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For the United States to have an effective military role in the new setting of regional
networking, a key requirement will be effective and assured combined command, con-
trol, and communications, linked by advanced computing capabilities to global, region-
al, and local intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance assets (C5ISR).

The services will need to ensure that there is broad synergy among U.S. global forces
fully exploiting new military technologies and the more modest capabilities of regional
allies and partners.

Indeed, C5ISR is evolving to become C5ISR D, whereby the purpose of C5ISR is to
shape effective combined and joint decision-making. The USMC clearly understands
and embraces the disruptive capabilities of the fifth-generation aircraft. For the USMC,
TAC Air does not simply play a close air support role in any traditional sense.

It is an enabler for distributed operations when such operations are essential to either
conventional strike or counterinsurgency warfare. USMC aviation has allowed the
USMC ground forces to operate with greater confidence in deploying within the civilian
population in Iraq. Aviation’s roles in both non-kinetic and kinetic operations have al-
lowed the USMC to avoid operating within “green zones” so as to facilitate greater
civilian-military relations.

Aviation has also provided an integrated asset working with the ground forces in joint
counter-IED operations. And quite obviously, battlefields of the future will require the
USMC to operate upon many axes of attack simultaneously. Such an operation is simply
impossible without a USMC aviation element.

For the USMC thinks ground in the air and the forces on the ground can rely 24/ 7 on
USMC aviation forces to be with them in the ground fight.

As Lt. Col. “Chip” Berke, the F-22, F-35, F-16 and F-18 Marine Corps former squadron
commander, put it in a presentation on airpower at the Copenhagen Airpower confer-
ence last year:

Second Line of Defense Lessons Learned at Pax River
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