Lessons Learned at Steel Knight 25: Operating Within and as a Kill Web
I spent two weeks in December with the 3rd Marine Wing working with 1MEF during the…
Read More »From Kill Chains to Kill Webs: 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing’s Communications Revolution
At 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing headquarters, a group of communications and intelligence professionals are working through…
Read More »MACG-38: The Command-and-Control Enabler for Marine Corps Distributed Operations
The modern Marine Air Control Group 38 (MACG-38) represents a fundamental shift in how the Marine…
Read More »Beyond Munich’s Maritime Blind Spot: The Autonomous Systems Revolution Europe Still Doesn’t Understand
Cyril Widdershoven has identified a critical gap in European strategic thinking following the Munich Security Conference…
Read More »Ukraine as Furnace of the New Global Order
For three decades, much of the Western debate treated Ukraine as a difficult policy problem on…
Read More »Maximizing Flexibility: MAG-11’s Approach to Multi-Domain Aviation Operations
In a conversation conducted during Steel Knight 2025 at a simulated forward-deployed location, Colonel Jarrod DeVore,…
Read More »
Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) have moved in just a few years from a conceptual “loyal wingman” idea to concrete flight testing, down‑selects, and multi‑service adoption, with 2025–2026 shaping up as the period where the United States proves whether it can actually field affordable combat mass at speed. Across the Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and now the Army, CCAs are evolving into a family of large, jet‑powered uncrewed systems, tightly linked to manned platforms and backed by a growing budget, a more incremental acquisition strategy, and intensive experimentation with autonomy and manned‑unmanned teaming. The U.S. Air Force remains the pacing service in the United States for CCA development, having launched the first formal program in 2023 and moved it into early operational prototyping during 2025. In August 2025,...