 This is Colonel Denny Gillen, the host of Frontlines of Freedom, your military talk radio show. The biennial Rim of the Pacific exercise, the world's largest recurring naval warfare exercise, kicked off in Hawaii late last month as warships, aircraft, and personnel from 29 countries gathered at the islands. The combined forces will conduct a mixture of naval combat exercises and humanitarian response operations in a region where both tensions and global temperatures have been on the rise.