AFSOC Mission Statement

04/07/2025

Air Force Special Operations Command enables the joint force by delivering Special Operations Forces mobility, strike, air-to-ground capabilities, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance across the spectrum of competition and conflict.

HURLBURT FIELD, FLORIDA, UNITED STATES

09.11.2024

Video by 94th Airlift Wing 

Air Force Special Operations Command

CMV-22B and Distributed Maritime Operations: A Key Enabler

04/03/2025

By CAPT (Ret) Christoper C. Misner, Senior Manager, Bell Strategic Pursuits

The U.S. National Defense Strategy prioritizes the Indo-Pacific as a critical theater for national security. Yet, the current U.S. Navy fleet would likely struggle to meet the logistical demands of the Joint Force across the vast maritime distances involved in prolonged combat operations within this area.

One reason is that the U.S. Department of Defense’s approved and funded procurement programs do not meet the demand for airborne logistics in maritime combat. This creates a significant gap in the Navy’s ability to support Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) and Expeditionary Advanced Based Operations (EABO).

The Navy must ensure it has the logistics capability to support the growing number of deployed naval and air forces operating from sea and shore-based hubs. This will not only ensure the Navy meets immediate and long-term needs but also strengthen the U.S. defense industrial base.

The U.S. Navy has historically projected power through carrier strike groups, concentrating firepower on a few assets, typically including an aircraft carrier, destroyers, frigates, and submarines. While powerful, this offensive operation model enables adversaries to anticipate U.S. naval movements, limits sailors’ ability to respond to threats across long distances, and exposes fleets to anti-access/anti-denial (A2/D2) threats.

As a result, the U.S. Navy is shifting from large, centralized carrier strike groups to distributed maritime operations, which disperse naval units over a larger area to complicate enemy targeting. This shift requires not only advanced combat capabilities but also flexible logistics support.

The CMV-22B Osprey – a tiltrotor aircraft – is at the heart of this transformation in the Navy’s approach. The CMV-22B offers superior range, avionics, and communications compared to the C-2A, its predecessor.

Although it was initially conceived as a carrier-onboard-delivery (COD) replacement, the Osprey is not confined to large-deck carrier logistics. The CMV-22B can conduct long-range navigation and deliver logistical support across entire fleets, an advantage in distributed maritime environments where logistics needs span vast areas and diverse units.

Carrier strike group operations today can cover over 700 miles in 24 hours. The CMV-22B ensures logistics support matches this pace, crucial for distributed maritime operations in contested environments. The aircraft can rapidly transport personnel, munitions, medical supplies, and components to Expeditionary Advanced Bases, Forward Logistic Support Sites, and ships at sea.

The CMV-22B also allows the U.S. military to lead joint combat operations, integrating capabilities across service branches. It assists the convergence of the U.S. Navy’s distributed operations with the Air Force’s agile combat employment and the Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO). The aircraft’s speed, range, and versatility ensure the Navy operates effectively as part of a modular force comprising air and ground elements.

The Osprey – used by the Navy, Air Force Special Operations Command, and Marine Corps – has evolved over time to meet the needs of our warfighters. Looking ahead, the CMV-22B presents opportunities beyond its primary logistics role. The Navy could leverage its versatility to support the Carrier Strike Group with aerial refueling capability. Its enhanced secure, long-range communication could better support Naval Special Warfare (NSW) forces in combat search and rescue (CSAR) and other NSW missions. These and other improvements would expand its strategic value to the U.S. Navy fleet and Joint Force.

Furthermore, procuring the CMV-22B and investing in its readiness and modernization are not only necessary to meet operational needs, but also to sustain and strengthen the U.S. defense industrial base. Team Osprey, a consortium of over 500 manufacturers and suppliers spanning nearly every U.S. state, supports jobs producing thousands of essential parts for the Osprey. This industrial base is vital to maintain American military and economic strength.

U.S. naval capabilities may not reach their full potential without a fast, long-range tiltrotor aircraft like the CMV-22B. Indeed, its ability to support both Fleet and Joint Force operations while enhancing combat capabilities makes it a key asset against emerging threats in contested environments.

The CMV-22’s speed and range are critical as the Navy adapts to distributed maritime operations and develops tactics, techniques, and procedures to meet future threats.

Featured photo: ATLANTIC OCEAN (Sept. 19, 2024) Ð A CMV-22B Osprey, assigned to the “Mighty Bison” of Fleet Logistics Multi-Mission Squadron (VRM) 40, lands on the flight deck of the world’s largest aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78), Sept. 19, 2024. These carrier landing qualifications are a first for the CMV-22B Osprey on a Ford-class aircraft carrier. USS Gerald R. Ford is underway in the Atlantic Ocean to further develop core unit capabilities during its basic phase of the optimized fleet response plan. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Maxwell Orlosky).

This article was first published by Seapower Magazine and is republished with the author’s permission.

And for the first of two books, we are publishing this year on the tiltrotor enterprise, see the following:

Later this year, we are publishing a companion volume to the one available now.

The King Stallion at WTI 1-25

04/02/2025

U.S. Marines assigned to Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One, Marine Operational Test and Evaluation Squadron One, and 2d Distribution Support Battalion Marines attached to 8th Engineer Support Battalion execute heavy lift of a tractor, rubber-tired, articulated steering, multi-purpose (TRAM) utilizing the CH-53K King Stallion as part of Weapons and Tactics Instructor course 1-25, at Auxiliary Airfield II, near Yuma, Arizona, Oct. 21, 2024.

WTI is a seven-week training event hosted by MAWTS-1 which emphasizes operational integration of the six functions of Marine aviation in support of the Marine Air Ground Task Force, Joint and Coalition Forces.

10.21.2024

Video by Cpl. Nicholas Johnson 

Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron-1

European Defence Uptick: The View from the Defense Industries

04/01/2025

By Pierre Tran

Paris – Two European arms companies, KNDS France and MBDA, recently pointed up their hefty investment to boost production of cannon shells, artillery, and missiles, indicating a willingness to anticipate orders, and their access to extensive funds.

The willingness of those two privately held companies to invest in new plant and parts could be seen in contrast to companies listed on the stock exchange showing reluctance to build up weapon stocks until they win government orders.

That commitment to invest among some unlisted companies also shows how prime contractors have own funds and can tap bank loans and capital markets, while small and medium companies in the supply chain have struggled to find working capital, just to keep up with present orders.

State-owned KNDS France invested €600 million ($648 million) to ramp up production of its Caesar artillery and 155 mm 52 caliber shells from summer 2022, in expectation of orders from France and European Allies.

The scale of that €600 million investment by the KNDS French unit can be seen in the light of the KNDS group reporting March 27 2024 sales of €3.8 billion, up from €3.3 billion the previous year; orders of €11.2 billion, up from €7.8 billion; and an order book of €23.5 billion, up from €16 billion.

There was “satisfactory profitability in line with industry expectations,” the KNDS group said in a statement with the financial results.

KNDS is a Franco-German group comprising the family controlled KNDS Deutschland and KNDS France, with the head office in Amsterdam.

On the French unit’s investment of own-funds for the Caesar, contracts for 78 artillery systems eventually landed. Kyiv ordered six of the truck-mounted cannons in September 2023, with allies ordering the remaining 72, the weapons to be shipped to Ukraine in 2024 and early 2025.

MBDA said March last year the missile company would invest €2.4 billion between 2023-2028 to speed up production, in response to calls by France for higher productivity. That planned investment compared to 2024 sales of €4.9 billion, up from €4.5 billion in the previous year; orders of €13.8 billion, up from orders of €9.9 billion; and an order book of €37 billion, up from €28 billion.

MBDA is a private company jointly owned by Airbus, BAE Systems, and Leonardo, which are listed on European stock exchanges. Those parent companies would have had to approve the investment drive of the missile manufacturer, and the expected return.

Contracts First

French listed companies such as Thales have been ready to invest but have been waiting for arms contracts, a defense specialist said. The industrial workplace has lacked financing from the government to tool up.

For privately held companies such as KNDS France, there was a distinct political dynamic. The state ownership of the KNDS France unit might be seen as making it easier for managers to opt for raising production before government orders rolled in.

It remains to be seen whether KNDS’s readiness to build up stocks without orders will continue if the group completed a reported plan to list on the Frankfurt stock exchange, with prospective shareholders looking closely at capital expenditure and return on capital.

Meanwhile, MBDA has called for client nations to pool their orders for missiles.

There was a case to be made for discounts on joint orders, a second specialist said.

The pursuit of new weapons stems from French support for Ukraine in its fight against Russian forces, and a drive to build up low national stocks of arms, made more pressing from  what appears to be the Trump administration’s scorn for European allies.

“Collective buying” in the European Union made sense, Steven Everts, director of the European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS), a think tank, told March 26 the Anglo-American Press Association (AAPA).

The bulk of European spending on arms was at the national level and based on a sovereign decision, he said, but there was a case to be made for buying European-built equipment and on a collective basis.

The European Commission has pledged €1.5 billion for the European Defence Industry Programme (EDIP) for 2025-2027, and there is the European Defence Industrial Strategy (EDIS), both seeking to support companies in the 27 E.U. member states.

“Let’s see how it goes,” he said.

Political Support

A political agenda was set with a June 2022 speech by President Emmanuel Macron at the Eurosatory trade show, when he said the Russian invasion of Ukraine meant France was moving to a war economy.

The armed forces minister, Sébastien Lecornu, followed that up by holding a September 2022 meeting with industry leaders, chiefs of staff, and the head of the DGA procurement office. The minister called on companies to build up stocks of raw material, and companies pledged to speed up deliveries.

However, companies quietly talked of a lack of orders, making the war economy more talk than a bankable walk.

It remained for Bercy, the finance ministry in modern buildings and a helicopter pad on the roof, to find the payment credits to make down-payments, and pay up when deliveries were made. Those payment credits came after authorizations were made, to allow an order to be placed – arguably the easy part.

“There were many statements, but no contracts,” the specialist said, from the industry point of view.

From the government’s view, there was “dialog” with industry to speed up the production cycle, the specialist said. But there was something of a structural problem, with Bercy holding the budget strings, deciding whether “to pay or not to pay.”

That problem stemmed from payment credits in the defense budget already committed to pay for programs under way. Those programs had to be paid for – and the payment credits could not be spent twice.

A shortfall between authorization and payment credits leads to a funding gap.

The significance of credit payments could be seen with Thales executive chairman Patrice Caine pointing up March 4 the importance of arms programs which ran for years over the life of multi-year budget laws. Even when orders related to Ukraine did land, such as a U.K. order worth £1.66 billion for Thales light missiles for Kyiv, they were of relatively little importance compared to the company’s overall order book, he said.

Thales reported a 2024 defense order book of €39 billion.

The 2024 financial results of the leading arms companies, listed and unlisted, showed orders have been made, and order books have hit highs.

But their suppliers are struggling.

New Funding

France has made efforts to raise fresh funds, with the March 20 announcement by the economy minister, Eric Lombard, and Lecornu of new measures to invest in the French defense industrial and technological base.

The ministers launched a €450 million fund, with the state-backed bank Bpifrance offering  the French public a way personally to invest €500 in the arms industry.

Lombard also launched a plan to raise €5 billion from public and private funding, to be invested in the some 4,000 small and medium companies in the military sector, where many owners are struggling with a weak capital base and low cash holdings.

Those companies would need a further €1 billion-€3 billion of equity in the next few years, as France planned to boost spending on arms, he said.
Public investors could invest €1.7 billion of capital, he said, which would be boosted by private investors, to raise up to €5 billion to invest in companies in the arms industry.

That public-private funding for weapons is seen as all the more needed, as the French 2024 public sector budget deficit rose to 5.8 pct of economic output, up from 5.4 pct in 2023. The E.U. ceiling for the deficit is 3 pct.

More generally, rising trade tension from Washington toward the European Union has highlighted a perceived need to boost European industrial capability, with calls for ordering European-built arms rather than U.S. kit.

European stock markets fell sharply March 27 after U.S. president Donald Trump said the day before that the U.S. would charge 25 pct tariffs on imports of foreign cars and car parts.

Credit image: ID 342656814 | Defense © Anna Komisarenko | Dreamstime.com

Transporting Patriot Missiles Bboard MV-22B Osprey

03/31/2025

U.S. Army Soldiers with 1st Battalion, 1st Air Defense Artillery Regiment and U.S. Marines with Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 265, Marine Aircraft Group 36, 1st Marine Aircraft Wing transport Patriot missiles on an MV-22B Osprey from Kadena Air Base to Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, Okinawa, Japan, Nov. 5, 2024.

The prototype loading system was designed to offer a more efficient method of transporting Patriot missiles.

OKINAWA, JAPAN

11.05.2024

Video by Lance Cpl. Thalia Rivera 

1st Marine Aircraft Wing    

Restoring Grounded Discourse in an Anxious America: The Focus of the Invisible Threads Lab

03/29/2025

By Robbin Laird and Ed Timperlake

Journalist Kate Woodsome has been laser-focused on a key challenge facing democracy in the United States and, frankly, within liberal democracies more generally: the growing inability of social and political tribes to talk with one another. In fact, the impacts of the pandemic on younger generations have generated difficulties for individuals to be part of a broader healthy – literally physically and mentally – democratic society. But the political sectarianism and mental health and addiction issues plaguing America existed even before covid-19 hit, and their corrosive challenge to social cohesion affect young and old alike.

Woodsome has been a journalist throughout her professional life, working for the Voice of America, Al Jazeera English, and The Washington Post in societies with complex information environments and fading or failed democracies. These include Cuba, Cambodia, Hong Kong, and the United States. Everywhere she’s lived and worked in, starting in her home state of Maine, Kate says she’s witnessed a common human experience: People are in pain, and they want to feel better. While so much political reporting focuses on tit-for-tat, he-said-she-said point-scoring, Kate delves deeper to examine the underlying forces of our division and alienation.

The root of much pain, Kate has found, is trauma, a biopsychosocial wound caused by an experience or condition so distressing that it overwhelms or short-circuits a person’s normal stress response systems. Even when a person returns to “safety,” their body and mind can carry the impacts of adversity, whether it is from a challenging childhood or fighting in war. A person’s nervous, endocrine, immune, cardiovascular, and cognitive systems can all be affected by the toxic stress, creating a complex web of long-term and even intergenerational consequences. Without care, resources and support, Kate told us, people can become shutdown or hypervigilant, scanning for threats or danger, or dissociating from even the highest levels of stress. She told us that trauma can rupture connections within ourselves and with others, and that social disorder, political polarization, and violence are all manifestations of collective trauma.

Kate had this experience in her home growing up. She witnessed it reporting in post-genocide Cambodia in the early 2000s. And she covered and lived it reporting on the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021 as part of The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning team.

Now an independent journalist and emerging entrepreneur, Kate is focused on bringing together her experience in the journalistic world with her research on trauma to take a new approach to the challenge of fragmentation. As she told us, “We have to heal our nervous systems to heal our social and political systems.”

Kate took a buyout from The Post in Dec. 2023, and began a multimedia newsletter on Substack called Invisible Threads, where she uncovers the ties between mental health and democracy. Her writing and conversations are compassionate and authentic, weaving personal experiences with larger systemic happenings to make complex challenges more relatable and, therefore, less overwhelming to address.

A year later, with thousands of subscribers, it has grown into something bigger: a living laboratory for media, education and resources to nourish what she calls “an economy of well-being.”

Now a visiting scholar with Georgetown University’s Psychology Department and a senior fellow with the school’s Red House research and design unit, Kate is pioneering a nervous-system-informed approach to journalism, education, and public engagement. She’s building The Invisible Threads Lab to empower people with “tools to stay regulated, relational, and responsive in a world of constant input.”

We had a chance to talk with Kate recently about her mission and how she’s approaching the work.

The key question we posed during the discussion was raised by Ed Timperlake: “Using an engineering term in times of stress, pressure builds, and we need for folks to have a constructive pressure relief valve in order to take the pressure down and allow the society or the system to function so it doesn’t blow up into a set of angry confrontations. Is your vision to pull people together by shaping a common ground?”

One might add that one of the objectives of democratic discourse is in fact to shape common grounds rather than simply to shape isolated social tribes fighting with one another, and unable to find, or even to see the necessity of, finding common ground.

Kate Woodsome provided a thoughtful response that gets at the heart of her work:

The goal is to have media and resources for an economy of well-being. An economy fo well-being is what would result if our social and political and economic systems — and our relationships — were built with human dignity and respect and care in mind.

Right now, the media information ecosystem that I am a product of, that I spent 23 years in newsrooms participating in, and that I consume, is built on adrenaline. It’s built on speed. It is built on generating clicks to bolster ad revenue, to rev you up, to make you scared to you keep checking the news. It keeps us all scanning for danger, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing except when it becomes overwhelming and unhealthy, which I’d argue a lot of people are feeling right now. The information ecosystem reflects the larger fear-driven, hyper-capitalist system that has people ordering stuff they don’t need from Amazon to temporarily make them feel better. People either want quick fixes to complex problems, something to make us feel better now, or they want to know that their angst is valid, and they seek out information that confirms their fears.

And so essentially, what is happening when people are engaging in the information ecosystem, be it mainstream media or social media, or even conversations across the dinner table that are a product of the hyper partisan media, the result is to keep people in a state of fight, flight or freeze.

When you talk about the nervous system and responses to a traumatic incident, you can get ready to fight, you can get ready to run away, or you can freeze and shut down. Another response is appeasement. For a lot of people, reading the news or even visiting family or old friends over the holidays can raise their stress levels so much that they don’t want to engage anymore. Or they’ll say something that fractures the relationship, or they’ll bite their tongue to make the problem go away, which often generates more resentment or grief. This is the tip of the iceberg of the deeper dysregulation of our society.

What I’m trying to do with Invisible Threads is help people understand the underlying, interrelated factors of our mental health and political crises — what I call our crisis of misunderstanding — and develop the skills to start looking at these overwhelming things through different lenses. If we examine complex problems by asking different questions, we can identify different tools and pathways to solve them.

In the writing, interviews and field reporting I publish with the Invisible Threads newsletter, I’m integrating references to the human nervous system and how trauma affects the world around us so that we are better equipped to notice how social, political, and economic systems affect our well-being, and how our well-being affects the communities and systems we build. The goal is to ground people in a shared sense of humanity, so even if you disagree on political points, at least you’re more aware that maybe someone is experiencing spikes of cortisol or adrenaline that might be affecting how they — or we — are listening, communicating, relating, for better or worse.

The current information ecosystems promote polarization. And political polarization is a manifestation of collective trauma. Trauma ruptures relationships and makes you look at someone as the enemy — “us versus them.” That is polarization.

If we have a baseline understanding of how our nervous systems are working, and how trauma and resilience affect society, people can come to Invisible Threads and engage with these conversations and these ideas in a more complex, almost slower way, to begin to reassess how we exist in the world, so that we can see how the systems were built around us.

That’s the media arm of Invisible Threads. This coming year, I’ll be releasing more videos with high-profile trauma experts including Bessel Van Der Kolk, the author of The Body Keeps the Score, as well as a younger generation of resilience teachers such as Nkem Ndefo. I’m also teeing up conversations with people affected by the massive shifts in government, those who support it and those who don’t. We need to model dialogue across differences but, more than that, we need the tools to navigate this on an embodied level.

This is where The Invisible Threads Lab comes in. I’m building a non-profit where nervous system literacy meets media literacy, social intelligence, and collective care. People need opportunities to develop deeper skills and practice what they’re learning, so I’m building curriculum and workshops to empower people to notice, navigate, and transform the systems inside and around them. Social media, misinformation, and fearmongering are not going away. We need different skills to stay healthy and grounded in this environment.

This builds on work I’ve been doing for the past year with my partners at Georgetown’s Red House, including its director, Dr. Randall Bass, and Dr. Mays Imad, a neuroscience professor at my alma mater, Connecticut College, as well as with Dr. Jennifer Woolard, a Georgetown vice dean and psychology and law professor who heads the Community Research Group, It’s exciting to blend journalism, psychology, and systems change with an eye on healing rather than fear and division.

You can subscribe to the Invisible Threads newsletter here: https://katewoodsome.substack.com. To help build The Invisible Threads Lab or to learn more about talks, workshops and tools, email ka**@**********me.com.

Editor’s Note: We called our defense website Second Line of Defense and I have had defense types ask why this title?

Our idea from the beginning is that the defense mission of the nation is too narrowly focused on forward deployed forces and neglecting the entire domestic base which makes defense of the nation possible, including infrastructure, industry, a healthy information society and the willingness of the civilian population to defend their ideals and the nation. What Kate is focused on fits right in with our core concept.

II MIG Participates in Resolute Hunter 2-24

03/28/2025

U.S. Marines with II Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group, II Marine Expeditionary Force, participate in exercise Resolute Hunter 2-24 on Naval Air Station Fallon, Nevada, from June 17 to June 20, 2024. Resolute Hunter demonstrates the U.S. Marine Corps’ ability to work within the joint force and with foreign partners to validate & develop service, joint, and coalition doctrine and tactics within the realm of battle management, command and control and intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance.

06.21.2024

Video by Cpl. Maurion Moore 

II MEF Information Group