When the Marine Corps formally reactivated Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 231 at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point on October 9, it closed a loop that had been open for more than a century. Few warfighting units in any service can claim a lineage that stretches from canvas biplanes over Nicaragua to a stealth fighter designed to penetrate the most heavily defended airspace on earth. The “Ace of Spades” can. The unit’s final flight as Marine Attack Squadron 231, its last act as a Harrier outfit, took place in May 2025, followed by the sunset of its McDonnell Douglas AV-8B Harrier II and a formal deactivation in September. Weeks later, the same hangars, the same airfield and much of the same institutional memory were reborn around the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II. The devil dogs have a new airframe and a vastly expanded mission set, but they remain at Cherry Point, and their expeditionary doctrine remains intact, even as ground crews trade a rugged jump jet for a machine built around algorithms, sensor fusion and low observability.
Founded on February 8, 1919, VMFA-231 is the oldest continuously active flying squadron in the Marine Corps. It now stands as the service’s 10th operational F-35B squadron out of a planned force of 12, and it earned its Safe for Flight certification in August, positioning it as a combat-ready unit in the active fleet immediately upon reactivation. The ceremony was less a beginning than a re-equipping: a unit born in the earliest years of Marine aviation, whose pilots fought over Guadalcanal in F4F Wildcats and flew the Harrier for more than five decades, has been handed the most sophisticated tactical aircraft the US military fields in any meaningful numbers.
Why the Harrier Fleet Ran Out of Time a Year Early
The reactivation did not happen in isolation. In parallel with the transition, the Marine Corps accelerated the sundown of the AV-8B Harrier II, with the final flight by a USMC pilot conducted on June 3, a full year ahead of the original 2027 target. Retiring the remaining Harriers early was an act of deliberate resource reallocation. It instantaneously freed budget, maintenance personnel and hangar space at Cherry Point, and it cleared the ramp for the far more demanding sustainment requirements of a fifth-generation fleet. The Harrier, for all its combat history, was consuming a disproportionate share of the Corps’ aviation maintenance capacity to keep a small number of increasingly obsolete jets in the air.
The deeper logic, however, was human. The principal bottleneck in standing up new F-35B squadrons is not the delivery of jets but the retraining of the people who keep them flying. Ending the Harrier program early allowed hundreds of highly experienced mechanics, maintainers and technicians from squadrons such as VMA-231 and VMA-223 to enter the F-35 pipeline, accelerating Safe for Flight certifications for multiple units in a way that no amount of production capacity could match. Moving VMFA-231 ahead of schedule also kept the service strictly aligned with its force design blueprint, in which the number and readiness of operational lighting-carrier squadrons matters more than the persistence of any particular airframe.
The retired Harriers found one more role, and it is a sharply ironic one. Because parts are no longer manufactured for its fleet of expeditionary Harriers, the Spanish Navy stepped in to acquire five newly retired USMC Harriers solely to harvest them for spare parts. Spain recently walked away from acquiring the F-35B, choosing instead a $7 billion Eurofighter Typhoon contract that extends its reliance on domestic and European aerospace partnerships. To prevent the Juan Carlos I from being downgraded to a basic helicopter carrier, Spain committed to keeping its old Harriers flying until at least 2032. The Eurofighter is an excellent land-based aircraft, but it cannot operate from the Juan Carlos I, a ship with a short-takeoff/vertical-landing ski-jump deck for which the F-35B is the only modern production fighter capable of serving as a replacement. Spain is now pivoting toward a true conventional CATOBAR carrier capability, leaning heavily on French industrial cooperation and European multirole programs, a track that mirrors the US Marines’ own acknowledgment that STOVL flexibility comes with operational limits in a high-end conflict.
What the F-35B and F-35C Add to a Harrier Squadron
The leap from the AV-8B to the F-35B and carrier-optimized F-35C extends far beyond a lower radar cross-section. The Harrier was a strictly subsonic attack aircraft, and a severe one at that: push past Mach 0.9 in a dive and it encounters buffeting and aerodynamic instability. Both Lightning II variants are supersonic platforms capable of dashing at Mach 1.6 with a full internal weapon load. Maximum payload rises from 9,200 pounds on the Harrier to 15,000 pounds on the F-35B and 18,000 pounds on the F-35C, while combat radius climbs from about 300 nautical miles to 450 and 600 nautical miles respectively. By omitting vertical-lift machinery entirely, the F-35C carries a massive internal fuel tank that delivers more than double the unrefueled strike range of the aircraft it replaces, a change that alters what a Marine air-ground task force can threaten without tanker support.
The avionics gap is wider still. In the F-35 family, advanced flight computers handle flight mechanics entirely, freeing the pilot to operate as a tactician rather than a manipulator of controls. The aircraft fuses data from its Active Electronically Scanned Array radar, its Distributed Aperture System and its Electro-Optical Targeting System into a single cohesive picture projected onto the pilot’s helmet visor. That combination of stealth and range is especially valuable as the Corps executes its force realignment under the pivot to the Pacific, where the tyranny of distance governs every air operation. Stealth is not a luxury in that theater; China’s advanced anti-aircraft systems and stealth fighters pose the primary threat to Marine lightning carriers and Raider forces stationed across the first and second island chains.
Readiness Is the Real Test of the Conversion
The harder question is not what the F-35B can do, but how often it can do it. VMFA-231 is not the only squadron returning to the East Coast F-35 force. VMFA-251 became the first East Coast Marine F-35C squadron in 2024, while VMFA-115 was deactivated at MCAS Beaufort, South Carolina, in 2023 when its Hornets retired, flew its first F-35C on July 31 and expects to return to operational service later this year. The Congressional Budget Office has examined how frequently these jets are actually ready to fly. According to Army Recognition’s summary of that historical assessment, F-35B availability fell from roughly 65 percent for new aircraft to 43 percent by their sixth year in service, while AV-8Bs slid from roughly 59 percent to 43 percent between their eighth and 20th years. The comparison is not perfectly even, since the age ranges differ, but the trajectory is sobering.
A squadron planning a ship deployment needs enough aircraft ready on the day, not on average across many years. The Gulf War offers a concrete benchmark: Harriers operating close to the front kept their readiness rate above 90 percent, with turnarounds measured in minutes during the ground offensive. Replicating that tempo with the F-35B requires far more support and infrastructure, and even with every tool available, software deficiencies are just as likely to keep F-35s grounded as broken parts. Under the 2025 Marine Corps Aviation Plan, every operational F-35 squadron is expected to receive 12 aircraft from 2030, compared with the present strength of ten. The plan cut total F-35B purchases from 353 to 280 jets while raising the F-35C order to 140 from 67, sustaining 12 F-35B squadrons and eight F-35C squadrons.
A Record That Runs From Biplane Dogfights to Stealth Air Supremacy
Army Recognition traces the squadron to Miami, Florida, where it was established on February 8, 1919, as 1st Division, Squadron D. On July 16, 1927, ten personnel under Major Ross E. Rowell joined the Battle of Ocotal in Nicaragua, carrying out an early dive-bombing attack with five de Havilland DH-4B biplanes. By then the unit had been renamed Marine Observation Squadron One, a title that sounds odd for a modern jet squadron but captures precisely what Marine aviation was built to do: observe, support and protect Marines on the ground. The Pacific War brought the hardest test. The squadron moved to Hawaii in January 1941, helped defend Midway, and reached Guadalcanal on August 30, 1942, flying SBD Dauntless dive bombers with the Cactus Air Force. By October 3, 11 of its 12 original aircraft had been destroyed or made unserviceable. It returned to combat in the Marshall Islands in February 1944 and switched to F4U Corsair fighters that October.
Peace brought paperwork rather than parades. The squadron was deactivated in March 1946, returned to the Marine Corps Reserve in September 1948, and was deactivated again on August 31, 1962. It returned to active service on May 15, 1973, flying the Hawker Siddeley AV-8A Harrier, the jump jet that would define the next 52 years and give the Marine Corps a flexible, responsive tool tailored to its expeditionary ethos. The Harrier years began quietly. In October 1976, the squadron deployed aboard USS Franklin D. Roosevelt with Carrier Air Wing 19, visiting Spain, Italy, Egypt and Kenya, before returning to Cherry Point in April 1977. In the mid-1980s it converted to the AV-8B Harrier II, which added a larger composite wing and better avionics. The jet proved so successful as a close air support vehicle for the Marine Air-Ground Task Force that the service was reluctant to retire it even in favor of the F-35, and the final Harrier sorties a year ahead of schedule were forced by budget and manpower reality rather than doctrinal preference.
What makes the reactivation more than a milestone is the continuity it preserves. A squadron that bombed insurgents from open-cockpit biplanes, held Guadalcanal under attack and flew the jump jet for half a century is now charged with the most data-intensive fighter in the inventory, at the same base and under the same name. The 52-year Harrier chapter closed early, but the institution that lived it did not. For the Marine Corps, the lesson of VMFA-231 is that platforms are temporary while squadrons are infrastructure, and the Ace of Spades has been dealt back into a hand built for the Pacific.
