This is the latest in a series of semi-regular columns by Robbin Laird, where he will tackle current defense issues through the lens of more than 45 years of defense expertise in both the US and abroad. The goal of these columns: to look back at how questions and perspectives of the past should inform decisions being made today.
I spent two weeks in December with the 3rd Marine Wing working with 1MEF during the Steel Knight 25 exercise. Steel Knight represents far more than another Marine Corps training exercise: Conducted across Southern California from December 1-14, 2025, this iteration served as a critical campaign laboratory where I Marine Expeditionary Force tested whether concepts like stand-in forces, distributed operations, and kill webs could actually function at scale under realistic conditions.
The exercise’s most significant departure from traditional training models lies in its rejection of linear force buildup assumptions. Rather than organizing around the expectation of force closure at secure bases before engagement, Steel Knight 2025 deliberately validated the ability to fight as a distributed, networked stand-in force from the opening moments of crisis.
This represents a doctrinal break from both Cold War-era exercises and post-9/11 training events, where U.S. forces assumed time to aggregate combat power before engaging near-peer adversaries. Additionally, the exercise structured itself around a campaign-like sequence of problem sets: embassy reinforcement, noncombatant evacuation operations, dispersed fires and maneuver, and sustained logistics under threat.
The connecting thread demanded synchronization of sensors, decision-makers, and shooters across extended ranges under compressed timelines, while sustaining dispersed ground and aviation elements from expeditionary infrastructure rather than fixed-base sanctuaries.
It was during the interwar period when the Marine Corps developed amphibious doctrine through iterative experimentation at Fleet Landing Exercises. Steel Knight serves a similar function for the stand-in force concept. It’s training for the kind of real scenarios that are likely to face the Marines going forward and others in the Pentagon should be paying attention.
There are a number of takeaways from the exercise. Here are my key observations.
The S²D Framework: Survivability, Sustainability, and Duration
One critical innovation emerging from the exercise is what I characterize as the S²D framework for force insertion: Survivability, Sustainability, and Duration.
How survivable is the insertion force under contested conditions? How sustainable once inserted? For what duration can operations be maintained? This framework represents significant evolution from traditional amphibious doctrine, which often assumed relatively permissive logistics environments once forces were ashore.
In contested environments where adversaries can disrupt supply lines, target logistics nodes, and interdict reinforcement, these assumptions collapse. Forces must be designed from the outset to operate with degraded logistics for extended periods. The exercise tested various force projection scenarios and different combinations of capabilities within a kill web framework, but questions remained about how these tactical operations would integrate into broader campaign plans.
Hub, Spoke, and Node Operations: Refining the Concept
The exercise also revealed both progress and challenges in developing hub, spoke, and node concepts for distributed operations. While tactical execution remained strong, operational questions persist about standardizing these concepts. As one participant in the exercise noted, everyone must understand what a hub provides and what it cannot provide, how static or semi-permanent it is, and the same clarity for spokes and nodes.
A particularly important operational concept emerged underscored by Robert Hedelund, a retired 3-star who participated in the exercise as a senior mentor. He argued that is important to put timestamps on nodes. Rather than nodes requesting extraction when threatened, they should operate with inherent shelf lives measured in hours or days, depending on assigned tasks. Elements should constantly move, with forces that inserted one node already en route to establish the next while the current node completes its mission. This addresses signature management: forces firing missiles from a location for extended periods will be detected and targeted. Constant movement becomes essential to survival and effectiveness.
However, current nodes remain “a little bit too heavy,” partially because the Corps hasn’t fully exploited F-35 capabilities, as one participant put it to me. The challenge involves determining precisely what each node should accomplish and for how long, then designing appropriate support structures.
The Logistics Imperative: No Magic Solutions
Throughout the exercise, logistics emerged as both the critical enabler and potential Achilles’ heel of distributed operations. Contested logistics presents challenges without perfect solutions, only paths to attenuating problems. The CH-53K King Stallion “couldn’t come fast enough” in this context, one observer underscored, and maritime autonomous systems offer promise for sustaining distributed nodes.
Air Force C-130 aircraft proved crucial to Steel Knight’s success. Without them, the exercise would have looked dramatically different. This dependency highlights capability gaps: the Marine Corps doesn’t have enough KC-130Js, MV-22 Ospreys, CH-53Ks, or F-35s to fully execute its distributed operations concept without joint support. The CH-53K could potentially assume some KC-130J missions, but only if acquired in sufficient numbers. As one commander concluded, “You cannot do this operation with magic. You might want to, but it’s not going to happen. No voodoo here.”
Of course, platforms now in use can evolve for different missions. Take the V-22 Osprey. This aircraft began as an assault support platform for amphibious operations, became understood as a crisis response platform during the Pivot to the Pacific, and by 2026 enables distributed operations by maintaining connectivity and transport capability between dispersed units across vast maritime distances. The platform itself hasn’t fundamentally changed, but its role adapted to reflect the shift towards kill web and distributed force operations.
This evolution illustrates a crucial point: successful military transformation is not simply about acquiring new platforms, though new technology enables new approaches. It is fundamentally about reconceptualizing how existing and emerging capabilities can be employed to address changing operational requirements.
Delegation and Decision Authority: The Cultural Challenge
The exercise demonstrated that distributed operations demand unprecedented delegation of decision authority. The technology and lethality available to smaller units has increased exponentially, but organizational structures haven’t fully adapted to enable these capabilities. Modern C5ISR and networking mean that relatively small Marine units possess situational awareness and strike capabilities that once required much larger formations.
But capability without clear tasking and appropriate authority becomes wasted potential. Even the Air Force struggles with similar challenges: they understand mission command conceptually but struggle to let go of centralized control. Operating in contested electromagnetic environments where a 32-second radio transmission could bring retribution within two minutes requires fundamentally different approaches to command and control.
Steel Knight experimented with low-signature communications and rapid decision cycles, but questions remain about how much authority to delegate and how to maintain unity of effort across distributed nodes operating with limited communications.
Digital Interoperability: The True Revolution
The exercise revealed that digital interoperability represents perhaps the most significant revolution in military aviation since the jet engine. The F-35’s ability to serve as a sensor and data node, not merely as a strike platform, fundamentally changes how commanders can employ airpower. The integration challenge goes beyond simply connecting platforms to maintaining awareness of what capabilities each configuration brings as the Marine Corps fields different block upgrades.
Notably, Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron 267 (HMLA-267), a key part of 3rd MAW but resident at 1 MEF at Camp Pendleton, is the first such squadron which has completely transitioned to the new digital interoperability capability. As the first H-1 squadron to achieve full digital interoperability with a complete unit of employment, HMLA-267 is demonstrating how the H-1 helicopter platform, sometimes dismissed as vulnerable or obsolete, is evolving into a critical command and control node for distributed aviation operations. Their experience reveals not just technological advancement, but a fundamental reimagining of how rotary-wing aviation integrates with the joint force in contested environments.
The G-6 team’s approach reflects practical reality: redundancy is survival. One officer’s personal rule of thumb: “I need three ways to win, three ways of getting a message across the wire. I’ll take commercial SATCOM, whether it’s Starlink or ViaSat. I’ll take cellular. I’ll take fiber. I’ll take anything.” This comprehensive approach acknowledges that in contested environments, communications will be disrupted, jammed, or denied. Multiple pathways provide the resilience operations require. The G-6 organization within a USMC air wing is the principal staff section responsible for Information Technology (IT) and Communications (COMM) services, overseeing network operations, cybersecurity, and command-and-control (C2) systems.
The Ukrainian Lesson: Speed of Adaptation
The exercise repeatedly referenced Ukraine, but not in the way many analysts discuss the conflict. The critical insight centers on the speed of adaptation. Ukrainian forces demonstrated an ability to rapidly integrate commercial drones, modify tactics, and create new operational approaches faster than their adversary. In one operation, when Russian forces penetrated several miles using motorcycles and tanks, Ukrainian defenders used a combination of HIMARS rockets, APCs, and drones in a coordinated strike they had never practiced before.
This pattern of rapid adaptation cannot be assumed to be a Western advantage. Adversaries globally demonstrate similar capabilities for fast cycle learning. This has profound implications for command and control. The engagement force encountering enemy systems in real-time may face weapon combinations or employment patterns not present in intelligence preparations. Human contact, observation, and judgment about what is actually happening provide irreplaceable value.
Command and Control in Transition
I visited the Wing Operations Combat Center and it was clear that it is an organization taking transformation seriously, asking hard questions, testing assumptions, and learning from both successes and failures. The relationship between centralized command posts and distributed forward nodes remains under development. The correct hybrid balance remains elusive and may vary by mission and environment.
One persistent theme was the gap between what technology promises and what it delivers in operational contexts. Technologists focus on what systems can do under ideal conditions, but operational effectiveness depends on what systems can do when employed by Marines who are tired, under stress, operating in degraded conditions, with limited training time, and facing unexpected challenges.
From Exercise to Acquisition: Closing the Loop
Steel Knight 2025 drove significant real-world innovation, revealing both current capabilities and critical gaps requiring attention. From my perspective, it would make strategic sense to shift acquisition authorities and resources to allow combatant commanders to spend dollars on the ready force, filling core capability gaps discovered through such exercises. This would create a direct feedback loop from operational experience to capability development.
Rehearsal of operations sheds light on gaps. When rehearsing, you write mission orders down to the trigger puller, and the trigger puller will identify what they don’t understand. This allows better processes for writing effective mission orders and drives requirements from people actually executing missions rather than war gamers sitting on staffs trying to figure out what trigger pullers should do.
Despite challenges, Steel Knight 2025 demonstrated that the Marine Corps is translating distributed operations concepts into practical capability. Tactical execution remains strong, and Marines at all levels show commitment to mastering new operational approaches. However, significant work remains in three critical areas.
First, command and control structures must evolve to match distributed operations’ tempo and decision-making requirements. Second, logistics capabilities need substantial enhancement through additional platforms and integration of maritime autonomous systems. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the Corps needs clearer strategic guidance on how distributed forces will be employed: what specific tasks nodes will accomplish, for how long, and in support of what larger campaign objectives.
Success requires continued hard work translating concepts into capabilities, honest assessment of gaps and shortfalls, and sustained commitment to the difficult organizational and cultural changes that distributed operations demand. The challenge is not finding perfect solutions but developing adaptive organizations that can learn faster than adversaries, integrate new capabilities effectively, and distribute decision-making without losing coherence.
The Marine Corps that deployed forces in 1985 and the Marine Corps conducting Steel Knight 2025 share fundamental DNA: both are combined arms forces built around aviation-ground integration. But the tools available today enable operations at scales and speeds previously impossible.
The challenge now is ensuring institutional structures, command relationships, and logistical capabilities match the revolutionary potential of these new operational concepts. Steel Knight 2025 represents essential steps in that ongoing transformation, working the problems and discovering what works and what does not as the service builds capabilities and concepts that will define operations in the period ahead.
Note: In May 2026, I am publishing my book entitled, Lessons in Military Transformation: From the RMA to the Drone Wars. The book provides several case studies from my engagement with and observations of deployed military forces on three continents over forty years.
