By Robbin Laird
A recent CSIS conversation between the Honorable Michael Obadal, Under Secretary of the Army, and the Honorable Ryan McCarthy, former Secretary of the Army moderated by Jerry McGinn of CSIS’s Center for the Study of the Industrial Base offered a candid look at how senior Army leadership is thinking about the service’s future. I listened to it shortly after finishing my own book, Building the Impact Force: Marine Corps Transformation in an Age of Chaos, which tracks how the Marine Corps has spent the past year reworking its own concept of what it is for.
Reading the two side by side turns out to be a genuinely useful exercise. The Army and the Marine Corps are answering the same set of pressures, Chinese and Russian modernization, the cost-curve problem in drone and missile warfare, the compression of decision timelines, but they are doing so from very different starting points, with very different institutional histories bearing down on the answers they can give.
What follows is that comparison, and then a closer look at the one piece of the Marine Corps story that does not yet have a real Army analog: what Marine aviation now delivers to make the “impact force” concept work in practice rather than on a briefing slide.
Two Services, One Inflection Point
Obadal frames the Army’s task around two durable outputs that only a dominant land force can provide, persistent presence and decisive control, and around a picture of the Army as the foundation the rest of the joint force stands on. It seizes and holds the terrain, the ports, and the airfields that let the other services exercise dominance in their own domains. Read against that framing, my book describes the Marine Corps arriving from a very different direction at a strikingly similar self-conception.
Brigadier General Christopher Haar’s account of the Force Design Update captures the shift in a single line: “The original document was all about killing ships for the stand-in force. And then we realized, you know what, we’re better as the JTAC for the joint force, using our sensors, using our eyes, killing occasionally, but using our time and our capabilities to enable the rest of the joint force.” Both services, in other words, have concluded from opposite ends of the force-design spectrum that their highest-value contribution in a peer fight is not what they can shoot themselves, but how much more lethal, aware, and coordinated they can make everyone else.
That shared conclusion runs through several parallel threads in both conversations.
Mass over exquisite performance. Obadal describes a deliberate 60/40 shift toward low-cost, producible-at-scale munitions over the smaller, exquisite systems the Army has spent decades perfecting, an explicit trade of unit performance for magazine depth, made because the cost curve in drone and missile warfare now favors the attacker. The Marine Corps reached for the same logic by a different route. The book’s account of the October 2025 Force Design Update describes a Corps that chose to preserve breadth rather than build an ever more specialized “ship killer” stand-in force, retaining the 4th Marine Regiment as conventional infantry rather than converting it into a third Marine Littoral Regiment, precisely so the service is not over-optimized for a single theater and a single threat. Retired Commandant Gen. Charles Krulak pressed that argument hard in the book’s account of the decision, and it is worth noting how directly it echoes Obadal’s own logic: both services independently concluded that over-specializing against today’s most visible threat is itself a form of risk.
Drones and AI as enablers, not replacements. Obadal and McCarthy insist that Ukraine has not made the tank obsolete; what it has shown is what happens when neither side has an actual maneuver combined-arms force to bring to bear. Their lesson is that drones unburden soldiers rather than replace them, and that the Army’s new data-centric C2 effort is compressing fires workflows while deliberately preserving human decision points rather than automating them away. My book draws an almost identical lesson from Steel Knight 25, the Marine Corps’ December 2025 exercise: Ukraine’s real lesson for Marines was adaptation speed, not a tactical template to be copied wholesale. Decision-Centric Aviation Operations, or DCAO, is built explicitly around that same instinct, treating data as the primary weapon while keeping decision authority delegated to the edge rather than centralized in a rear headquarters.
Command and control as the actual bottleneck. Both conversations locate the hardest problem not in hardware but in culture. Obadal’s Army C2 effort aims to replace some fifteen stovepiped warfighting-function systems with a single data layer accessible through one common set of applications, a project that is as much about breaking organizational habits as it is about software. Steel Knight 25 exposed the Marine Corps’ version of the same friction: modern C5ISR gives a captain commanding a distributed node access to F-35, MQ-9, and allied sensor data, and the ability to coordinate naval, Air Force, and Army fires but, as the book puts it, “capability without clear tasking and appropriate authority becomes wasted potential.” Both services have arrived at the same uncomfortable conclusion: the limiting factor on the new way of war is less technology than institutional willingness to delegate.
Where the Paths Diverge
The similarities are real, but so are the differences, and they follow directly from scale and mission. McCarthy’s description of the Army as “the show that never ends”, 60 percent of combatant commanders’ worldwide requirements on a good day, plus hurricane response, border missions, and disaster relief at home, describes an institution whose baseline identity is standing global demand. It cannot choose when to show up; it is already everywhere, all the time, by design. The Marine Corps’ impact-force argument, by contrast, is built around a much narrower proposition: that a comparatively small force can generate effects disproportionate to its size by persisting forward as sensing and decision-enabling connective tissue inside contested space, not by being everywhere at once. Scale, in other words, is not a detail here. It is the reason the two services can share a philosophy and still end up with different force designs.
That difference in scale produces a difference in how each service is managing its hardest modernization trade. The Army’s aviation dilemma centers on a single, enormous fleet decision: sunsetting roughly 2,000 Black Hawk helicopters in favor of the MV-75 Cheyenne tiltrotor, whose roughly two-and-a-half-times range advantage is meant to solve what McCarthy frames starkly as the Scarborough Shoal-to-Hainan problem, 550 nautical miles that the Black Hawk simply cannot cover without extensive aerial refueling. Obadal and McCarthy are candid that this will be one of the harder political sells the Army faces, precisely because the congressional committees with jurisdiction sit atop the jobs and factories tied to the existing fleet. Retiring a platform is never just an engineering decision; it is also a fight over districts and payrolls, and both men know it.
The Marine Corps, by contrast, largely already made its version of that bet when it fielded the MV-22 Osprey a generation ago. Its current aviation transformation is not about replacing a legacy platform with a new one; it is about re-purposing an already-diverse inventory — F-35, MQ-9, MV-22, CH-53K, and H-1 — as nodes in a kill web rather than as independent shooters. That is a fundamentally different kind of modernization problem. The Army is trying to decide whether to make a single, politically fraught platform swap. The Marine Corps has already made its platform bets and is now working the harder, less visible problem of getting five very different aircraft to behave as one integrated sensing-and-decision network.
The two services also differ in how they talk about their own force design logic, and the difference in vocabulary is itself revealing. The Army’s framework is explicitly categorical: every piece of equipment is sorted into legacy (divest), enduring (sustain and modernize), or modern (invest aggressively), Humvee, Black Hawk, and Group 4/5 attack-reconnaissance UAS, respectively. It is a taxonomy built around ownership: what do we keep, what do we shed, what do we buy next. The Marine Corps’ framework, as the book documents, is less about platform categories and more about a change in the metric of success itself. An F-35 sortie that discovers ten targets and cues joint strikes without firing its own weapons is now judged to generate more impact than the same sortie engaging two targets independently. The Army is still fundamentally organizing around what it owns; the Marine Corps has shifted toward organizing around what it enables. That is not a small semantic distinction.It changes how each service will eventually measure whether its own modernization program is actually working.
What Marine Aviation Delivers to the Impact Force
This is the piece of the Marine Corps story that has no close Army analog yet, and it is worth spelling out in some detail, because it is the mechanism that actually makes “impact force” more than a slogan on a strategy document.
The 2026 Marine Aviation Plan elevates Aviation Ground Support to a formal seventh function of Marine aviation, on par with assault support and offensive air support, a recognition that the ability to generate fuel, power, maintenance, and airfield services from austere, shifting locations is what actually determines whether distributed operations work at all. It is easy to overlook this kind of decision because it is unglamorous; nobody writes headlines about fuel bladders and expedient runway repair. But an impact force that cannot sustain itself forward is not an impact force, it is a stranded one, and the plan’s authors clearly understood that.
That plan organizes around Project Eagle’s three horizons — Fight Tonight (2026-2030), Bridge the Gap (2031-2035), and Future Fight (2036-2040) — and around two operational concepts that Steel Knight 25 tested under real conditions rather than on a whiteboard. Distributed Aviation Operations, or DAO, sustains combat power from a hub-spoke-node network of expeditionary sites rather than fixed bases. Decision-Centric Aviation Operations, or DCAO, treats data flow not organic weapons as the thing that actually generates impact. Put the two together and you get the operating logic behind everything that follows: disperse the aircraft, concentrate the data.
Against that framework, each platform’s role changes in ways that would have been unrecognizable a decade ago.
F-35 functions less as a strike aircraft and more as a sensor-shooter node, an airborne “brain,” in one Marine officer’s phrase, that can discover targets inside threat rings other platforms cannot penetrate, manage networks as an airborne C2 node, and cue joint fires from Navy ships and Air Force bombers, employing its own weapons only when sensor-to-shooter timelines demand immediate action. The jet’s stealth and sensor suite were built for a different era’s assumptions about air combat; what the impact-force logic does is repurpose those same attributes as a discovery-and-cueing capability that happens to also be able to strike when nothing else can.
MQ-9 delivers persistence rather than firepower, 20-plus-hour orbits that feed targeting cycles and sustain pattern-of-life analysis, turning episodic strikes into sustained campaigns. An aircraft that simply stays overhead longer than anything else in the inventory changes the nature of what can be tracked and understood over time, which is a different kind of contribution than lethality, but not a lesser one.
MV-22 and CH-53K enable impact through movement rather than fires: inserting forces, sustaining dispersed nodes, and extracting personnel under contested conditions. The CH-53K’s lift advantage, once fully fielded, changes the DAO logistics math directly by letting one sortie do what once took several MV-22 sorties which matters enormously in a hub-spoke-node concept where every sortie flown is also a sortie that a contested adversary might detect and target.
H-1, far from being a legacy platform on its way out, has gained new relevance through digital interoperability rather than through any new hardware. HMLA-267, the first Marine H-1 squadron to achieve full digital interoperability, demonstrated H-1s operating as airborne gateways that translate between legacy and modern communications systems and cue joint fires. That is proof, in a very concrete form, that the impact-force logic applies to older platforms as much as to new ones, the transformation here is not about buying something new but about rewiring what already exists.
The throughline across all five platforms is the same one the book keeps returning to: aviation’s value is no longer measured primarily by what any single aircraft can do on its own, but by how much faster, more lethal, and more survivable it makes the rest of the joint force. That is a genuinely different design philosophy than the Army’s current aviation debate, which for entirely legitimate reasons tied to the size and age of the Black Hawk fleet is still substantially a platform-replacement conversation.
The Marine Corps got to skip that conversation, in effect, because it already had it a generation ago with the Osprey. What it is doing now is the second-order work of turning a diverse inventory into a coherent network, and that work is arguably harder than any single procurement decision, because there is no single program office or committee hearing that can be pointed at as the finish line.
The Common Unfinished Business
For all the differences, both services land on the same honest caveat, and it is to their credit that neither leadership team tried to paper over it. Steel Knight 25 revealed, in the book’s words, that “capability gaps remain severe,” that “logistics is the binding constraint,” and that “culture lags technology” or the Marine Corps has platforms and networks that enable impact-force operations but not yet the command cultures and training methodologies to fully exploit them.
Obadal and McCarthy describe an almost identical unfinished agenda for the Army: contested logistics as an unsolved problem, a fires portfolio still being rebalanced between exquisite and producible-at-scale, and a political fight still ahead over trading a large, understood fleet for a smaller number of more capable aircraft. Neither service has finished the transformation it is describing; both are candid that the exercises and studies driving these changes have exposed as many gaps as they have closed. That candor, frankly, is one of the more reassuring things about both conversations. Services that claim to have already solved their hardest problems are the ones worth worrying about; services that can name their own gaps in public are the ones doing the actual work.
Looking Ahead
The most interesting open question raised by putting these two conversations side by side is whether the Army’s coming tiltrotor decision will end up rhyming with the Marine Corps’ aviation experience rather than with the Army’s own legacy framework. The MV-75 Cheyenne is, functionally, the Army’s belated version of the range and speed advantage the Marine Corps has flown with since the MV-22 entered service. If the Army follows the Marine Corps’ arc, the more consequential change will not be the airframe itself. It will be whether the Army treats the Cheyenne as a networked sensor-shooter node in a joint kill web, the way the Corps has come to treat the Osprey, rather than simply as a faster Black Hawk that happens to fly further and carry the same mission set it always has.
That is the thread I plan to pick up next: how the tiltrotor factor could reshape Army aviation in the same way digital interoperability has already reshaped what Marine aviation delivers. The airframe is the easy part of the story to tell, because it is the part with a ribbon-cutting and a production line attached to it. The harder and more consequential part, whether the institution around the airframe changes how it thinks about what aviation is for and is the part the Marine Corps’ experience suggests is worth watching most closely.