Defense Technology International – The heart of future joint aviation plans pivots on where the services go with electronic attack and other network centric attack. A relatively small $125 million contract to Northrop Grumman may signal the direction of the shake out. It has landed a contract to build Lot 4 of its ICAP III airborne electronic attack systems for the U.S. Marine Corpsí growing fleet of EA-6B Prowlers.
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Associated Press – The Pentagon has extended the tour of 2,200 Marines in Afghanistan, after insisting for months the unit would come home on time. The 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is doing combat operations in the volatile south, will stay an extra 30 days and come home in early November rather than October
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USA Today – Faced with an alarming increase in sniper attacks in Iraq, Marine commanders in late 2006 began looking for ways to turn the tables on an elusive enemy. The result is the combat hunter program, an experiment in training Marines to fight insurgents by making the Marines as wily as the enemy they face. The training combines outdoor skills culled from hunting and tracking with the street smarts developed by police and Marines who grew up in cities.
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Associated Press – U.S. Marines are crossing the sands of southern Afghanistan for the first time in years, providing a boost to a NATO coalition that is growing but still short on manpower.
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Washington Post – AH-1 Super Cobra pilot Katie Horner has blasted the enemy with missiles and a three-barrel 20mm turreted cannon. Being a woman hasn’t made her any less lethal.
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Marine Corps Times – Sean Naylor on the actions of Marine Special Operations Company Fox in Afghanistan.
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Washington Post – People on this faraway island — a U.S. territory 7,824 miles west of Los Angeles — delight in calling Guam the “tip of the spear” for its role defending U.S. interests in the Far East???The Pentagon has chosen Guam, a quirkily American place that marries the beauty of Bali with the banality of Kmart, as the prime location in the western Pacific for projecting U.S. military muscle.
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Washington Post – President Bush has approved an “extraordinary, one-time” deployment of about 3,200 Marines to Afghanistan for seven months starting this spring, the Pentagon announced yesterday, while defense officials continued to urge NATO allies to supply more forces to fill a long-standing shortfall of 7,500 troops that commanders say are needed to improve security.
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Washington Post – The U.S. military is planning to deploy about 3,000 Marines to Afghanistan this spring to counter an expected offensive by Taliban insurgents, a Pentagon spokesman said yesterday, citing NATO allies’ failure to provide additional combat troops.
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Virginian Pilot – A look at how the MV-22 Osprey is doing on its first operational deployment.
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New York Times – Senior Pentagon and military officials said Wednesday that Defense Secretary Robert Gates had decided against a proposal to shift Marine Corps forces from Iraq to take the lead in American operations in Afghanistan.
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Defense and the National Interest – William Lind analyses the Marines’ proposal to focus their operations in Afghanistan.
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Army Times – Sean Naylor writes that Generals in the Army and on the Joint Staff reacted with surprise at a Marine Corps move to assume the Armyís combat role in Afghanistan and expressed doubt that the Corps could handle the mission without substantial support from the larger ground service.
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Washington Post – The Marine Corps is making a bid to take over the command and primary mission of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, anticipating a gradual withdrawal of its troops from Iraq’s western province of Anbar.

New York Times – Marines Press to Remove Their Forces From Iraq.
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Time – A critical review of the V-22 program???

???and Bill Sweetman’s response to it: Aviation Week – V-22 – The Real Questions
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Daily Telegraph – US Marines in Iraq’s Anbar province have taken the battle against al-Qa’eda to the unlikely setting of a beachside resort in the desert.
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New York Times – When a suicide bomber struck a convoy carrying special operations marines along a highway in northeastern Afghanistan in March, the blast killed one bystander and wounded one marine and three Afghans in a nearby vehicle, a military police report said.

What came next – a lethal response by the Marine platoon along a seven-mile stretch of road that American military commanders say killed about a dozen civilians – caused outrage among Afghan villagers and criticism from high-ranking Afghan officials about the rising civilian toll in American military operations.

But as a Marine general is mulling whether to bring charges against a handful of the 30 Americans involved in the episode, lawyers for two of the marines, including a company commander riding in the convoy, are disputing the official military and Afghan descriptions of their actions that morning.
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Marine Corps Gazette – An update to the plan to provide Marines with foreign weapons training. The training will provide deploying tactical units, such as infantry battalions, as well as specialized units with the capability to provide foreign weapons training to foreign militaries.
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Marine Corps Gazette – As the Marine Corps seeks to increase its size incrementally over the next several years to 202,000 active duty Marines, concerns have arisen over how to recruit the additional personnel we will require. In this article the author, who has commanded a recruiting station, postulates six ideas that he believes will improve recruiting productivity immediately.
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Defense and the National Interest – William Lind analyzes the happenings in Anbar province in Iraq.
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Wired – A look at how difficult it is for Marines to field new weapons???
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Washington Post – A U.S. Army brigade commander in Afghanistan yesterday told the families of 69 civilians who were killed or wounded by members of an elite Marine Special Forces unit in March that he is “deeply, deeply ashamed” about the incident, describing the series of shootings along a civilian thoroughfare as a “terrible, terrible mistake.”
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Marine Corps Times – Despite public support by Pentagon and Navy leaders for the short-take-off/vertical-landing version of the Joint Strike Fighter, debates about the planned acquisition and operation of the F-35B continue behind the scenes – worrying Marine Corps officials and potential foreign customers who are counting on the versatile aircraft.
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Washington Post – The Marine Corps chain of command in Iraq ignored “obvious” signs of “serious misconduct” in the 2005 slayings of two dozen civilians in Haditha, and commanders fostered a climate that devalued the life of innocent Iraqis to the point that their deaths were considered an insignificant part of the war, according to an Army general’s investigation.
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Washington Post – A preliminary U.S. military investigation indicates that more than 40 Afghans killed or wounded by Marines after a suicide bombing in a village near Jalalabad last month were civilians, the U.S. commander who ordered the probe said yesterday.
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