The nation’s first Littoral Combat Ship, USS Freedom (LCS 1), recently departed Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam to participate in the world’s largest maritime exercise, known as Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) 2010.

RIMPAC is held biennially in Honolulu, Hawaii, and hosted by U.S. Pacific Fleet. During this year’s exercise, USS Freedom will operate in the area with air, land and maritime forces from 13 other nations.

The recent departure from Pearl Harbor marks the beginning of the at-sea operational phase of RIMPAC 2010.

To view video footage of USS Freedom from RIMPAC, click here.

“RIMPAC is a tremendous opportunity to build upon and to refine Freedom’s known surface warfare and maritime security capabilities and to break new ground in LCS employment,” said Cmdr. Kris Doyle, commanding officer of Freedom’s Blue Crew, in a recent Navy press release. “We have several ‘first-of’ events scheduled, ranging from air defense to anti-submarine to fire support exercises. Every day, we will be stretching ourselves to learn more about what LCS brings to the fleet and how we integrate in a multinational environment.”

Freedom departed from San Diego, where it arrived in April, marking the conclusion of a highly successful first deployment to the U.S. Southern and U.S. Pacific Command areas of responsibility. Throughout the deployment, the ship conducted counter-illicit trafficking operations, making four successful interdictions in which more than five tons of cocaine and two “go fast” drug vessels were seized, and nine suspected smugglers were taken into custody.

Freedom also performed integrated at-sea operations with the USS Carl Vinson Carrier Strike Group. The successful operations confirmed USS Freedom’s ability to seamlessly integrate into strike group operations.

LCS 1 is the first of 55 the Navy plans for a new class of ships designed to operate in coastal waters.

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