– War on the Rocks – The Warbots concept is certainly creative, but it is a right of boom solution for a left of boom world, and consequently risks ceding strategic ground.

– UPI – About 700 Marines have deployed to Norway, the first deployment of a larger Marine Corps presence in the country following a request earlier this year.

– Marine Corps Times – The winner of a contract to develop the Marine Corps new amphibious combat vehicle, the first of its kind in four decades, showcased a potential variant that would give commanders eyes on all areas of the littoral battlefield, on-board drones and targeted hand offs to any ACV in their formations.

– USNI News – Striking the right balance between funding today’s force and funding new capabilities for the future has always been a challenge, but Marine Corps leaders have firmly come down on the side of favoring modernization to win in a future fight.

– War Zone – The debut combat missions for American Joint Strike Fighters came after the same jets conducted armed reconnaissance patrols near Somalia.

– War on the Rocks – The purpose of this article: a dispatch from four marines to our naval service leadership and the American people sharing ideas on how the Marine Corps can help the Navy, the joint force, and our allies win by averting — or, if necessary, succeeding in — the speculative Great Indo-Pacific War in 2025. This can be accomplished by maximizing the use of lethal, coordinated, and swarming Warbot combat teams. These distributed marines will be able to strike adversaries from every direction, both within the littorals as well as at stand-off range. In so doing, they’ll enable friendly naval maneuver, reassure allies, create countless “no win” dilemmas for adversaries, and buy space and time for U.S. policymakers.

– USNI News – The Marine Corps has canceled its Amphibious Assault Vehicle Survivability Upgrade effort with SAIC and will instead focus its efforts on the Amphibious Combat Vehicle that will eventually replace the AAV.

– 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.