7,500 US Marines Conduct Combat Exercises with Japanese Forces; F-35s & F-15s Deployed

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By Kris Osborn – President & Editor-In-Chief, Warrior Maven

US and Japanese forces are preparing for island hopping amphibious warfare in the jungles near Okinawa through a series of joint air-land-sea combat operations, an exercise supported by more than 7,500 US Marines and the Navy’s USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group.

F-15s & F-35s

There was a significant air-ground-sea synergy in the exercise as well, wherein US Air Force and Marine Corps strike aircraft joined Japan Self-Defense Force F-15s to provide crucial Close Air Support to units fighting in the jungle. 

The aircraft used for support included the carrier-launched US Navy F-35C and Marine Corps F-35B along with US Air Force F-15s. Networking the assets and “war nodes” to one another was a key emphasis of the operation, called “Jungle Warfare Exercise 22,” as new hardened communications networks enabled a multi-domain networked of “meshed” nodes within a combat system to find target specifics, transmit them and shorten the “kill web.”

 “Each mission focused on the refinement of new tactics, techniques, procedures, and technologies such as rapid dispersion and utilization of a digitally interoperable kill chain,” Col. Cristopher Murray, commanding officer of Marine Aircraft Group 36, said in a Marine Corps report.

Multi-Domain Connectivity 

The Corps report emphasized this multi-domain connectivity and stressed that newer kinds of island, sea-land integrated combat operations would be required of an amphibious force should the US and Japan need to occupy or liberate jungle island areas in the Pacific.