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The Admiral at the Helm: How Brad Cooper’s Years in Bahrain Are Shaping the Iran War

03/08/2026 By Robbin Laird For most of its history, U.S. Central Command has been an Army officer's domain. Since its founding in 1983, CENTCOM has been led predominantly by Army and Marine generals whose careers were shaped by the grinding land campaigns of Iraq and Afghanistan. The combatant command that oversaw two of America's longest wars naturally gravitated toward the warrior… Read more »

Coalition of the Unwilling: Dassault, Airbus, and Europe’s Next Fighter

03/07/2026 By Pierre Tran Paris - The executive chairman of Dassault Aviation, Eric Trappier, called March 4 on Airbus to accept management leadership of the French industrial partner on a new European fighter jet, otherwise the project would die from lack of corporate support. “If Airbus maintains the probability of not working with Dassault, the project is dead,” he told a… Read more »

From Post-Cold War Settlement to Contested Global Order

03/06/2026 My recently published books on the global war in Ukraine along with my forthcoming book with Kenneth Maxwel examining the Australian, Brazilian, and Chinese dynamic within the broader framework of Global China together constitute a sustained analytical argument about the transformation of the international system. Individually, each book addresses a discrete set of questions: one concerns the origins, conduct, and… Read more »

Japan’s Defense Transformation and the Embedded Logistics Imperative: A Trilateral Opportunity for Industrial Integration

03/05/2026 By Robbin Laird A recent article by Stephen Kuper entitled, "Japan accelerates dual-use technology cooperation and development: Opportunities for allied nation industrial cooperation," provided a thoughtful opportunity to revisst my early argument shaped in a discussion with David Beaumont on my concept of embedded logistics. This article draws on both of these articles to take forward a way to look… Read more »

Understanding the Age of Chaos: Strategic Reflections on My 2026 Books

03/04/2026 By Robbin Laird Over the course of 2026, I am completing a series of interconnected books that examine what I believe represents a fundamental inflection point in modern history. These works are not independent scholarly exercises but rather pieces of a larger analytical puzzle, each contributing to our understanding of what I term the Age of Chaos, a period… Read more »

Australian Defense and Energy Security: A Key Enabler

03/02/2016 2016-03-02 Our colleague Air Vice Marshal (Retired) John Blackburn has focused attention on the energy security shortfall for Australia for some time. As an island continent at the bottom of the Asia Pacific region, Australia is heavily dependent upon liquid energy imports and with a rapidly disappearing domestic refinery production capacity, these imports necessarily are with regard to refined end products… Read more »

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The LVC Dynamic: A Key Force for Change in Combat Pilot Training

09/29/2025 The landscape of military aviation training stands at a critical juncture. As combat aircraft have evolved into increasingly sophisticated platforms bristling with advanced sensors, networked communications, and complex mission systems, the challenge of preparing pilots to operate these systems effectively has grown exponentially. The emergence of fifth-generation fighters has fundamentally altered the calculus of pilot… Download PDF Now »

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Trump’s Long Game: The Abraham Accords, Iran, and the Global War in Ukraine

03/03/2026 By Robbin Laird Among the many charges levelled at Donald Trump, that he is impulsive, inconsistent, transactional, hostile to alliances, one rarely examined proposition cuts in a different direction: that… Read more »

Competitive Coexistence, the ‘Fight Tonight’ Force and Australia’s Growing Multipolar Predicament

02/28/2026 By: Stephen Kuper Just as the Cold War was characterised by a period of “Competitive Coexistence” between the United States and the Soviet Union, our new multipolar world embodies this in… Read more »

Enabling Arctic Sentry: The Key Role for Maritime Autonomous Systems

02/25/2026 By Robbin Laird On February 11, 2026, Allied Command Operations (ACO), which is responsible for the planning and execution of all NATO exercises, activities and operations, noted that they began… Read more »

The Fight Tonight Paradigm: Adapting to Compressed Timelines in Modern Warfare

02/19/2026 By Robbin Laird The fundamental assumptions underpinning Western defense planning are collapsing. For generations, democratic nations operated under the comfortable presumption that major conflicts would arrive with ample warning, years,… Read more »

After Rafale? France Bets Big on India as Its Fighter Lifeline

02/18/2026 By Pierre Tran Paris – President Emmanuel Macron started Feb. 17 an official visit to India, a few days after the defense ministry in New Delhi said it had given… Read more »

From Crisis Management to Chaos Management: AI and the Collapse of Strategic Predictability

02/17/2026 By Robbin Laird For decades, national security establishments have organized around crisis management or the structured response to disruptions within fundamentally stable systems. The Cuban Missile Crisis, though terrifying, operated… Read more »

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HMLA-269 Conducts live fire training During MAG-29 DAO Exercise

03/06/2026 U.S. Marines with Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron (HMLA) 269, Marine Aircraft Group 29, 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, conduct a live fire training event during MAG-29’s Distributed Aviation Operations Exercise… Read more »

U.S. Air Force Special Tactics Squadron

03/04/2026 U.S. Air Force Special Tactics Squadron Commander Lt. Col. Blake Jones discusses how Special Tactics Airmen remain a community of “doers and problem solvers” during an interview at Hurlburt Field,… Read more »

First Team uses Drones to Expand Signal Network

03/02/2026 Chief Warrant Officer 2 Jesse Wallace, an air and missile defense systems integrator assigned to 6th Battalion, 56th Air Defense Artillery Regiment, explains how the Battalion uses drones to expand… Read more »

Atlantic Lightning 26-1

02/17/2026 U.S. Marines with Marine Fighter Attack Squadron (VMFA) 542 and VMFA-251, Marine Aircraft Group 14, 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, conduct maritime strike training during Atlantic Lightning 26-1 at Marine Corps… Read more »

Protecting undersea Infrastructure in the Baltic Sea.

02/13/2026 Off the coast of Gotland, Sweden, scientists from the NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) are deploying cutting-edge acoustic sensors to see if they might help NATO Allies… Read more »

The King Stallion as an Inter-Agency Asset

02/11/2026 U.S. Marines with Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron (HMH) 461, Marine Aircraft Group 29, 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing (MAW), and 2nd Distribution Support Battalion (DSB), Combat Logistics Group 2, 2nd Marine… Read more »

Resolute Force Pacific (REFORPAC)

02/09/2026 In July of 2025, the Air Force launched its Department-Level Exercise (DLE) series in multiple locations across the United States and Indo-Pacific areas of responsibility. This DLE features 12,000 U.S.… Read more »

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The Second Line of Defense team provides high quality publications with regard to key global strategic developments. You can purchase these on a number of booksellers such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Kobo.

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Lessons from the Drone Wars

03/01/2026 Lesson from the Drone Wars argues that the “drone wars” mark a wider transformation in warfare, where intelligent mass, mesh networks, and maritime autonomous systems are reshaping force design, deterrence,… Read more »

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