Two F-35 COs Sat In A Bar And Planned A New Way Of Waging War

The U.S. Marine Corps is the smallest of the U.S. military branches. But its size—just 210,000 active and reserve personnel, compared to nearly a million in the U.S. Army—isn’t always a disadvantage. Not when it comes to deterring Chinese aggression in the Western Pacific.

A year ago, Lt. Col. Michael O’Brien, commanding officer of Marine Fighter-Attack Squadron 314, an F-35 squadron in California, sat at a bar in Nevada with his counterpart from the Royal Australian Air Force’s No. 3 Squadron, Wing Commander Adrian Kiely, and planned a major Pacific deployment—on a napkin.

“Our lack of bureaucracy allows us to attack short-fuze missions such as preparing to deter China … a lot more aggressively than organizations that are a lot larger, such as the Air Force and Navy,” O’Brien said.

VMFA-314 flies Lockheed Martin F-35Cs—the big-wing, long-range carrierborne variant of the popular stealth fighter. No. 3 Squadron flies the land-based F-35A with its slightly smaller wing and smaller fuel tanks.

The two F-35 models are similar enough that the two squadrons could, in theory, fly and fight together—sharing runways, fuel, weapons, spare parts and, most importantly, ground crews.

O’Brien and Kiely wanted to prove the theory—and also prove the two squadrons could link up fast, on short notice, to put high-tech firepower within range of a possible aggressor.

“Over the past year, No. 3 Squadron has operated with VMFA-314, aiming to deepen operational and maintenance interoperability,” Kiely said in a statement.

Last year, the two squadrons trained together in Nevada and Hawaii. “In 2023, specifically, we are seeking to test and prove interchangeability, with a specific focus on our maintenance and logistics workforces.”

With official approval of their bar-napkin deployment plan, VMFA-314 last month launched six of its F-35Cs and, with assistance from U.S. Air Force and contracted tankers, hopped them across the Pacific Ocean to RAAF Base Williamtown in New South Wales in southeastern Australia.

The tankers returned home, leaving the Marines and Aussies to spend three weeks pretending to wage, with minimal support, an air war over the Western Pacific.

The Marines traveled light. “What we bring is manpower and firepower and aggressiveness, but we don’t necessarily bring the parts tail,” O’Brien said.

The F-35 is a complex and maintenance-hungry machine. To fight the hardest, a deploying squadron either must bring parts with it, or fall in a stash of spares at the overseas location. For VMFA-314, No. 3 Squadron with its 10 F-35s was the logical host. “Kenny has been great helping us out,” O’Brien said, referring to Kiely by his callsign.

The Marines often deploy without attached Air Force tankers and cargo planes, which are in high demand and short supply and largely dictate the pace of U.S. military fighter deployments in the Asia-Pacific region.

But the same lightness that allows the Marines to move fast and on short notice also constrains their operations once they arrive.

The Pacific is vast. It’s 1,800 miles from Williamtown to Darwin, Australia’s northernmost fighter base. It’s another 2,200 miles from Darwin to the northern Philippines. From there, it’s 500 miles to Taiwan, the likeliest locus of a major war in the region.

An F-35A ranges just 650 miles, there then back, with full tanks and a few missiles. The F-35C travels slightly farther. An F-35 squadron fighting in the Western Pacific has two options: refuel in mid-air a lot … or leapfrog from one small island base to the next. “This is all a time-distance-fuel problem,” O’Brien said.

The Marine-Aussie team, despite some local support from USMC KC-130 and RAAF KC-30 tankers, made its choice by opting to deploy light and fast. It’s rehearsing a largely tanker-free war.

That means putting in practice a distributed “hub-and-spoke” concept, whereby squadrons leave their heaviest equipment at some big air base—Williamtown, for instance—and stage a few maintainers, some weapons and a little gas at austere airfields closer to the front lines. Say, in The Philippines or Malaysia or on some Japanese island.

Any location with 6,000 feet of clean runway is a candidate, O’Brien and Kiely said. To keep things simple, the leapfrogging Marines wouldn’t even plug into the F-35’s centralized Autonomic Logistics Information System, O’Brien said. They’d fix planes the old-fashioned way.

The host country would have to approve the plan, of course. “When we talk about operating in austere locations and different areas in the region, not only is our capability a key factor in that, but also host-nation authorization,” said Maj. Natalie Batcheler, a 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing spokesperson.

Assuming allies agree to let American and Australian F-35s stage from their territory, it’s possible to imagine mixed flights of USMC and RAAF F-35s moving quickly across the Western Pacific in a time of crisis.

More bar-napkin plans could lead to more short-notice exercises that result in more and more pilots, maintainers and planners getting comfortable with the idea.