Gidget Fuentes

3 days ago | news.usni.org | Gidget Fuentes

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. – By year’s end, the Marine Corps will be fielding thousands of small aerial drones across its operational forces. Marine Corps training schools are now familiarizing Marines and small-unit leaders with the handling and tactical use of small drones. One training course run by the 1st Marine Division’s schoolhouse is building basic skills and tactical savvy that infantry forces will need using their drones against multiple threats in a ground fight.

1 month ago | news.usni.org | Gidget Fuentes

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. – On any given day, thousands of unmarried Marines and sailors with Fleet Marine Force units spend days and nights out in the field, or weeks training shipboard or on bases far from home. “We wake them up before dawn. We send them into the hills running and hiking every day, and they come back to the rooms. And then we send them [to training bases] for weeks on end, and we bring them back to these rooms,” said Col.

2 months ago | news.usni.org | Gidget Fuentes

Last month, the Okinawa, Japan-based 12th Marine Littoral Regiment stood up the last of its subordinate units, pulling a storied combat infantry battalion into the fold of a modern front-line Marine Corps force in the Western Pacific. As the second of the Marine Corps’ three planned littoral regiments, the 12th MLR is tasked with operating alongside Japanese Self-Defense Forces if conflict erupts in the region, notably with China.

2 months ago | news.usni.org | Gidget Fuentes

NAVAL BASE SAN DIEGO, Calif. — When NASA’s Orion spacecraft shoots back into Earth’s atmosphere, after a visit around the moon next year, one of the Navy’s warships will race to intercept the module carrying the four-member crew. That responsibility – if all goes as planned in April 2026 for the 10-day mission – will fall to one of the Navy’s San Antonio-class amphibious warships.

Feb 15, 2025 | news.usni.org | Gidget Fuentes

Just moments after a Navy EA-6G Growler jet crashed into San Diego Bay this week, members of the U.S. Navy’s Marine Mammal Program sprung into action. The twin-engine electronic warfare jet plunged into the bay just about 200 yards from a set of pens holding several dozen bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions, which the Navy uses to help find and mark submerged mines that endanger vessels.