By Robbin Laird In August 2026, off Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story, Virginia, a Navy-industry team quietly solved a problem that has constrained every discussion of unmanned maritime systems I have written about for the past several years: how do you keep an autonomous vessel on station without a…
The post-Cold War period shaped a Marine Corps optimized for the wrong war. Built around a “crisis management” paradigm — one that assumed sanctuary, permissive logistics, and a knowable adversary, the Corps found itself increasingly cast as a maritime bus service for land-centric CENTCOM operations. The threat environment has since…
By Robbin Laird The official photographic record of Weapons and Tactics Instructor Course 2-26, running from March through late April 2026 at MCAS Yuma and across a range of training sites in the American Southwest, is more than a set of public affairs images. Examined systematically, it constitutes a documentary…
By Robbin Laird The photos accompanying this article were taken at Pinal County Airpark near Marana, Arizona on April 4, 2026, during the Weapons and Tactics Instructor (WTI) course 2-26, hosted by Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One (MAWTS-1). They tell a story worth examining carefully not just as…
By Robbin Laird The United States Marine Corps is in the midst of the most consequential transformation in its modern history. That transformation is not, at its core, about new platforms or revised force structure tables, though both are part of the story. It is about something more fundamental: a…
By Robbin Laird Eight photographs from April 4, 2026, at Combat Village near Yuma, Arizona, document an AH-1Z tactics exercise with an unusual premise: the attack helicopter pilot as the person being recovered. The simulated personnel recovery exercise conducted by Maj. James Turner, an AH-1Z Viper pilot with MAWTS-1, turns…
By Robbin Laird A series of photographs taken on April 6, 2026 in the early weeks of Weapons and Tactics Instructor Course 2-26 documents an Osprey assault support tactics evolution in the desert near Yuma, Arizona. Taken together, the images tell a complete operational story: departure from the flight line,…
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…
