The Marine Corps aviation community is nearing the end of upgrading its aircraft despite ongoing budget cuts, but the assistant deputy commandant for aviation said the real game-changer will be connecting the platforms with networks and sensors to get a sum greater than the whole of its parts.

Brig. Gen. Matthew Glavy told the audience at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event Monday morning that “we are transitioning every type/model/series of aircraft,” and among the most important upgrades will be the “very powerful one-two punch to kick down the door” when the F-35B comes online to operate alongside the MV-22 Osprey. He also noted the CH-53K will have three times the distance and carrying capacity compared to the CH-53E it will soon replace, and he said the unmanned RQ-21 could begin to take on some of the cyber and electronic warfare missions currently carried out by the EA-6B fleet that will retire in 2019.

The Marine Corps' short takeoff and vertical landing (STOVL) F-35B performs a vertical landing. Photo: Lockheed Martin.
The Marine Corps’ short takeoff and vertical landing (STOVL) F-35B performs a vertical landing. Brig. Gen. Matthew Glavy said the F-35 had long been the Marines’ top aviation priority and is key to future operations, both in the capabilities the platform itself will bring and the range and networking capabilities created with the F-35 and MV-22 Osprey operating in tandem. Photo: Lockheed Martin.

“Our optimism is high,” he said of the aviation community. But even more exciting than the platforms themselves, he said, is “interconnecting these capabilities.”

“It’s all about waveforms and networks,” Glavy said, rather than hardware that will age and become less operationally relevant. He noted that a few years ago the Marine Corps had tried to choose a  standard waveform to adopt, but there are so many waveforms being used by so many communities the Marines would need to communicate with, Glavy said Marine Corps aviation finally accepted it needed to find a way to excel in that ever-evolving communications environment.

“Instead of chasing waveforms, we’ll let the waveforms happen. And we will chase the processing power to convert the waveform,” he said. He said processing power is easy to improve, and doing so may allow waveform conversion faster, or in a smaller package to put on more types of aircraft, and so on.

For example, he said the LITENING targeting pod was among the greatest upgrades to the AV-8B Harrier in the platform’s existence. But right now, all the benefits of the pod’s sensors are contained in just that aircraft. Ideally, Glavy said, “I can take full-motion video [in the AV-8B], a very significant capability; I can bring it in to a V-22 and then I can take it from the V-22 and push it to multi-platforms. So I bring it in on [Tactical Targeting Networking Technology]…and then I can take it and push it out via [Adaptive Networking Wideband Waveform].”

Being able to simply upgrade software to keep up with new waveforms as other services, domestic agencies or even foreign militaries adopt them is a very powerful operating construct, Glavy said.