Missing Marine Corps Helicopter in Nepal should give Distributed/Disaggregated Ops proponents pause.

via Marine Times

More than 24 hours after a Marine helicopter disappeared in flight over Nepal, a search and rescue effort has found no sign of the missing aircraft and its crew of six U.S. Marines and two Nepalese soldiers, a Pentagon official said Wednesday.
"The search continues," Army Col. Steve Warren, a Defense Department spokesman, told reporters at the Pentagon Wednesday morning.
The latest official update dashed hopes raised by an earlier report Wednesday morning from the Deutsche Presse Agentur news agency, which suggested that officials had determined the helicopter's location.
"There are a lot of reports floating around, none are attributed to anyone and most have been investigated by DoD and determined to be fake," Army Maj. David Eastburn, a spokesman for U.S. Pacific Command, said in an email to Military Times on Wednesday.

Special Operations operate small units that have HUGE support infrastructure.  The idea that the USMC should operate small units and purposefully disassemble their support infrastructure has always struck me as misguided.

And now we have a helicopter from Joint Task Force 505 missing in Nepal.

The issues with Distributed/Disaggregated Ops should be obvious to everyone now.  Lets say you disaggregate the 15th MEU and the USS Pvt Schmucatelli gets assigned an embassy reinforcement mission.  The Company Landing Team launches on 4 MV-22's at distance...we're talking about say 500 miles out.

One of the birds goes down halfway there in the middle of the sea.

Does the mission continue or do you divert to start rescue ops?

What happens if that so called benign embassy reinforcement turns hot and now you're dealing with evacuating personnel under fire?

Distributed/Disaggregated Ops is a playtoy of the Think Tanks.  I would expect Marine Corps leadership to properly plan for worse case scenarios instead of basing our operating concepts on  best case mixed with what they call "operational risk"!

If nothing else the loss of the helicopter in Nepal should give leadership pause.