U.S. Marine Corps wants AI to spot aircraft failures early

The U.S. Marine Corps has picked SteerBridge Strategies, a small veteran-owned company in Vienna, Virginia, to work on artificial intelligence tools meant to predict aircraft maintenance needs and manage aviation spare parts, after a selection process the service said took 34 days from approved requirement to vendor notification.

The Marine Corps’ aviation acquisition office at Patuxent River, Maryland, announced the selection on Oct. 8. It said the tools, which it calls predictive super intelligence and machine learning technologies, are intended to help forecast parts demand, anticipate maintenance and support planning decisions for Marine aviation units. The selection is not a contract award, and the office said any agreement still depends on negotiating and finalizing a statement of work and completing other acquisition steps. No value, timeline or list of aircraft types was disclosed.

The service ran the competition through an Other Transaction Authority process, a faster route the Pentagon uses for prototypes, with the Naval Aviation Systems Consortium handling the solicitation. Companies submitted white papers and videos for review. The Marine Corps said the effort carries out a directive from the secretary of war to speed up software acquisition.

“This agile approach demonstrates that we can shorten the timeline from identifying an operational need to delivering a capability to our Marines,” said Lt. Gen. William Swan, the deputy commandant for aviation. “Accelerating our acquisition speed is essential to maintaining our competitive edge and driving the modernization goals outlined in the Marine Corps Aviation Plan.”

The 2026 Marine Corps Aviation Plan, released in February, makes AI-enabled sustainment a central goal, built around three lines of effort: dynamic aviation supply, predictive maintenance and data-driven operational planning. The idea is to replace scheduled inspections and surprise breakdowns with maintenance timed to data that shows when a part is likely to fail, so parts and mechanics can be in place before an aircraft goes down.

The service has already begun testing the approach. In April, Marine Corps aviation officials said they were feeding KC-130J tanker data into an AI system and planned to give a maintenance assessment tool to a unit at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Arizona. Swan said then that if the tools could forecast part failures with around 90 percent probability, that would be good enough.

“The effort aligns directly with DoW objectives to accelerate acquisition timelines, strengthen collaboration with industry, and modernize acquisition processes,” said Maj. Gen. David Walsh, deputy portfolio acquisition executive for Marine Corps aviation.

SteerBridge is a certified service-disabled veteran-owned small business. The company says its aviation division already supports Marine Corps F-35 sustainment and analytics work.

Under the planned prototype, the government and the company will test and refine the tools for Marine aviation maintenance, supply and planning.