The Marine Corps spent six years arguing about Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations. Critics called it a PowerPoint concept built for a war with China that might never come. Supporters called it the future. Nobody had done it while being shot at.

Then the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit went to the Middle East, and on 17 September the Marine Corps confirmed to TWZ that during Operation Epic Fury it used EABO in combat for the first time.

Not in the Pacific. Not against China. In a war nobody had designed the concept for.

What They Actually Built

Marines established forward arming and refueling points and what the Corps calls sensor expeditionary advanced bases in places where none existed. A FARP is a deliberately unromantic thing: fuel, ordnance, a handful of people who know what they are doing, and the ability to be gone before anyone works out you were there.

The sites served Marine F-35B Lightning IIs and MV-22B Ospreys, and also US Army helicopters and US Army MQ-1C Gray Eagle drones. That last detail is the interesting one. The concept was written so Marines could sustain themselves; in practice they ended up refuelling somebody else’s army.

Official photographs of a FARP in the US Central Command area are dated 26 May 2026 and show Marines moving AIM-120 AMRAAMs. The locations have not been disclosed. A US defence official described them only as disaggregated throughout the Middle East, and said they are still in use.

Why Bother, When You Have Tankers

This is the question the concept has always had to answer, and the 31st MEU’s commanding officer answered it plainly. There were tankers everywhere, all the time, he said. The FARP exists to extend operational reach, and if you can do that from the ground, you take load off the tanker fleet.

The second reason is survivability, and it is the one that shapes everything else.

The video above is a US Marine Corps explainer on how a forward arming and refueling point works. It is not from Epic Fury, and it predates it by years, but the mechanics are the mechanics: get the fuel forward, turn the aircraft, leave.

Six Months, Two Oceans, One Very Long Deployment

The 31st MEU sailed from Okinawa in January 2026 for what was meant to be a Pacific patrol. In March it was ordered to the Middle East. It came home on 22 July.

The numbers from the deployment are substantial: more than 1,600 mishap-free flight hours of combat aviation missions including precision strikes, 800,000 pounds of cargo moved, 5,000 personnel transported, and over 300 aircraft refuelled ashore and underway. Four vessels were interdicted and three boarded, including the MV Touska on 19 April, which was disabled by 5-inch rounds from USS Spruance aimed at its engine room.

A Concept Built for the Wrong War

There is a lesson buried in this that the Corps will be chewing on for years. Force Design 2030 was controversial precisely because it traded away capability that looked useful everywhere in exchange for capability that looked useful in one specific theatre against one specific opponent. Retired generals wrote open letters. The tanks went away.

And then the first combat validation of the central concept happened several thousand miles from where it was supposed to, against an entirely different enemy, refuelling Army aircraft nobody had drawn on the diagrams.

That is either an indictment of the planning or the strongest possible argument for it, depending on which side of the Force Design argument you were on. The Marines who built the FARPs probably do not care. They put fuel in aircraft in places where there was no fuel, and the aircraft kept flying.

Sources: TWZ; Stars and Stripes; US Marine Corps; DVIDS.