Marines are speeding up aircraft turnarounds for a scattered future fight and moving more munitions faster to keep up

• The Marine Corps is shifting from large, fixed bases to dispersed, harder-to-target operations.
• Marine aircrews are rushing to cut ground time as persistent surveillance and missiles speed up kill chains.
• Resourceful Marines managed to triple the number of munitions some aircrews can move.

California Marines are working to disperse forces and move aircraft and crews in and out faster, as persistent surveillance and accelerated kill chains threaten to catch them on the ground during refueling, rearming, and maintenance.

The growing threat of long-range missiles and drones is driving a shift in how the Marine Corps operates — not just dispersing forces, but reducing the time aircraft spend on the ground.

Instead of relying on large, fixed bases, the service is shifting to operations from smaller, less predictable locations while speeding up key support operations at these makeshift sites, which are often less heavily defended.

US forces in the Middle East are already “distributing” in ways that resemble how they would fight in the Pacific, the Corps’ Deputy Commandant for Aviation, Lieutenant General William Swan, told reporters last week.

“How do we ensure that we’re survivable,” Swan asked, “and distributed to a point, and have the ability to arm, rearm, refuel, and have the parts and maintenance to keep our sustainment and our readiness up?”

Dispersed operations close to the fight

Far-flung aviation operations require having aircraft support teams positioned at austere locations to turn aircraft around quickly, minimizing their exposure to an enemy’s targeting cycle and making them harder to detect and strike.

In a distributed fight, “you want to have the right stuff at the right place, at the right time,” Swan said. “We have to go this route, and frankly, we’re behind.”

The Corps hopes distributed aviation operations can include expedited, efficient processes, including AI-enabled predictive maintenance, Swan said, meaning aircraft could land at the most efficient time and place to access the right repair parts and mechanics.

For aviators and ground crews, there are also efforts to move faster on the ground to get aircraft in and out more quickly than ever before, shared Col. Jarrod DeVore, the commander of California-based Marine Air Group 11.

Pacific Marines are increasingly exploring operations under a “hub, spoke, node” framework, part of a broader shift in how Marine aviation thinks about the battlefield.

Instead of relying on a single sprawling base, Marines are training to spread aircraft and support teams across multiple small, remote locations. While a larger hub can still serve as a base, smaller spokes and nodes allow troops to keep moving, reloading, and refueling aircraft closer to the fight.

Throughout these operations, though, Marines remain within an enemy’s “targeting cycle,” DeVore said, meaning the time available to service aircraft on the ground is shrinking. Time on the ground has to be cut down to reduce the likelihood of detection and engagement, which is moving much faster than in past conflicts.

“They just go in, they refuel it, they load up the ordnance if they need to, and then they get out of the way,” DeVore said.

Reworking the logistics now

That pressure is forcing Marines to rethink basic logistics, including how they move weapons into austere locations and how they shuffle munitions around with the area of operations.

Knowing they could need to move more weapons quickly for rearmament, some of DeVore’s troops came up with a way to fit more munitions into cargo aircraft headed to remote positions— repurposing a cargo trailer as an improvised munitions mover.

Transporting missiles and other weapons can be complicated, said Maj. Daniel Kassebaum and Maj. Bradley Kirby, two aviation ordnance officers assigned to the I Marine Expeditionary Force. The weapons can be awkwardly balanced, and their varying sizes and shapes can make efficient packing difficult.

Most methods of missile transport also require specialized equipment to load and unload them from aircraft.

“We needed to have a system that would really enable the last-mile logistics problem for distributed operations,” said Kirby.

The pair repurposed an older trailer model to double, and in some cases triple, the number of munitions that Marine aircrews can move, a low-tech solution that speeds up the movement of munitions to dispersed forces but could also be used to accelerate rearming and reduce the time aircraft spend exposed in these areas.

The tool could be used to support loading C-130s and V-22s, as well as fighter aircraft. These Marines hope to field a newer version that would not require a forklift — equipment that may not be available in combat — but that design could still be years away due to the military’s slow acquisition process.

“It’s kind of like the analogy of fitting a sofa through your front door,” Kirby said of the munitions loading procedure. “You’re going to have to turn that sofa lengthwise and work the geometry to get it through the door. So what the trailer does is it allows you to turn those missile coffins lengthwise and roll them onto aircraft.”

“This is really our bid for success, to kind of make our own luck, to try to push for capability now,” Kassebaum said, “as opposed to waiting for the perfect solution.”