– USNI News – The Marine Corps’ F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters are the only ship-based fixed-wing aircraft in the Middle East right now, and service leaders say the new jets are ready to handle any fight in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan they may be tasked with.

– USNI News – Marines training on the ground on the Horn of Africa will see a new set of wings pulling the classic close air support mission: The F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter.

– USNI Proceedings – Marine Corps culture is rooted in the service’s long and storied history. Arguably, its culture is what differentiates it from other services and contributes to its fighting prowess and success.

– USNI Proceedings – There are at least 35 megacities — or “dense urban areas” (DUAs), in doctrinal terms—in the world, most of them adjacent to littorals. Lagos, Nigeria; Mumbai, India; and Seoul, South Korea, to name just three, are among the many that also sit in active or potential conflict zones. The U.S. military almost certainly will have to fight in one or more of these 35 in the near future.

– USNI News – The Navy and Marine Corps are running up against a deadline to add more amphibious warships to the fleet before older hulls start retiring.

– War on the Rocks – The Marine Corps has a tendency toward paranoia over its institutional purpose – America doesn’t need a Marine Corps, America wants a Marine Corps. We were recently reminded that there are reasons this insecurity endures.

– War Zone – The new Harvest Hawk Plus package is a significant improvement over the existing setup and will be easier for crews to install and use.

– Breaking Defense – The initial contract announced today was just $198 million for the first 30 vehicles, to be delivered by next fall, but Marines want to replace approximately 870 existing AAVs with better-protected, more mobile ACVs “as rapidly as we can,” which will take into “the mid to late ’20s.”

– USNI News – The Marine Corps’ Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF) Crisis Response force in U.S. Central Command is becoming increasingly distributed across the Middle East as its role evolves, but it is gaining additional aircraft and a ship it can call upon to help support its vastly spread out operations.

– Breaking Defense – For years, we’ve heard about how vulnerable aircraft carriers are to enemy fire. They’re big. They’re not that fast — compared to a missile. But a big airbase isn’t exactly mobile. While it can be hardened, its location is well known.

– USNI News – The Marine Corps and Navy are preparing for a high-end fight that will require ships to be distributed across the ocean rather than clustered around an aircraft carrier, and the Marines’ future Group 5 unmanned aerial system will give them the airborne early warning capability to break free from the carrier and its E-2D Advanced Hawkeye early warning aircraft.

– USNI News – Forward-deployed Marines are using a new system to protect U.S. troops from the threat of cheap and lethal unmanned aerial vehicles.

– USNI News – The Marine Corps wants to focus its continental U.S.-based forces training for a high-end large-scale war, in case a conflict on the Korean Peninsula or elsewhere requires a massive surge force.

– Breaking Defense – The Marine Corps is reorganizing its infantry for future high-tech conflicts in which troops must spread out to avoid the enemy’s precision-guided firepower.

– War Zone – What it really takes to keep the USMC’s tired Hornet fleet in the air and first-hand experience of Marine Aviation’s waning readiness.

– War on the Rocks – One only needs to look at the opening ceremony of the 2018 PyeongChang Olympic games to see how modern drone technology could soon render today’s Marine Corps warfighting platforms and doctrine obsolete. During the ceremony, Intel Corp used over 1,200 specially designed drones to light up the night sky in a never-before-seen swarm that danced and maneuvered in formations that included a giant moving snowboarder, an enormous flying dove, and the iconic Olympic rings. With such a graphic display of sophistication, it is not difficult to imagine the damage that could be inflicted against an adversary’s force if each of those 1,200 drones had been weaponized and configured to seek and destroy enemy formations.

– Breaking Defense – If the Commandant of the Marine Corps had one more dollar to spend — and he probably will with the recent budget deal — he’d use it to upgrade Navy ships’ electronics to take full advantage of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

– USNI News – The Marine Corps is beginning to implement changes to the infantry battalion a year into the service’s Sea Dragon 2025 experimentation effort, with recommendations that include fielding small unmanned aerial systems (UAS), adding advanced training opportunities, restructuring the rifle squad and drawing up new tactics and procedures for a high-end battlefield.

– Navy Times – A small Marine artillery battalion fired more rounds than any artillery battalion since Vietnam. It’s an explosive revelation that sheds light on the immense level of lethal force brought to Raqqa and northern Syria in support of U.S. counter-ISIS operations.

– USNI Proceedings – The retention of highly trained Marines is a major problem that the Corps is fighting and losing as personnel leave the ranks for a multitude of reasons, including lack of satisfaction with their service, mistaken expectations, cumulative fatigue, and medical problems.

– Breaking Defense – Perhaps the most damning thing a director of Operational Test and Evaluation can say about a weapon is that it is not “operationally suitable.”

– CIMSEC – It is one thing to state the aspiration for more unmanned systems in the Fleet, and quite another to develop and deploy them. There are compelling reasons why naval expeditionary forces have been proactive in experimenting with emerging unmanned systems.

– War on the Rocks – Marine training reflects a Cold War mindset with only minor adjustments over the past two decades. A substantial shift is required for service level training to ensure Marine units are prepared for the current and forecasted future operating environment.

– Defense News – The U.S. Navy amphibious assault ship Wasp has arrived at its new home port in Japan, setting the stage for the first time the Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning II fighter jet will go to sea on an operational cruise later this year.

– San Diego Union Tribune – Despite overseas tensions triggered by a nuclear-armed North Korea’s missile tests and China’s territorial claims in the Western Pacific, Japanese and American forces kicked off war games on Friday in California.