The F Thirty-Five Charlie Kill Markings That Tell the Story of Operation Epic Fury

A photograph published by The Aviationist in October 2026 shows an F-35C belonging to Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 314 (VMFA-314), the Black Knights, bearing a collection of kill markings that documents one of the most operationally significant multi-domain combat records to appear on a modern military aircraft. The silhouettes span four domains - sea, undersea, air, and land - all from a single deployment during Operation Epic Fury. The image is exclusive, authenticated by The Aviationist’s established network of sources inside the naval aviation community.

What the Kill Markings on the VMFA-314 F-35C Show

The silhouettes painted on the Black Knights’ F-35C represent five distinct target categories:

An oil tanker
Three submarines
A surface combatant
A Shahed-type drone
An artillery piece and ground-based launchers

Taken together, these markings document maritime strike, anti-submarine warfare, air defense, and land attack - all credited to a single carrier-based fighter during a named combat operation.

What Is the F-35C and Why Does the Carrier Variant Matter?

The F-35C is the carrier-based variant of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. It differs from the F-35A (conventional Air Force variant) and F-35B (Marine Corps short takeoff/vertical landing variant) through reinforced landing gear, a strengthened airframe, a tail hook, and a larger wing area designed to survive the demands of arrested carrier landings. It replaced the F/A-18 Hornet on Navy and Marine Corps carrier decks.

VMFA-314, the Black Knights, is one of the storied carrier-based Marine aviation units, with a history reaching back through the F/A-18 Hornet and the F-4 Phantom. Their transition to the F-35C is part of the Marine Corps’ broader modernization of carrier-based strike aviation.

The Oil Tanker and Surface Combatant: Deep Maritime Strike Confirmed

Striking an oil tanker in a modern operational context requires positive identification, strike package coordination, and precision weapons employment careful enough to avoid creating a maritime environmental catastrophe. Credit for this target confirms VMFA-314 was conducting deep maritime strike missions during Operation Epic Fury - not simply flying combat air patrol over the carrier.

The surface combatant marking represents a more demanding target set still. A warship built to fight at sea carries search radar, fire control radar, surface-to-air missiles, and close-in weapon systems designed specifically to engage incoming aircraft and munitions. Successful prosecution requires either suppressing those defenses before the strike, or closing inside the engagement envelope before the ship’s systems can generate a fire control solution.

The F-35C’s low-observable design directly enables this mission. The physics of radar cross-section determine what a platform can survive in a defended environment, and the Charlie’s design exploits them. This is a mission the F/A-18 and F-16 could not have executed the same way.

Three Submarine Kills: The Number the Aviation Community Is Focused On

The three submarine silhouettes are the markings drawing the most attention from military aviation analysts - and for serious reasons.

Anti-submarine warfare (ASW) is among the most demanding disciplines in the entire naval arsenal. Submarines are engineered specifically to be invisible: operating at depth, moving slowly and quietly, with every design decision built around the assumption the platform will not be detected until the crew chooses to act. The traditional airborne counter is the maritime patrol aircraft - the P-3 Orion or P-8 Poseidon - platforms designed to fly for eight to ten hours, deploy sonobuoys across broad ocean areas, and build a targeting picture through sustained acoustic processing.

The F-35C is not that platform. Its endurance is measured in a few hours. It does not carry sonobuoys. Its radar, the AN/APG-81 Active Electronically Scanned Array, is optimized for air-to-air engagement and surface strike - not acoustic processing of undersea contacts.

How an F-35C Gets Credit for Submarine Kills: Sensor Fusion and Kill Chains

The answer lies in what makes the F-35 program architecturally different from every previous fighter aircraft.

The F-35C is a sensor fusion node. Its Distributed Aperture System (DAS), Electro-Optical Targeting System (EOTS), and radar are inputs to a processing and networking architecture that integrates targeting data from every platform connected to joint force data links. When a P-8 Poseidon builds a sub-surface contact picture over eight hours of patrol, that data can flow through the tactical data link architecture directly into the F-35C’s cockpit. Satellite thermal signatures from a submarine running near the surface to ventilate or charge batteries move through the same pipes. A friendly submarine tracking a contact can pass its targeting solution up through fleet communications to the same crew.

Three submarine markings most likely represent an F-35C crew flying the final leg of kill chains built by many platforms over many hours. The fighter receives the credit. The credit belongs to the joint force that built the targeting solution and handed it off for execution.

That distinction is not a diminishment of the Black Knights or the crews who flew those missions. It is an accurate description of how multi-domain integrated warfare actually functions. No single platform wins a modern engagement alone.

For historical perspective: The total number of American submarines lost in World War II - from all causes including enemy action - was 52 boats over nearly four years of Pacific warfare. Three submarine credits in a single deployment would represent an operationally significant event in the history of naval warfare.

The Shahed Drone Marking: What It Reveals About the Threat Environment

The Shahed-136 is an Iranian-designed loitering munition - delta wing, piston engine, small warhead, with range measured in thousands of kilometers and a production cost low enough to permit employment in large swarms. These weapons have appeared over Ukraine, been launched against commercial shipping in the Red Sea corridor, and struck infrastructure targets across multiple theaters.

Using a fifth-generation strike fighter against a munition that costs a fraction of one percent of what the aircraft is worth is not an economically efficient exchange. It reflects a threat density that required every available airborne asset to pull air defense duty - and an F-35C sensor fusion capability fast enough to identify and prosecute those contacts before they reached their targets.

There is an additional operational data dimension: newer Shahed variants reportedly incorporate navigation systems that reduce GPS dependence, making them harder to jam than earlier versions. Real-world performance data against these systems in a contested environment feeds directly into future tactics and procurement decisions in ways that training range results cannot.

Artillery and Ground-Based Launchers: Completing the Multi-Domain Record

Artillery at range threatens air base operations, ship movements in coastal waters, and logistics nodes that support a naval campaign. Ground-based launchers - whether firing anti-ship missiles, surface-to-air missiles, or ballistic munitions - are priority suppression targets in any contested maritime approach.

The F-35C crediting both land-based target types while simultaneously conducting maritime strikes and contributing to anti-submarine warfare operations is real-world validation of the platform’s multi-domain versatility that no exercise scenario fully replicates. It also recalibrates the threat calculation for any adversary watching carrier strike group operations.

A carrier equipped with F-35Cs, integrated into a joint targeting architecture spanning satellites, maritime patrol aircraft, submarines, and surface combatants, presents a fundamentally different problem than a carrier armed with legacy fighters. The reach is longer. The domains covered are broader. The targeting chains feeding into the cockpit are faster and more connected than anything the previous generation of carrier aviation could access. That is the strategic argument for the F-35 program - and it is more convincing made in paint on a fuselage than in any Congressional testimony.

The Kill Marking Tradition Behind Those Silhouettes

Kill markings trace back to the aerial aces of World War I, who painted victory symbols on their aircraft to record confirmed kills. By World War II, the practice had expanded to all target categories - submarine silhouettes, locomotives, warships, tanks - visible today on aircraft from the B-17 Flying Fortress to the F-86 Sabre in aviation museums worldwide.

The Black Knights painting three submarine silhouettes on their F-35C continues an unbroken line from today’s crews back through every generation of military aviation. Whatever the full account of Operation Epic Fury eventually produces, those markings are part of the historical record.

A Note on Confirmation Status

Kill markings represent claimed credits. In the full post-operation review process, some claims are fully confirmed, some are revised, and some are upgraded as additional evidence accumulates. The specific numbers on these markings may shift.

What will not shift is the operational picture they document: a multi-domain engagement conducted by a carrier-based fighter across sea, undersea, air, and land targets, in a contested environment, during a named combat operation. That picture holds regardless of the final count.

Key Takeaways

An F-35C from VMFA-314 (the Black Knights) returned from Operation Epic Fury with kill markings across five target categories spanning four domains: sea, undersea, air, and land.
Three submarine credits on a carrier-based fighter reflect the F-35C’s role as a sensor fusion node completing kill chains built by maritime patrol aircraft, satellites, and submarines - not functioning as a standalone ASW platform.
The F-35C’s low-observable design enables prosecution of defended surface combatants that would present prohibitive threat envelopes to non-stealthy platforms like the F/A-18.
Employment of a fifth-generation fighter against Shahed-type loitering munitions signals threat density that required all available assets for air defense, while generating rare operational data on countering GPS-independent munitions in a live environment.
These markings constitute real-world validation of multi-domain integrated warfare - a more compelling argument for the F-35 program than any procurement hearing has produced.