By Robbin Laird A light rain fell over the parade field at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point on the morning of June 16, 2026, but it did nothing to slow the proceedings. Under a covered pavilion ringed with the stadium-style red seats that mark official functions on the station,…
Three days after Marines with Marine Wing Support Squadron 373 laid AM-2 aluminum matting at Auxiliary Airfield II near Yuma, Arizona, a new team returned to the same site to build the next layer of the expeditionary airfield. On March 17, 2026, personnel conducting the Forward Arming and Refueling Point…
By Robbin Laird The first week of Weapons and Tactics Instructor Course 2-26 began not with aircraft, but with aluminum matting and a post driver. On March 14, 2026 — the opening phase of the seven-week course — Marines with Marine Wing Support Squadron 373, Marine Aircraft Group 11, 3rd…
By Robbin Laird At the heart of Marine aviation’s drive for combat excellence lies a semi-annual event that most outsiders have never heard of, yet which one senior MAWTS-1 Commanding Officer described in unambiguous terms: WTI is where the United States Marine Corps comes together every year to train for…
By Robbin Laird The history of warfare is inseparable from the history of weather. At Normandy in June 1944, Dwight Eisenhower held four stars and command of the largest amphibious operation in history and deferred to a meteorologist. The 24-hour delay that enabled D-Day was not the product of a…
By Robbin Laird USS Lewis B. Puller (ESB-3) embodies a straightforward but strategically important proposition: if you want to keep the Strait of Hormuz open against the threat of mines, you put the mine-warfare force where the mines are likely to be laid. The expeditionary sea base brings aviation, unmanned…
By Robbin Laird The U.S. capture of Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1989 and of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela in 2026 frame a striking transformation in American military power. Both operations targeted a hostile ruler in the Western Hemisphere. Both aimed to reset a regional balance of power. Yet the…
By Robbin Laird When I first visited the Ocius build facility, it was tucked inside the University of New South Wales, an enthusiastic team of smart young engineers clustered around Robert Dane’s vision of what an uncrewed maritime surface vessel could become. There was genuine energy and real technical imagination,…
