The Marine Corps is seeing success with fielding futuristic loitering munitions and unmanned missile launchers, however the flat protection funds has constrained the tempo of the service’s transformation, the service’s assistant commandant stated Monday.
Many of the 96 packages linked to Drive Design 2030, the Marine Corps’ sweeping modernization marketing campaign, are “performing very nicely,” Gen. Christopher Mahoney stated in an interview with Protection One.
Nonetheless, progress is slower than he’d like, Mahoney stated, thanks partly to Congress’s failure to cross a brand new funds and ensuing reliance on a sequence of continuous resolutions, which hold funding on the earlier yr’s ranges.
“What we will not do is speed up them as quick as I would really like, and construct a depth of journal to the extent that I would really like,” he stated.
Mahoney highlighted the Corps’ program to equip squads with one-way assault drones as one of many successes of Drive Design thus far. This system, dubbed Natural Precision Hearth—Infantry (OPF-I), is “performing very, very nicely,” stated Mahoney.
A capabilities integration officer for the Marine Corps earlier advised Protection One that the Corps hopes to discipline loitering munitions on the squad degree by 2027, and work is constant to determine how greatest to deal with the affect of climate on the storage and use of the subtle weapons.
The Marine Corps additionally runs a program for launching loitering munitions from automobiles in a program referred to as Natural Precision Hearth—Mounted, or OPF-M.
Mahony stated OPF-M has “been a problem, each from a technical standpoint, and from a efficiency standpoint,” however stated the Marine Corps is constant to work on the acquisition technique.
The Corps in 2021 awarded a OPF-M contract to Israel’s UVision Air to combine the Joint Mild Tactical Automobile with UVison’s Hero-120 loitering munition, which is designed to take out armored targets. Loitering munitions with an anti-tank functionality partly fill the void in anti-armor weapons left when the Marine Corps removed tanks in 2020 as one of many first main Drive Design adjustments.
This yr’s funds additionally marks a interval of funding within the Marine Corps’ new precision missile platforms, which match lengthy range-missiles with an unmanned model of the Corps’ Joint Mild Tactical Automobile, dubbed the ROGUE Fires unmanned missile launcher.
For 2025, the Marines hope to amass 90 Naval Strike Missiles for the Navy/Marine Corps Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS), which Mahoney referred to as “certainly one of my higher performing packages.”
The service can also be trying to purchase eight Lengthy Vary Fires (LRF) programs, which launch the longer-range Tomahawk missile from a ROGUE Fires launcher.
The Marine Corps will deal with making the system as a complete “smaller and lighter,” Mahoney stated. “It is the logistics practice that may observe Within the speedy bodily footprint that we’re attempting to shrink all the way down to be extra expeditionary.”
The Corps can even search for heavy lifting drones to ferry provides throughout the huge Pacific with out risking the lives of logisticians. Final yr, the service started working a small logistics drone able to dealing with 150 kilos, dubbed the Tactical Resupply Unmanned Plane System (TRUAS).
Mahoney stated he’d finally wish to see drones able to carrying “hundreds of kilos,” giving the Corps choices apart from touchdown ships or helicopters.
The Marine Corps can also be engaged on fielding a brand new vessel for ferrying Marines between islands, referred to as the Touchdown Ship Medium. Whereas the ship remains to be within the proposal stage, Mahoney indicated that the Corps is just not searching for a vessel with each protecting measure attainable.
“It must be survivable, however I’m not of the varsity that survivability is a binary alternative.” Mahoney stated. “Historical past is replete with issues that had been extraordinarily survivable, that are actually on the backside of the ocean.”
Even because the Corps embraces extra autonomous programs, Mahoney stated getting people to belief drones for human transport is a steep barrier. Individuals could be “very reluctant, as a result of the arrogance degree is not there,” Mahoney stated.
However the extra publicity Marines get, the extra comfy they’ll be, Mahoney believes. The F/A-18-turned-F-35 pilot stated he’s all too acquainted with the issue.
“Once I got here to need to hover in an F-3B for the primary time, it was an unnatural act for me,” stated Mahoney. With time, although, he realized the plane might hover itself “in all probability 99 occasions out of 100 higher than I ever might.”