On Dec. 8th, 2024, four F-35Bs from VMFA-214 “Black Sheep” squadron, along with two F-35Bs from VMX-1, flew out of Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) Yuma in Arizona accompanied by two Air Force C-17s from the 97th Airlift Squadron. The destination was an airfield on San Clemente Island (SCI), a U.S. military-controlled outpost used for training, test, and weapons development, located roughly 65 miles off the San Diego coast. Before the C-17s landed, VMFA-214’s F-35Bs faced a host of ‘red air’ adversaries, including 5th generation fighters, before the C-17s could safely ingress. In other words, they would have to fight their way in.
From this airfield, the Black Sheep and VMX-1 would test a host of new tactics, techniques and procedures while refining others, before fighting their way out on the way back to MCAS Yuma. The Marines would be stationed as they would in a conflict, living in tents and eating Meals Ready to Eat (MREs), while living and operating from SCI.
The War Zone was invited to get an exclusive look at how these squadrons operated and maintained the F-35B out of an austere environment while generating combat sorties. It was an unprecedented and exclusive peek into the USMC’s evolving Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) playbook and what a real fight in the Pacific with the USMC’s most advanced fighter aircraft could actually look like.
Fighting Their Way In
The War Zone sat down with VMFA-214 Commanding Officer Lt. Col. Robert “Champ” Guyette to discuss the melding of USAF heavy transport capabilities and Marine tactical airpower in a forward deployed scenario from an island with minimal support and highly contested logistics.
“It’s somewhat non-standard for Marine tactical aviation to work this closely with the C-17, but we have a great relationship with the reserve unit, the 97th, the ‘Fightin Roos’ out of Joint Base Lewis-McChord up in Washington. It started about a year and a half ago. We’ve got some Marines that used to fly with us that are now reservists with the 97th. And so that’s how the relationship started,” Guyette explained. “We started doing detachments out of New Orleans and other places like that to achieve mutual training objectives. There’s a lot of things that we can’t do that they can do and vice-versa, so it’s a symbiotic relationship between the two of us.”
“From the Marine perspective, the C-17 represents tactical fixed-wing heavy lift, which we always welcome in expeditionary mission planning cells. They routinely practice things like high-speed, low-level ingress and egress, and they can carry a ton of stuff. We are employing it to insert my entire Marine Corps team on the objective – all the weapons I would need and the tactical refueling and ground refueling systems to fight and sustain ourselves inside the WEZ [enemy’s weapons engagement zone], all in one C-17. Whatever fuel that they don’t need to get home, we can download that fuel from the C-17 into our fuel bladders to fill fighters,” the squadron commander said. “We set up the base, dump the gas out of the C-17, and then defend it so they can scoot. Once the bladders are filled with C-17 gas, MWSS (Marine Wing Support Squadron) Marines can fill up the F-35s when they cycle down from the overhead CAP (combat air patrol) and really minimize the time we are on deck. Properly configured C-17 and F-35 units make a strong expeditionary fighting team, and we’re really lucky to have those partners in the 97th.”
The F-35B and C-17A have more in common than one might think. Each aircraft was designed to operate from remote locales. The design of the C-17 with high-lift wings, slats, powerful engines, and externally blown flaps, allows it to take off and land on runways as short as 3,500 feet. The runways need to be only about 90 feet wide because the aircraft can turn around using a three-point star turn. It also had a unique backing-up capability using thrust reversers, which was demonstrated on the island during the exercise. Maximum payload capacity of the C-17 is 170,000 pounds, and it has space for 18 pallet positions that makes it ideal to help carry the equipment needed for EABO.
All F-35Bs took off and landed in the Short Take Off and Vertical Landing (STOVL) mode during the exercise. Short takeoffs can lead to issues because, if not done properly, pieces of the runway can break apart and get ingested into the engine or strike the aircraft and nearby assets. Mitigating foreign object debris (FOD) on takeoff, pilots demonstrated the short takeoff (STO) capability of the F-35B, launching their combat-loaded 5th generation fighters from simulated short and narrow runways in less than 1,000 feet using temporary markers on SCI’s main airfield.
Naval Auxiliary Landing Field San Clemente Island was the perfect place to set EABO for this exercise. The main runway sits at the northern tip of the island with the Pacific at both east and west ends, providing a fairly austere environment for training objectives that would simulate what the Marines could face much farther out into the Pacific. For 48 hours, the three flying squadrons along with MWSS-371 would establish an EABO node in support of the larger 3rd Marine Air Wing exercise known as Steel Knight 24. The event is the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force’s (I MEF) annual large-scale exercise, which is seen as the final major training event for the 1st Marine Regiment before they deploy as part of Marine Rotational Force Darwin in Australia.
Previous Steel Knight exercises, which have become increasingly challenging and realistic, as well as this one, act as an operation that the MEF and 3rd MAW use to develop and validate their concept of operations in the Pacific. For VMFA-214 on SCI, objectives included enhancing squadron proficiency, Training and Readiness (T&R) progression to prepare for deployment, and exercising the planning, coordination, and logistics required to establish an EABO-representative node in a contested environment.
Guyette summed up the mission as “Fight in, fight from, fight out. It’s a three phase-approach that we’re rehearsing this week. We believe that in the next fight, we’re going to have to fight to get to anywhere we go, and the enemy is going to try to hassle us on the way in. Once we get there, we’re going to have to protect ourselves, and we’re going to minimize our time in any one place. We’re going to have to be able to strike from that place and then pack up and then fight our way back out. And so day one of this exercise was an opposed escort of C-17s from Yuma into San Clemente Island. We had four Black Sheep F-35Bs, and two from VMX-1 — the operational test unit in Yuma, and we were up against a large number of what we call red air, or adversary aircraft. We sourced the red air from Marine F/A-18s, F-35s and contract red air from companies like ATAC flying F-21 Kfirs and Hawker Hunters with special mission pods on them. They were simulating a coordinated enemy, trying to protect the island and prevent us from getting the C-17s on there.
“With some tanking support, we got the band together airborne and executed an offensive counter air (OCA) sweep mission to punch a big hole in that red air picture. Then we got those C-17s ingressed into San Clemente Island, carrying my Black Sheep maintenance team and all of our ordnance, as well as the MWSS-371 Sand Shark Marines and their Tactical Air Ground Refueling System (TAGRS). Once on deck, the Sand Sharks offloaded the gas out of the C-17s and into the TAGRS bladders. While they’re setting that up on the ground, the F-35s overhead shifted to a defensive counter air (DCA) mission to protect the island, as the red air reconstituted for another re-attack. This scenario was modeled after similar … situations we’d see in the real world — the enemy would be made aware that we are there and would not just cede the island, so we’d have to put them in their place again while the Marines below us set up that position. And so, a red air strike package approached, we defended the island, and then recovered the four Black Sheep and two VMX-1 jets for the night.”
After two C-17s conducted their low-level approach to the island with F-35B cover, they quickly unloaded MWSS Marines and cargo with the help of experienced loadmasters. Three Marine Polaris MRZR all-terrain vehicles towed two TAGRS and several 3,000-gallon fuel bladders off the aircraft and were set up alongside the C-17 within minutes. The other C-17 offloaded maintenance Marines and ordnance, which included several GBU-53 Bravos, also known as Small Diameter Bomb IIs (GBU-53/B, and several AIM-120 air-to-air missiles. Marine F-35Bs can carry eight GBU-53/Bs internally, as well as a pair of AIM-120 AMRAAMs, maintaining their low observable signature. The GBU-53/B can glide for dozens of miles to its target, which can be static or moving, striking with extreme precision and a powerful blast that can even piece some fortified structures.
MWSS-371, which is responsible for providing all essential aviation ground support requirements to the expeditionary group, put the new TAGRS to use. The TAGRS includes all of the refueling components in one compact system allowing for rapid setup and breakdown. This makes it near-essential for EABO operations, which seeks to distribute lethality across a large battlespace, especially to austere locales. The MRZR/TAGRS combination is perfect for expeditionary fuel operations since they can fit in both MV-22s and CH-53s. MWSS-371 recently employed this system during a recent Weapons and Tactics Instructor Course (WTI) and reduced expeditionary F-35B refueling time by 90% over previous capabilities and concepts of operations.
The planning cell for the exercise was unique in that it included pilots and loadmasters from all three weapons schools including graduates from Marine WTI training in Yuma, the USAF Weapons School in Nellis, and the Navy’s Fighter Weapon School (Topgun) in Fallon.
One of the planners on the C-17 side for the exercise was Maj. Matt “Leaker” Walton. Walton has been flying the C-17 since 2009 with more than 4,000 flying hours and is a graduate of the USAF Weapons School. “Exercise opportunities with units like VMFA-214 and MWSS-371 are critical to the continued development of C-17 training because it allows us to see how to best support our joint partners like those of I MEF,” Walton stated. “The C-17 plays a significant role in the joint maneuver force, especially in the INDOPACOM theater, so these opportunities have an operational level impact by building relationships at the tactical level. Further, this opportunity represents the first step in synchronizing the parallel joint efforts of Expeditionary Advanced Basing Operations (EABO), Agile Combat Employment (ACE), and the Army’s Multi-Domain Task Force (MDTF) to address challenges like anti-access area denial (A2/AD).”
Asked about how the school prepared him for this unique training event, Walton told us, “The USAF Weapons School is a problem-solving course I think thinly disguised as a mission planning course. It teaches you how to solve difficult problems and build a team to do it. I think what we did with the VMFA-214 is a perfect example. I don’t speak all of the same language as the Marines, but when you have a singular purpose with another unit it allows you to sit across the table from each other, look each other in the eyes and figure out ‘what do I need to support you. What do you need to support me?’ And it allows you to build very complex integrated plans in a systematic way.”
“I don’t know the correct way to say this but every one of the weapons school communities has a different flavor. Topgun and WTI certainly have their own flavor and they’re different from each other. The Air Force is very, very heavy on mission planning and integration. I think mission planning and kind of like deliberate strategic long-range planning is an Air Force strength. And so I think that is a large focus of Weapons School, how to build a complex thing piece-by-piece,” Walton added.
The C-17 dropped off 80,000-pounds of fuel at the Marines’ temporary home on SCI, providing enough gas for a few days of air operations, but integrating the C-17 into complex mission planning was difficult. The aircraft lacks a Link-16 networking capability, which provides challenges to the F-35s as they provide escort.
Without a viable datalink that can connect with the F-35s, C-17 crews are forced to use other methods to stay on task. “We are literally using a piece of paper and a pencil with a bullseye chart and tracking where we are and where red air is based on specific criteria in order to maintain the risk that we are set to. Most of the defense of the C-17 is accomplished in the mission planning cell where we produce contracts that VMFA-214 have to execute in order to keep us safe. We are highly dependent on our escort or the tactical command and control function as we listen to radios and use paper. It is hard to do and requires a high level of aircrew training.”
“Flying low-level is a very important self defense capability for the C-17. It is something we train to on almost every sortie. We can fly down to 300-feet AGL (above ground level) and did that for most of the mission both in and out. While it makes it harder for red air to target us, it also makes it harder for blue air to track us, which is why the mission planning and mutual trust is so important.”
Taking The Fight To The Enemy
Day two on the island saw VMFA-214 awakening out of their tents to begin executing a long-range strike against a simulated surface target. Capt. Christopher “Mellen” Streicher serves as the operations officer at VMFA-214, having previously served in VMFA-211 where he deployed on the HMS Queen Elizabeth.
Stryker told us about day two, stating, “We flew a division [four aircraft] of F-35Bs off San Clemente and hooked up with some F-15E Strike Eagles in the lane along with some F/A-18s from VMFA-232 executing a maritime strike on an enemy combatant in the Whiskey 291 (training range area). They had to fight back the red air picture which was trying to prevent them from reaching that asset, and they had to locate that asset which is challenging. As F-35 pilots, we continuously train to locate challenging targets with both active and passive techniques. More importantly is how you pass on that information to an asset that has weapons that can attrite that threat.”
“It is critical to integrate with our F/A-18s. In the air-to-air arena, the Hornets have six medium range missiles and two AIM-9Xs so they carry more weapons than we do. The challenge becomes ‘how do I use those weapons efficiently and effectively and get the Hornets into a spot where they can employ their strengths?’ Maybe the answer is ‘I use my sensors to help them find targets … so we find and locate the target, and then fight the air-to-air fight while we pass the targeting info to the Hornets that can go fire a weapon to destroy that target.’ The data passage piece is not that complicated, but it is the one that takes the most planning, so things go smoothly.”
Guyette elaborated, telling us, “So that’s the whole trick of it, to use the different strengths of each aircraft together as a team in order to accomplish a challenging objective. The key to building a winning plan is understanding each other’s systems and then having long discussions about what each other needs to accomplish the mission. We call that process F2T2EA: find, fix, target, track, engage, and assess. We need to find the target and we need to fix it, or make sure that we understand very precisely where it is. We will then target and then track it as it’s moving. In this case, a ship moving through the ocean. We will then engage it as a team, and then we will assess the effects of our engagement. In each one of those steps, different players come into the forefront, with different contracts between teammates and different systems and capabilities that are the focus. At the end of the day it’s the crews — men and women, Marines, airmen and sailors — working together to use the systems and their training and their airplanes to complete that kill chain.”
“On day two, we used Marine F-35Bs, Air Force F-15Es, and Marine F/A-18s, as well as some other special mission systems to get that done. On this mission the target wasn’t an actual warship, it was a contracted barge with a system that simulates the signatures of a threat surface combatant. Team F-35 finds it, then fixes it using techniques to reduce the uncertainty area. Then the Hornet steps into the spotlight, as F-35s use datalinks to pass targeting information to the F/A-18s, with multiple briefed backup plans when Murphy inevitably shows up and the plan goes sideways. We use a very talented and experienced white cell to inject that kind of friction, testing blue air adaptability and flexibility by simulating chaotic event patterns many of us have witnessed in combat.”
Once the target was located, F/A-18s simulated an attack with their AGM-84 Harpoon anti-ship missiles, while F-35s and F-15Es provided protection against the rapidly regenerating red air threat. With the target destroyed, F-35s covered the egress of the F/A-18s and then returned to SCI for a quick refuel and rearm, postured to scramble to defend their island outpost while pilots planned the next offensive action.
Current plans have the Marine Corps retiring F/A-18C/Ds around 2030, but they will spend their last years getting some very important upgrades as they continue to fly along with F-35s. Those upgrades include new APG-79(V)4 active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars and improved electronic warfare suites. On the weapons side of the house, Marines are busy integrating the AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) cruise missile. The introduction of the JASSM to the legacy Hornets will provide a huge capability over current weapons in terms of reach, which will allow the aircraft to be more survivable as they attempt to stay out of the range of enemy air defenses. With no current aircraft in the USMC inventory capable of carrying the JASSM, integrating JASSM into the Hornet will provide some time until both Marine F-35Bs and Cs receive new stand-off strike weapons.
The Fight Out
On the final day at SCI, Marines quickly packed up their gear and awaited the arrival of the C-17s that took off from MCAS Yuma. With the C-17s on deck, Marines quickly loaded their equipment and themselves leaving only the F-35Bs with their pilots on deck in running aircraft. The last people of the aircraft were the crew chiefs that were carrying the chocks for the F-35s.
C-17s departed with F-35Bs just a few minutes behind. One of the F-35B pilots on the last mission was Maj. Mike “Harvey” Savage. C-17s incorporated one of their unique abilities into the final mission, which was a maritime resupply of a notional submarine. Savage told us, “The mission planning day was a little non-standard because due to operating off the island, we had to do the mission planning day three days prior to execution. This presents a myriad of challenges because the mission was not fresh in people’s minds. We’d been sleeping in tents for two nights. The day includes executing the mission planning cell, which includes a structure of meetings. It was also a rep for one of the pilots as a workup event for the pilot to get his Mission Commander Under Instruction, which is a prerequisite for the pilot to attend the next WTI in the spring. It was a 12-hour day.”
“For the mission we executed short takeoffs as a four ship after waiting for the wake turbulence of the C-17s to subside. We executed a pre-mission hit to top off our gas and got in the escort mindset to get the C-17s to a release point to where the C-17s could provide an aerial replenishment to a nuclear submarine. We joined up with five other F-35s from Yuma for a total of nine plus four F/A-18s. We went up against four F-35Cs, two Kfirs, two Learjets and four Hawker Hunters. It was a robust red air picture. We gave the C-17s a hard time on target to make it more difficult for mission planning. We attempted to set conditions to enable the C-17s to get to the release pilot without getting shot down. The C-17 is a strategic target so we provided escort. It was great having F-35Cs on the opposing side because it shows you what the threat is we’re going up against. The Learjets had jamming pods which made it more difficult and added a layer of complexity. Once the C-17s were in an acceptable level of risk to complete their mission, they went in.”
Embracing The Digital Battlespace While On The Move
Another unique part of the exercise on SCI was the testing of the Maritime Targeting Cell – Expeditionary (MTC-X), also known as MENACE. Designed specifically for use in missions that require great mobility, the system is an upgrade of the MTC-A (Maritime Targeting Cell – Afloat), which gathers information from sensors and sends it to communication nodes based on land and at sea, in a secure way.
One of the ideas behind the system is to help reduce the sensor-to-shooter time by accurately directing long-range fire from weapons such as the Navy-Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System, also known as the NMESIS weapons system. The NMESIS fires Naval Strike Missiles, capable of hitting targets 115 miles away. For this exercise, the system was brought on to SCI by a Marine KC-130J from VMGR-352. It is also capable of being slingloaded beneath a CH-53.
The MTC-X is vital to getting the most out of all the F-35 has to offer in the forward battlespace. Col. John “Ike” Dirk serves as the commanding officer of VMX-1, who flew out to SCI on a CH-53K to get a firsthand look at MENACE in an expeditionary environment. He told us, “MENACE is kind of a forward edge deployable communications node and planning facility with connectivity. We at VMX-1 are doing an evaluation on it. There are a lot of different systems in the space. It has some on-board power capability. As good at the F-35 is, we must have near real-time communications, otherwise, as latency builds up — whatever the data we have is only as good as our last communications hit. If we are going to be spread out doing stuff like we like to do in the Marine Corps, then we need to have the ability to be connected in that environment. Menace is one of the things we are evaluating to help facilitate that.
“The key thing is that it is organically transportable by the Marines Corps. As important and reliant as we are on the joint force, we can’t be completely dependent on external logistical support to move around our key pieces of equipment. The system doesn’t need a power source and can actually provide power to other systems like a COC (Combat Operations Center).”
Dirk continues, “One of the great things about the F-35 is that we have gotten out of the business of doing time-based maintenance where we wait for a piece to fail. We do a lot of conditions-based maintenance and some of that is done algorithmically, calculated in the airplane when it might be time to change out a part. In order to do that you need connectivity with either stuff you have with you, like MENACE, or where you can reach back to the enterprise and say, ‘hey these are the parts that I am going to need to replace soon and here are the ones we need to order because I want to replace them because of what they went through in their lifespan.’ Being able to be connected not only enables the tactical part but enables the logistical past for not only the F-35 but for all of our systems.”
Talking about MTC-X, Guyette added, “The Marine Corps and the Marine Corps War Fighting Lab is pushing this really hard, because we’ve realized that part of being able to do EABO is to be able to push data back and forth in a denied, degraded, intermittent and latent data environment. In places where it’s hard to get a cellular signal, or it’s hard to get connection to overhead assets to generate data back and forth, data isolation can be a showstopper for anybody that’s trying to do this kind of thing. Expeditionary command and control and expeditionary data are key enablers to our way of fighting, and so the Marine Corps is currently investigating multiple solutions to that problem.
“What we’ve got out here today is one solution from a vendor that allows us to use unclassified and classified networks, both over voice and data, in order to support our maintenance effort and support mission planning, mission briefing, mission execution from a command and control perspective, and debriefing as well. The maintainer is pushing data back from a node to a hub or a spoke, so that back home, where we do have those resources, they can prepare and order parts from farther back in the supply chain. When the jet finally makes it back to that echelon, it’s maintained proactively instead of reactively.”
Guyette added, “Robust expeditionary C3I allows my intelligence Marines to provide crews with real-time situation updates prior to launch, and the pilots can take that information and modify the software in the airplane to customize our lethality based on the current threat. They can also use this equipment to coordinate mission briefs with disparate assets, which is something we did here on the island. So, Air Force units that are not located with us, other Marine units that are on the ship or on other bases, overhead Space Force assets, and our Ground Combat Element Marine brothers and sisters on the ground, coordinating all that stuff and secure comms, and then going out and executing it, managing the battle space via a C2 (command and control) node … and then coming home and doing it all over again.”
Living In The Expeditionary Environment
A few years back when he was the commanding general of the 3rd Marine Air Wing, Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Christopher J. Mahoney was speaking to The War Zone about Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations. He told us, “In the Marine Corps, if I want a new idea, I read an old book. The EABO concept is about moving around, establishing a capability, sustaining that capability, and then moving again before you become a seductive target to somebody. That is what we’re moving toward with EABO.”
“If you look at Operation Cartwheel in World War II, up in the Solomon Islands, and how we executed particularly aviation operations in Korea, that’s what we did. MAG-12 [Marine Air Group 12] moved across several airfields and moved around depending on where the fight was, picked up their trash, moved around, got in battery, and started generating combat power or moved back onto the ship and then moved back ashore. So, those ideas and those capabilities are things we’ve got historical experience with. Now it’s a matter of reintroducing them intellectually, and then making the structure follow the concept and thoughts, and then training to the functions that we want to perform,” he added.
One of the squadrons that was a big part of those operations in the Solomon Islands that Mahoney was referring to was the Black Sheep, known as VMF-214 at the time. During the late 1943 island-hopping campaign up the Solomons, Maj. Gregory “Pappy” Boyington led VMF-214 as they flew out of bases so far forward that they were often behind Japanese lines, and even operating out of an airfield on an island that still had enemy positions on it. The squadron was made up of some of the most experienced pilots in the Pacific and scored dozens of kills in a few short weeks with nine of the 28 pilots becoming aces.
Now the Marines of the Black Sheep squadron are at it again, training in austere environments as they prepare for a possible confrontation in the Pacific.
Watching the Marines on their final day on the island packing up their tents and gear behind a ramp dotted with 5th generation F-35s, one could only think of the photos from the Solomon Islands where “Boyingtons Bastards” were seen operating in much the same way living next to their F-4U Corsairs.
Guyette summed up the experience of the exercise saying, “If my Marines can wake up in a tent, hygiene, shave their face successfully, go out and work on an airplane, and then come back to their bivouac and be comfortable being uncomfortable, and then pack their trash quickly, get in a C-17, and then get out and do it all over again, that’s success for me this week. The high speed, whiz-bang, gee-whiz stuff will come with time. Our pilots are capable of amazing things, but the thing that I personally as a commander really focused on is my corporals and my sergeants. I asked them to shift their mindset from a hangar or a ship, where we have everything we could ever want, into this kind of field environment where they’re aggressively conserving materials and doing without a lot of creature comforts that we normally have. And I think that’s kind of the best part of this job for me as a CO now, is watching the Marines effortlessly do that and be excited to do it because they know it’s realistic. It’s built into them as Marines, and they continue to amaze me after 20 years of watching them.”
“They know we’re not going to have hangars. We’re not going to have all of our nice equipment like at home. It’ll be compromised, destroyed, or we’re going to have to move away from it when the time comes. And so the question you ask yourself is, can we really make that happen when the fight comes to us? Could we actually do that? What you’re seeing during this exercise is that the things that make us Marines are the things that are going to help us win.”
Guyette elaborated further, “We must continue to train like this. Marines know it and honestly they don’t care about creature comforts because they just want to fight and win. You know, if we give them an MRE and a bottle of water and maybe someplace to sleep out of the rain, they will just continue to smash the enemy into the dirt, repeatedly. I couldn’t be more proud of them and proud to be on the team with them. They just get it done, and it doesn’t matter where they are or what the situation is – if they’re together, they’re going to find a way to win. The Black Sheep, the Sand Sharks, and the VMX-1 Marines … they’ve all demonstrated that the strength of the individual Marine is what will carry the day.”
All of the squadrons that participated showed an extraordinary ability to get maintenance done with far fewer tools and equipment than they would normally have at MCAS Yuma. During the visit, we saw only one aircraft go down for some unexpected maintenance that required a few hours before it was back flying.
“We say in the Black Sheep, slow is smooth, smooth is fast. And so, we don’t hand out qualifications because somebody knows everything. We hand out qualifications to lead maintenance tasks because we trust their ability to make good judgment calls. We’ve got publications our Marines reference on ruggedized computers that show them exactly how to perform maintenance actions and they followed them to the T, both out here and back in the hangar. However, there are certain situations that require young Marine NCOs to simultaneously demonstrate leadership, technical expertise and risk assessment in stressful environments.
“For example, if we strip out a screw or this nut and we don’t have another one out here in the node, we can’t just go to the hangar and get another one, right? So, what do we do? Is the jet flyable? What is the risk? How do I assess that? All of these questions are being asked in the corporal or sergeant’s head, alongside a clock that is always ticking, with little sleep and tough physical conditions weighing down on him or her. From the first weeks of boot camp, the Marines learn critical personal skills that allow them to be very deliberate with the tasks on which success of a huge upcoming strike, or the defense of the node, rests. I trust them implicitly with my life and the lives of my pilots, and they don’t let us down.”
Guyette summed up his reflections on how his Marines get the job done, stating “And so, in the last 48 hours we adapted to this field environment really well and that’s indicative of strong NCO leadership. The strength of any Marine unit is these E-4s and E-5s, corporals and sergeants. They run down the C-17 ramp, pop out of their tent with just their tool bag and they are turning jets around within minutes — landing them, recovering them, refueling them, arming them and de-arming them. And they’re doing it without getting hurt and without breaking anything. They move quickly, with a sense of urgency, but they’re not rushing. I don’t have to pick an all-star team. I don’t have to pick my best Marines to do this kind of thing. They’re all like this, so there really isn’t an all-star team. We picked who was available and who was willing and they’re knocking it out of the park.”
Busy Year For The Black Sheep
The exercise finished a long year for VMFA-214 that saw them traveling to several countries across INDOPACOM as they prepare for an upcoming Unit Deployment Program (UDP). In May, the squadron left Yuma and landed on a flightline at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam during a trans-Pacific flight route to Royal Australian Air Force Base Tindall, Australia. There, Marines trained alongside allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region for several weeks. VMFA 214 got the opportunity to participate with their Australian partners in Diamond Storm, which is the Australians’ Air Warfare Instructor Course, also known as AWIC. It’s their culminating event of a multi-month weapon school. Prior to that, they teamed up with the Australian 75 Squadron, which is their F-35A Squadron based out of Tindall as well as their 3 squadron, which is in Williamstown on the east coast.
The Black Sheep also cut their teeth in hub-and-spoke operations in the First Island Chain this summer, participating in Marine Aviation Support Activity 2024, a multinational exercise based mostly out of the Philippines. VMFA-214 flew four jets from Australia to Clark Air Base in the Philippines and executed a littoral live fire exercise integrated with some artillery strikes, where they attacked and destroyed maritime targets off the coast of Luzon using precision munitions. Flying and fighting under Philippine command and control, they were in and out, returning to Australia to rejoin the fight within 72 hours and demonstrating the tactical value of an agile F-35 unit in INDOPACOM sphere of control.
Speaking about the last few months, Guyette added, “One of the things that I’m most excited about is we got the opportunity, after we came back from Australia, to go down to work Emerald Flag in Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida. We were working with the Kratos XQ-58, which is another potential capability that the Marine Corps is looking for Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), Penetrating Autonomous Affordable Collaborative Killer Portfolio (PAACK-P), which we are now transitioning to MUX-TACAIR. We’re starting to explore the concept of ‘VMFAU,’ or maybe just ‘VMF,’ where we combined piloted and unpiloted tactical platforms to get after TACAIR mission sets. Armed, sensing and jamming remotely-piloted aircraft that you can launch from a node could potentially work in tandem with our aviators in fighter aircraft to win in our most challenging scenarios. We would control that from somewhere like a C2 node like we had out at SCI. The TACAIR squadrons of the future are going to be teamed up with unmanned assets, both launched from their position and from points elsewhere. We are considering many concepts of employment. In one of them, you may be flying in an F-35 and, the next day you are flying a CCA on the wing of your squadron mates from a ground station, controlling it from the node.
“What the Black Sheep are clearly demonstrating is that the combination of manned and unmanned expeditionary TACAIR and advanced expeditionary C2 gives the Marine Corps a powerful, agile weapon, and it’s a strong value proposition to the joint force. It’s the ability to strike and move — hitting hard and then rapidly relocating while continuously integrated with our joint teammates, within the enemy’s WEZ. We are not quite there yet, but we now know exactly the skill sets and capabilities we need to develop. The Black Sheep are excited to push these concepts into reality, because it provides an incredibly difficult problem for those who would oppose us.”
Summing up the experience of operating off of SCI, Guyette provided the big picture view. “There were a lot of Marines that did some amazing things in the Solomon Islands. They were all heroes fighting from those islands. We are literally on an island practicing fighting from an island. As a commander, I have engaged and gone through all of the books from the Marine Corps Historical Society and even looked at some old pictures of how those bases were laid out, putting myself in the context and seeing the challenges that people had to go through 80 years ago. The challenges haven’t changed, just the ranges are larger and farther and everything happens faster, but the things that made them successful yesterday are the things that will make us successful tomorrow.”
Contact the editor: Tyler@twz.com