combat aircraft

set o in that direction and the ground

force guys said, ‘Hey, if we do that, it’s

not like the army where it’s nice if the air

force gets there. Now I need you to be

there.’ So we started forming the Marine

Air-Ground Task Force [MAGTF].’

The concept of the MAGTF was,

and remains, to have a scalable, self-

contained,  ghting force to provide that

 rst-to- ght capability. A V/STOL tactical

aircraft gives land-based and seaborne

MAGTFs a  xed-wing capability to be

that aerial artillery for the infantry,

with the advantage of forward,  exible

basing allowing faster response times.

Vietnam was the  rst major test of the

MAGTF concept, and it identi ed a few

de ciencies in marine aviation. As Blot

explained, ‘Our job was to get there in

10 minutes. In Vietnam, we found that

the average time from a call for help

to bombs on target was 27 minutes.

Aviation was not living up to its part of

the deal. It wasn’t the fault of aviation —

the pilots were doing everything they

could. It was that we had conventional

airplanes and there were only a few

air elds that we could operate from.’

An aircraft that could  y from shorter

Right: Armed with
seven-shot 2.75in
rocket pods and
Aden 30mm
gun pods, these
VMA-231 Harriers
cruise down the
North Carolina
coastline. USMC

http://www.combataircraft.net // November 2018 59