployment for the Clemenceau 25 mission – brings together nine countries including Canada, the United States, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Australia, the United Kingdom and Singapore. This force gathers 13 ships and about 130 aircrafts of all types (helicopters, MPAs, fighter jets).

Regarding the ships involved, as previously reported by Naval News, the CSG consists in the carrier itself, an Horizon-type air defense destroyer, an Aquitaine-class frigate (ASW FREMM), an air defense FREMM (FREMM DA, which, Naval News understands is likely to be Alsace), a Suffren-class nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN), a logistics support ship (the Jacques Chevallier) and a Loire-class metropolitan offshore support and assistance vessel. The air wing is set to include two E-2C Hawkeye AEW aircraft, about 24 Rafale Marine and four helicopters.

Naval News can confirm that Canada is partcipating with the Halifax-class frigate HMCS Ottawa and on its side, UK can count on the presence of one of its River-class OPV, HMS Spey. Malaysia deployed the corvette KD Lekir and the training ship KD Gagah Samudera. The rest of the participating units remains unclear for now.

The main objectives of La Perouse exercise are to “provide maritime safety with regional partners and multinational coalition assets in the 3 main straits detrimental to commercial shipping”, and “sharing information and coordinating their actions against multiple threats thanks to the communication and coordination system IORIS”.

This exercise is performed in two steps. First of all, from January 16th to 20th, the coalition will focus on the two main straits of the area which are the Malacca and the Sunda straits. If the first is well publicly known for being the world’s most used straits, the Sunda strait is much less used, but no less strategic. It connects the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea through the Indonesian Java and Sumatra islands. In a second phase, from January 21st to 24th, the CSG will sail further East to “secure” the Lombok strait.

News.Az