A Look at this Year’s USMC Aviation Plan: Shaping a Way Ahead

03/02/2025
By Robbin Laird

In January 2025, the USMC released its latest Aviation Plan.

As was noted in the press release accompanying the plan:

“Headquarters Marine Corps Aviation released the 2025 Marine Corps Aviation Plan, outlining a strategic framework that balances responding to today’s crises with modernizing Marine Aviation to ensure the Corps is prepared for tomorrow’s fight. The plan focuses on key areas of transformation, including technological advancements, expeditionary mobility, sustainment, and total force integration. This plan is a roadmap to enhancing operational readiness and ensuring Marine Aviation remains a lethal force in support of the Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF) throughout the spectrum from competition to conflict.”

There is much in the plan to discuss which I will do over a series of articles. Here I am going to step back and take my own bird’s eye view of the plan.

I will publish a book later this year entitled A Paradigm Shift in Maritime Operations. I argue in the book that the US Navy is focused on DMO or distributed maritime operations or how to makle their capital ships more lethal and survivable by shaping effective ways to distribute effectively their capital ships.

But such an effort will fall short, given the state of U.S. shipbuilding and the availability of capital ships. DMO needs to be combined with innovative ways to distribute maritime effects or DME, which can be done by combined arms operations of manned aircraft with various payload innovations, including incorporation of maritime autonomous systems.

The Marine Corps is clearly focused on both their ability to operate from capital ships to do distributed operations and an ability leveraging their unique mix of aircraft to deliver innovative new ways to do DME.

I am looking at the aviation plan from this standpoint. A key part of the plan highlights the nature of the current USMC air systems, which are unique in terms of what they can deliver to an insertion force. But the plan focuses on the new operational dynamics to which these systems are enabling and evolving and to which new systems and payloads will be added.

The plan also highlights the evolving eco-system which will enable either a DMO or DME force to operate effectively, new C2, new ISR, new training approaches and other tools which will allow for more combat flexibility and effectiveness.

I will examine the approaches suggested in the plan from this perspective.

But let me conclude with what the press release mentioned earlier highlighted as key priorities for the USMC going forward.

The 2025 plan underscores additional key priorities, including:

Aviation Readiness:  Ensuring Marine Aviation remains poised to respond to any crisis at a moment’s notice, with the readiness to deploy rapidly and provide immediate support when the nation calls.

Enhanced Expeditionary Mobility: Strengthening the Marine Corps’ ability to operate from austere, distributed locations through the modernization of platforms like the MV-22B Osprey, CH-53K King Stallion, and KC-130J Hercules, ensuring agile mobility and support for maritime and littoral operations.

Modernizing Aviation Logistics: Modernizing sustainment practices to ensure readiness in contested environments through the creation of Maintenance Operations Centers, streamlined supply chain reforms, and enhanced aviation logistics packages. These innovations will better support DAO and MAGTF operations while improving sustainment across the force.

Marine Air Command and Control System (MACCS) Modernization: Transforming air command and control capabilities with advanced technologies like the TPS-80 radar and Ground-Based Air Defense Systems. The integration of regional air defense concepts will support Expeditionary Advance Base Operations (EABO) and enhance digital interoperability for joint and coalition operations.

Total Force Integration: Strengthening collaboration between active-duty and reserve forces, particularly through the integration of the 4th Marine Aircraft Wing, to enhance operational flexibility, sustainment, and warfighting readiness across the total force.