By Robbin Laird

There is a seductive fallacy embedded in how we talk about military technology. Every generation produces its own version of it. The airplane will make armies obsolete. Precision strike will end the fog of war. Network-centric warfare will lift the battlefield veil permanently. Each claim, when it arrives, carries the intoxicating logic of finality, the idea that this time, this breakthrough, will produce a stable dominance that the enemy cannot answer.

It never does.

And understanding why it never does is arguably the most important intellectual framework a defense professional can internalize. The lesson is not that technology is irrelevant. It is that technology is always in motion, always being answered, and that the side which survives and prevails is not the one that achieves a superior snapshot, but the one that learns to move through snapshots faster than its adversary.

Superiority as a Snapshot in Time

The insight I return to most frequently in thinking through these dynamics comes from Dr. Holger Mey, whose framing is deceptively simple: technological superiority is never a permanent status. It is a snapshot. What functions as a revolutionary edge today becomes the baseline expectation of tomorrow, and a catalogued vulnerability the day after. Military history, properly read, is not a progression toward a final state of dominance. It is a transient series of advantages, each one generating the conditions for its own erosion.

Traditional bureaucratic thinking is constitutionally allergic to this reality. Washington planning cultures seek what they call a stable end-state, a point at which the technology race is effectively won, acquisition lists are finalized, and the process concludes.

This is not merely wishful thinking. It is institutionally reinforced. Programs of record require stable requirements. Budgets require predictable timelines. The entire acquisition machinery is organized around achieving a fixed capability, then defending it.

The problem is that adversaries are not organized around your acquisition calendar. Genuine military transformation requires rejecting the stable end-state fallacy at the institutional level and replacing it with what the evidence actually shows: superiority is a transient moment of leverage within a continuous evolutionary process. Innovation is not a destination.

It is a temporary position that must be constantly reinvented as the adversary adapts. You are not acquiring a solution. You are joining a contested process of competitive co-evolution.

The Pendulum of the Spear and the Shield

The structural reality of warfare is defined by what is perhaps the oldest competition in human conflict: the spear and the shield. Every offensive breakthrough triggers a defensive counter. Every defensive adaptation necessitates a new offensive evolution. The pendulum swings. What changes across eras is the speed of the swing.

Three contemporary examples illustrate the pattern with particular clarity. Air power proponents have argued for a century that domination of the skies translates to domination of the battle. The counter is advanced integrated air defense, sensors, missiles, layered systems, capable of denying access to the very airspace that air power requires. Precision strike theorists argued that the ability to find and hit any coordinate with near-perfect accuracy would break adversary will and capability. The counter has been concealment and dispersal: forests, urban canyons, secure landlines, pre-delegated authority, methods of remaining invisible and operational even when individual nodes are destroyed. Information dominance advocates argued that network-centric warfare would lift the fog of war entirely. The counter has been electronic warfare: jamming, decoys, and what might be called digital fog, deliberate disruption of the sensors the network depends upon.

Each of these is not a failure of the original technology. It is confirmation of the cycle. Precision strike is real. Information fusion is real. Air power is real.

But none of them terminate the competition. Each creates the conditions for the next adaptation.

Dr. Mey adds one further complication that should trouble anyone who has sat through a briefing on exquisite capabilities: quantity is a form of quality. A technologically superior air platform capable of engaging six targets simultaneously still faces a terminal problem when confronted by a seven-to-one numerical disadvantage. Technological edge is a force multiplier, but it can be overwhelmed by mass.

The balance between exquisite capability and intelligent mass is not a procurement question. It is a strategic one that the tactical cycle forces onto the table repeatedly.

From the Black Line to the Combat Cloud: Democratizing the Battlefield

Abstract principle becomes concrete in the evolution of how ground forces and airpower have learned—and repeatedly relearned—to share a common operational picture. The Marine Corps tradition, from the ridges of Korea through the jungles of Vietnam, was built around what practitioners called the black line analogy: you never let the airmen out of sight of the ground. The intimacy of the connection was enforced by physical proximity. The pilot and the Marine on the ground were operating in the same sensory world, even if communication was voice-only.

What changed that relationship fundamentally was a practitioner’s question. Chief Warrant Officer Manuel, watching full-motion video being pushed to an AC-130, asked the obvious question that the acquisition system had not yet answered: if the aircraft can see it, why can’t I? Major Greg Harbins turned that question into hardware, a prototype built from a Panasonic hard-book and components sourced from Radio Shack. The result was the Rover: the Remotely Operated Video Enhanced Receiver.

The Rover story is worth dwelling on because it illustrates the Tactical Cycle at the level of institutional behavior, not just technology. The breakthrough did not originate in a program office. It came from the field, bypassed the formal center entirely, and solved a life-or-death problem in real time. It was a bottom-up fix that the top-down system had not produced and might not have produced on any timeline relevant to the operators being killed in the gap.

The second transformation Rover produced was structural. It broke the vertical information hierarchy. Before Rover, the comprehensive picture was held at the top, generals had it, captains and lieutenants did not. Rover pushed that picture to the tactical edge. A captain on the ground could now see exactly what the pilot saw. Decision-making authority could follow the information, enabling a horizontal command structure where choices were made with higher fidelity closer to the fight.

Rover’s evolution into what is now called the Combat Cloud represents the full maturation of this logic. Information is no longer a one-way feed from platform to ground. It is a distributed mesh: any sensor, drone, jet, ground robot, can support any shooter. The force has moved from platform-centricity to what we have described as the kill web: an integrated, organic system where the value is not in any individual node but in the connectivity among all of them.

The H-1 and the Cognitive Transformation

The transformation of the H-1 platform, the Cobra and the Huey, from what was essentially a voice-driven weapons system into a digital node in a distributed kill web is one of the more instructive case studies in what genuine military transformation actually requires. It is not primarily a hardware story. It is a story about changing the mental furniture of the operators who fly the platform.

Units like HMLA-267 and its parent MAG-39, stationed at Camp Pendleton alongside the 1st Marine Division, have pioneered digital interoperability precisely because of their structural proximity to the ground combat element. The physical colocation of air and ground forced the kind of integrated thinking that geographically separated communities struggle to produce. The shift from voice-only operations to Link 16 integration delivered what the technology promised: targeting data pushed directly to the pilot’s glass cockpit, eliminating the ambiguity of long voice descriptions, compressing the kill chain, and enabling the H-1 to function not merely as a shooter but as a command and control node, managing autonomous drones, integrating fifth-generation data from the F-35, and contributing to the information architecture of the entire force.

But Major Jonathan Moss’s evolution from a traditional Cobra pilot to what might be called a digital warrior is more significant than the platform upgrade. It represents the cognitive shift that the Tactical Cycle ultimately demands: from platform mastery, the idea that excellence means flying the helicopter exceptionally well, to systems understanding, where the pilot manages information flows and node relationships across a kill web that extends well beyond the cockpit. This is not a marginal adjustment in how pilots are trained. It is a fundamental reconception of what the job is.

The Field Versus the Center: Where Transformation Actually Happens

The greatest obstacle to executing the Tactical Cycle is rarely the adversary’s technology. It is our own structural friction. Military evolution is a contested process between two entities with fundamentally different priorities and time horizons.

The Center, Washington, the acquisition bureaucracy, the program offices, operates on linear, risk-averse timelines. It focuses on programs of record, acquisition lists, and requirements documents. It sees technology as a fixed capability to be defined, procured, and fielded. The Field, operators, practitioners, the people who will die if the technology fails them, operates on the physics of combat. It solves problems through improvisation. It discovers applications that designers never intended and creates capabilities from commercial off-the-shelf components when the formal system cannot move fast enough.

What bridges these two worlds are what might be called lead users in the field and innovation protectors in the bureaucracy. The lead users are people like CWO Manuel and Major Harbins, practitioners close enough to the problem to see the solution and resourceful enough to build it. The innovation protectors are senior officials willing to use their institutional authority to shield promising work from bureaucratic strangulation.

Secretary Michael Wynne provided a canonical example of the second category. When program officials insisted on halting development of the Joint Unmanned Combat Air System to focus on air-refueling, a secondary problem that threatened to consume the schedule of the primary mission—Wynne threw a one-inch binder across the conference table, frisbee-style, and walked out. The message was clear: come back when you have something useful to say. This kind of principled contrarianism, the willingness to protect core innovation from being smothered by process—is not incidental to military transformation. It is necessary to it.

From Crisis Management to Chaos Management

The Tactical Cycle leads ultimately to a distinction that I consider the defining conceptual divide in contemporary defense thinking: the difference between crisis management and chaos management.

Crisis management is built on the assumption that conflict is a temporary disturbance. There is a baseline of stability. War is the deviation from it. The goal is to apply sufficient force or technology to restore equilibrium. This mindset generates a particular type of military planning, episodic, campaign-oriented, aimed at achieving conditions that allow a return to the pre-conflict normal.

Chaos management begins from a different premise: the modern world is in a state of persistent turbulence. There is no stable baseline to restore. The adversary is not pausing to allow us to catch up. Stability, in the old sense, is ephemeral. The military problem is not to achieve a final condition; it is to operate effectively within constant complexity and relentless adaptation. Transformation in this framework is not a project with a deadline. It is an organizational capacity, the ability to learn and adapt faster than the adversary across the full Tactical Cycle.

The implications cascade across every dimension of military organization. Doctrine, training, acquisition, command philosophy—all of them look different when the operating assumption is persistent turbulence rather than recoverable crisis. A force organized around crisis management optimizes for the decisive battle. A force organized around chaos management optimizes for continuous learning.

The Rover story and the H-1 transformation are not museum pieces. They are templates. They show what the Tactical Cycle looks like when it is working, when practitioners identify the gap, build the bridge, push the capability to the edge, and force the institution to catch up with what operators have already discovered. The alternative, when institutions defend programs of record against field-driven innovation, is a force that loses cycles. And in the current environment, losing cycles is not a recoverable condition.

Victory in the Tactical Cycle does not go to the side with the most expensive snapshot of technology.

It goes to the side that learns fastest within the chaos that moves through snapshots rather than defending them, that generates lead users rather than suppressing them, and that produces the institutional protectors willing to shield innovation from the gravitational pull of bureaucratic inertia.

Transformation is evolutionary, contested, and practitioner-led. That has always been true.

What the current era has changed is the cost of getting it wrong.

By Robbin Laird

A photograph taken at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma on April 13, 2026, shows a Marine avionics technician from VMFA-251 connected to an F-35B cockpit via the aircraft’s Internal Communication System cable, a 600-inch tether that is, in many ways, a window into how the Marine Corps is rethinking the ground side of fifth-generation aviation.

The image was taken during Weapons and Tactics Instructor Course 2-26, hosted by Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One (MAWTS-1). WTI is the Marine Corps’ premier venue for testing, refining, and injecting new concepts back into the fleet.

What VMFA-251 brought to Yuma this spring was not a new platform or a new weapon. It was a new approach to the turnaround.

The Problem: The Ground Side of the Kill Web

The F-35 is frequently discussed as a sensor-fusing, data-generating node in a networked kill web. What receives less attention is that the aircraft’s ability to cycle through that web — to land, rearm, refuel, and return to the fight — depends on a ground process that has historically been slow, fragmented, and dependent on secondhand communication.

Before this initiative, maintainers on the flight line at VMFA-251 faced a fundamental constraint: they could not speak directly to the pilot while the aircraft was running. They either had to wait for the pilot to shut down and disembark, or rely on relayed communication through an intermediary. In a high-tempo environment, the kind WTI is designed to replicate, that delay costs sorties.

The Solution: Direct Connection and Distributed Awareness

CWO2 Jory D. Reed, aviation ordnance officer with VMFA-251, led the effort to close this gap using tools already in the inventory. The centerpiece was the F-35 ICS cable, a hardwired connection from maintainer to cockpit that allows real-time, direct voice communication with the pilot without requiring engine shutdown.

Reed described the operational shift plainly: the direct connection allows ground crews to diagnose and resolve problems while keeping the aircraft operational. That sentence deserves emphasis. The aircraft stays hot. The pilot stays strapped in. The maintainer gets the information he needs from the source rather than through a chain of intermediaries. The turnaround clock keeps running.

VMFA-251 extended this further by integrating handheld radios on a shared frequency across multiple maintenance sections. CWO2 Eladio Vega, avionics officer, explained the effect: instead of a single point of contact relaying information, multiple sections, ordnance, avionics, fuel, can simultaneously monitor the pilot and respond in parallel. The sequential bottleneck becomes a parallel workflow.

Link 16 to the Flight Line: Knowing Before the Aircraft Lands

The ICS cable initiative was part of a broader digital interoperability effort that pushes the F-35’s data advantage down to the ground crew. Using Digital Interoperability kits, VMFA-251 extended Link 16 data, aircraft position, fuel state, remaining ordnance, to ground-based tablets (MAGTABs) carried by flight line personnel.

The operational implication is significant. The ground staff  can see what assets the aircraft has expended and what it will require before it even touches down. Ground crews can pre-position exactly the ordnance, fuel, and personnel needed, not a generalized kit, not excess equipment that has to be moved aside, but precisely what that specific aircraft will require based on its actual mission data.

This is not a trivial efficiency gain. In distributed, resource-limited environments, the operating context the Marine Corps is explicitly designing for, moving excess ordnance and equipment is not just inefficient, it is a signature and a logistics burden. The ability to know before touchdown what is needed compresses the turnaround and reduces the footprint of the support operation.

WTI as the Proving Ground

MAWTS-1’s role in this story is as important as the technology itself. WTI is not simply a training course. It is the Marine Corps’ primary mechanism for validating new concepts under realistic operational conditions and then radiating what works back to the fleet through WTI graduates returning to their squadrons.

MAWTS-1 provides a venue to take concepts and apply them in a realistic training environment, to test new capabilities, identify what works, and determine how to apply them to improve efficiency and lethality across the entire Marine Corps.

This is the kill web logic applied to institutional learning. A concept developed in one squadron, validated at WTI, becomes doctrine that flows to every squadron. VMFA-251’s work at Yuma in April 2026 is not just a 2nd MAW story. It is potentially a Marine aviation story.

The Broader Significance

The F-35 is routinely described as a system rather than an aircraft. What VMFA-251 demonstrated at WTI 2-26 is that the system boundary does not end at the skin of the aircraft. The ICS cable, the MAGTAB tablets, the shared radio frequency, these extend the F-35’s informational advantages to the people who turn it around for the next sortie.

In a sustained high-tempo campaign, sortie generation rate is a measure of combat power as surely as weapons range or sensor reach. An F-35 that cycles through its turnaround ten minutes faster, because its ground crew knew what it needed before it landed and could talk to the pilot without waiting for engine shutdown, is a meaningfully more capable combat asset.

The 600-inch cable in the DVIDS photograph is a small thing. What it represents, the deliberate extension of networked awareness and direct communication to every node in the turnaround cycle, is not small at all.

By George Galdorisi

The conflict in the Middle East has reminded nations and navies of the importance of naval forces in ensuring that the global commons is relatively free of strife and that nations can trade freely and energize the global economy. The role of navies in ensuring the security and prosperity of all nations has never been greater—nor under more stress. More so than perhaps any other navy, the U.S. Navy is feeling this most acutely.

This conflict has also brought to the fore the deadly effectiveness of sea mines. Reliable estimates from multiple sources assess that Iran has in the neighborhood of 6,000 sea mines. These include moored mines, bottom mines, limpet mines, and drifting mines, all purpose-designed to damage or sink ships attempting to transit the Strait of Hormuz or other restricted waterways.

This is not a new threat, and Iran has learned from previous uses of mines to intimidate adversaries. In the past several decades rogue states have indiscriminately employed sea mines. Libya used mines to disrupt commerce in the Gulf of Suez and the Strait of Bab el Mandeb.  Iran laid mines to hazard military and commercial traffic in the Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman.  During Operation Desert Storm in 1990-1991, the threat of mines precluded the effective use of the Navy and Marine Corps expeditionary task force off the shores of Kuwait and hazarded all U.S. and coalition forces operating in the Arabian Gulf.

Mines cannot be cleared swiftly. The threat posed by mines was so extensive that clearance operations in this confined body of water were not completed until 1997.  Indeed, Operation Desert Storm highlighted the importance of mine warfare with the near catastrophic damage to USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG 58), USS Princeton (CG 59) and USS Tripoli (LPH 10). Indeed, fourteen U.S. Navy ships have been sunk or damaged by mines since World War II, over three times the number damaged by air and missile attack.

The Hybrid Fleet

The U. S. Navy stands at the precipice of a new era of technology advancement. In an address at a military-industry conference, the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Michael Gilday, revealed the Navy’s goal to grow to 500 ships, to include 350 crewed ships and 150 uncrewed maritime vessels. This plan has been dubbed the “Hybrid Fleet.” In an address at the Reagan National Defense Forum, CNO Lisa Franchetti cited the work of the Navy’s Unmanned Task Force, as well numerous exercises, experiments and demonstrations where uncrewed surface vessels were put in the hands of Sailors and Marines, all designed to advance the journey to achieve the Navy’s Hybrid Fleet.

The reason for this commitment to uncrewed maritime vehicles is clear. During the height of the Reagan Defense Buildup in the mid-1980s, the U.S. Navy evolved a strategy to build a “600-ship Navy.” That effort resulted in a total number of Navy ships that reached 594 in 1987. That number has declined steadily during the past three-and-one-half decades, and today the Navy has less than half the number of commissioned ships than it had then. However, the rapid growth of the technologies that make uncrewed surface vessels increasingly capable and affordable has provided the Navy with a potential way to put more hulls in the water.

More recently, the U.S. Navy’s commitment to uncrewed surface vessels has culminated in the issuance of the Chief of Naval Operations Force Design 2045, and subsequently the Chief of Naval Operations Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy, both of which call for 350 crewed ships and 150 large uncrewed surface vessels.  These documents provide the clearest indication yet of the Navy’s plans for a future fleet populated by large numbers of uncrewed surface vessels (USVs). Indeed, the recent DoD reconciliation bill made a $3.6 billion commitment to Navy uncrewed surface vessels, adding $2.1 billion for medium USVs and $1.53 billion for small USVs.

Juxtaposed against this aspiration is the fact that the U.S. Congress has, until recently, been reluctant to authorize the Navy’s planned investment of billions of dollars in USVs until the Service can come up with a concept of operations (CONOPS) for using them. Congress has a point. The Navy has announced plans to procure large numbers of uncrewed systems—especially large and medium uncrewed surface vessels—but a CONOPS, one in even the most basic form, has not yet emerged.

The concept of operations proposed is to marry various size surface, subsurface and aerial uncrewed vehicles to perform missions that the U.S. Navy has—and will continue to have—as the Hybrid Fleet evolves. The Navy can use evolving large uncrewed surface vessels as a “truck” to move smaller USVs, UUVs and UAVs into the battle space in the increasingly contested littoral environment. The Navy has several alternatives for this platform:

The Navy’s program of record LUSV. The Navy envisions these LUSVs as being 200 feet to 300 feet in length and having full load displacements of 1,000 tons to 2,000 tons, which would make them the size of a corvette.

Unmanned Surface Vessel Division One (USVDIV-1) has stewardship for two surrogates for LUSVs, the Ranger and Mariner, as well as two MUSV prototypes, Sea Hunter and Seahawk. The Navy was sufficiently confident in the operation of its LUSV and MUSV prototypes to deploy them to the 2022 international Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise.

The MARTAC T82 Leviathan, a scaled-up version of the T38 Devil Ray, is an MUSV capable of either carrying an approximately 40,000-pound payload or, alternatively, carrying smaller craft and launching them toward the objective area.

While there are a plethora of important Navy missions this integrated combination of uncrewed platforms can accomplish, this article will focus on two: intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and especially mine countermeasures (MCM). There are many large, medium, small and ultra-small uncrewed systems that can be adopted for these missions.  The technical challenge remains that they must be designed to ensure that the “multiple sized” UxSs associated with these missions can be adapted to work together in a common mission goal.

Rather than speaking in hypotheticals as to how uncrewed vehicles might be employed for these missions, this article will offer concrete examples using commercial-off-the shelf (COTS) uncrewed systems that have been employed in recent Navy and Marine Corps events.

While there are a wide range of medium uncrewed surface vessels (MUSVs) that can potentially meet the U.S. Navy’s needs, there are three uncrewed surface vessels that are furthest along in the development cycle.  All are currently in production and fully operational. They are:

• The Leidos Sea Hunter is the largest of the three.  The craft was launched in 2016 and was built at a cost of twenty million dollars.
• The Textron monohull Common Uncrewed Surface Vessel (CUSV), now referred to as the MCM-USV, features a modular, open architecture design.
• The Maritime Tactical Systems Inc. (MARTAC), catamaran hull, uncrewed surface vessels (USV) include the Devil Ray T24 (24-foot), and T38 (38-foot) craft.

All three of these MUSVs are viable candidates to be part of an integrated uncrewed solution CONOPS. I will use the Devil Ray craft for a number of reasons. First, they come in different sizes with the same hull, mechanical and electrical (HME) attributes. Second, Sea Hunter is simply too large to fit into and of the LUSVs the Navy is considering. Third, the CUSV is the MUSV of choice for the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) Mine-Countermeasures Mission Package, and all CUSVs scheduled to be procured are committed to this program.

This scenario and CONOPS is built around an Expeditionary Strike Group underway in the Western Pacific.  This Strike Group includes three LUSVs under supervisory control from a large amphibious ship. Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Michael Gilday, suggested this CONOPS in early 2022 when he noted that he: “Wants to begin to deploy large and medium-sized uncrewed vessels as part of carrier strike groups and amphibious ready groups in 2027 or 2028, and earlier if I can.” More recently, Navy officials have suggested that these deployments may begin as early as this year.

Depending on the size that is ultimately procured, the LUSV can carry a number of T38 Devil Ray uncrewed surface vehicles and deliver them to a point near the intended area of operations. The T38 can then be sent independently to perform the ISR mission, or alternatively, can launch and recover one or more T12 MANTAS small USVs to perform this mission.

For the MCM mission, the LUSV can deliver several T38s equipped with mine-hunting and mine-clearing systems (all of which are COTS platforms tested extensively in Navy exercises). These vessels can then undertake the “dull, dirty and dangerous” work previously conducted by Sailors who had to operate in the minefield. Given the large mine inventory of peer and near-peer adversaries, this methodology may well be the only way to clear mines safely.

Implications for the Mine Countermeasures Mission

Few understand just how brittle the ability of the U.S. Navy to combat deadly sea mines is in 2026. The platforms that embody the U.S. Navy’s primary mine countermeasures (MCM) capability—the MH-53E AMCM aircraft and the Avenger-class minesweeper are all-but history. The MH-53E AMCM aircraft is scheduled to sunset in the next few years.

The last Avenger-class minesweepers were recently decommissioned. This leaves the totality of the Navy’s MCM capability in the discrete number of Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) outfitted with the Mine-Countermeasures Mission Module. Indeed, during the war with Iran with the crisis of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. Navy could only muster three LCS equipped with the Mine Countermeasures Module.

The emerging Hybrid Fleet presents a cutting-edge solution to deploy a viable MCM capability with all U.S. Navy carrier strike groups and expeditionary strike groups, making autonomous mine-countermeasures assets readily available to deal with adversaries who deploy “weapons that wait.”

From Concept to Capability

This innovative approach accomplishes an important goal. If the U.S. Navy wants to keep its multi-billion-dollar capital ships out of harm’s way, it will need to surge MCM-capable uncrewed maritime vessels into the contested battlespace while its manned ships stay out of range of adversary A2/AD systems, sensors and weapons.

To be clear, this is not a platform-specific solution, but rather a concept. When fleet operators see a capability with different size uncrewed COTS platforms in the water working together and successfully performing the MCM mission, they will likely press industry to produce even more-capable platforms to perform these missions.

While evolutionary in nature, this disruptive capability delivered using emerging technologies can provide the U.S. Navy with near-term solutions to the vexing MCM challenge, while demonstrating to a skeptical Congress that the Navy does have a concept-of-operations to employ the uncrewed systems it wants to procure.

Note: The article was originally published in Oceans Robotics Planet and is republished wit the author’s permission.

See also, the following:

Lewis B. Puller and the Mine Warfare Mission at the Strait of Hormuz