In this paper, addressed is the control problem of generating a formation for a group of unmanned surface and underwater vehicles. The formation control scheme proposed in this work is based on a fusion of theleader-follower and virtual reference approaches. This scheme gives a formation constraint representation that is independent of the number of vehicles in the formation and the resulting control algorithm is scalable. One of the most important features in controller design is the ability of the controller to globally and exponentially stabilize the formation errors defined by the formation constraints. The proposed controller is based on feedback linearization, and the formation errors are shown to be globally and exponentially stable in the sense of Lyapunov.