Sgt. Cole Hoppert perched in the back of a V-22 Osprey earlier this month, zipping through the air somewhere off the East Coast as he dumped little parachutes from cream-colored tubes out of the aircraft’s rear ramp and into the water below.
A weapons and tactics instructor with Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 162 out of North Carolina, Hoppert had never before employed the nearly 40-pound “sonobuoys,” expendable sensors designed to detect underwater sounds emitted from enemy submarines.
His unit’s participation in the naval integration exercise this month — dubbed Atlantic Alliance 2025 — signaled a notable progression in the Marine Corps’ involvement in anti-submarine warfare, or ASW, a more than century-old concept the service is embracing alongside the Navy for modern conflict.
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“ASW is not a standard mission or even talking point,” Maj. Sean Penczak, the executive officer for VMM-162, with nearly 13 years of experience on the Osprey, said in an interview with Military.com on Friday. “This is the first time I’ve really heard about it, discussed it and done it.”
Nearly five years ago, then-commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. David Berger wrote that Marines would start helping the Navy fight submarines. He said that Chinese and Russian submarine capabilities continued to grow, and the Arctic and Pacific theaters were becoming increasingly important to fighting them.
“The undersea fight will be so critical in the High North and in the western Pacific that the Marine Corps must be part of it,” he wrote in 2020. “Anti-submarine warfare is not just submarine versus submarine — it is a fleetwide effort.”
During the Global War on Terrorism, the Marine Corps had largely shifted its focus away from those regions, especially the Arctic, but to Berger, it became evident that an amphibious force having spent 20 years concentrated on the Middle East needed to grow closer to its Navy counterpart, even during missions beneath the sea’s surface.
Years after Berger’s charge, that effort is growing, and while other Marine squadrons have participated in ASW missions as long ago as 2022, officials told Military.com that the latest exercise marked a pivotal moment for the Corps’ partnership with the Navy fighting against submarines.
“I’d say we’ve reached an inflection point. We’re no longer just exploring whether the Marine Corps can contribute to the undersea fight. We’re operationalizing how they contribute and folding that into theater-level tactics,” Navy Capt. Bill Howey, the director of maritime operations for Submarine Group Two, a unit out of Virginia that participated in the exercise, told Military.com in an emailed statement.
“The MV-22 isn’t here to replace traditional platforms; it brings a unique capability that enhances the fight,” he added, noting that the process will continue to evolve and be refined. “With its speed, range and payload capacity, it’s well-suited for distributing sensors and expanding undersea awareness, especially when other assets are committed or operating farther forward.”
ASW isn’t part of the Osprey’s primary mission set and Marines don’t historically train for it, officials said. And while the aircraft is one of the Corps’ key modes to quickly deploy Marines on beachheads, that doesn’t mean it can’t help kill subs.
“It’s very similar to some of the other missions that the V-22 already supports,” Hoppert said. “The closest one would be battlefield illumination, which is where we would throw a battlefield illum flare out the back — it’s very similar to that.”
Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel and senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, said that ASW is “pretty high” on the list of important functions for the military, and also noted that the Atlantic theater, where this exercise took place, is well equipped to thwart “arguably the most dangerous part of the Russian Navy” — submarines — given the U.S.-allied presence there.
“Russia would be hard pressed to get a lot of submarines out into the Atlantic,” he said. “In the Pacific, it’s trickier, because the Chinese have a lot of submarines, typically not as sophisticated, but they are closer to their home bases, and their ability to challenge the United States in all domains is much greater.”
Cancian said that, in the grand scheme of the Marine Corps’ repertoire, “it’s still an adjunct function for Marine aviation, useful potentially, but an adjunct function. You can tell that the Marine Corps will be really serious when it starts modifying aircraft for this mission, and I haven’t seen any indication of that yet.”
Penczak said that the planning for the exercise began months in advance and included collaboration with the Office of Naval Research, which studies advancements in naval warfare. He said that there was frequent communication with ONR to give and receive feedback about the new mission.
Preparation included classes, understanding what the Navy needed for that type of mission, and working out how Marines and their aircraft would organize in support of ASW. Several Ospreys deployed for the mission with their respective pilots, a communications Marine and two to three crew chiefs like Hoppert managing the deployment of the sonobuoys over multiple days of training.
“At the end of the day, the ASW evolution was an exceptional opportunity,” Penczak said. “It executed exceptionally well, and I wouldn’t foresee any issues for another VMM being tasked to go support one of these vignettes, to have any issues going out to execute.”
While carrying the tubes was “pretty physically demanding,” it wasn’t anything the crew chiefs couldn’t handle, Hoppert said, and they were “able to spread the workload pretty evenly” as they rotated responsibilities between ASW work and their usual aircraft responsibilities.
“It’s the same principles behind it,” he added, alluding to other Osprey missions when asked how he would advise another crew chief embarking on the ASW mission for the first time. “So don’t overthink it. It’s pretty similar.”
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