The European Defence Industrial Base in Transition

04/15/2026 European primes can evolve into kill web ecosystem orchestrators but only if they move faster than their current political, financial, and organizational wiring allows, and Ukraine's war laboratory window will not stay open indefinitely. The strategic question is deceptively simple: Can Europe's defense primes make the transition from platform manufacturers to kill web ecosystem orchestrators? The answer depends not on… Read more »

Always Ready, Persistently Under-Resourced: The U.S. Coast Guard in the 21st Century

04/13/2026 I arrived at the Pentagon on the morning of September 11th, 2001, expecting a routine meeting on post-Soviet nuclear security issues. Within hours, the world had changed. So had the trajectory of American defense analysis. For those of us who felt the building rock that morning, September 11th is not history. It is lived experience, as present and immediate now… Read more »

Flamingo and the Future of the Missile Industrial Base

04/10/2026 [caption id="attachment_149311" align="alignnone" width="962"] Screenshot[/caption] The emergence of Ukraine’s Flamingo cruise missile is about more than a new long‑range strike weapon; it is a signal of how the missile industrial base itself is being re‑engineered under wartime pressure. What makes Flamingo strategically important is not simply its range or payload, but the way a drone‑native company has fused missile‑class performance… Read more »

Toward the Hybrid Fleet: Rebuilding Naval Power for the Age of Intelligent Mass

04/08/2026 By Robbin Laird The world’s navies are crossing a strategic fault line in which traditional assumptions about capital ships, carrier battle groups, and exquisite platforms no longer hold. The emerging era of uncrewed, networked, and AI-enabled systems is creating a new maritime order in which the force that adapts fastest, not the one that spends the most, will prevail.​ For… Read more »

Brazil, the Gripen, and the Long Road to Aerospace Sovereignty

04/07/2026 By Kenneth Maxwell When I wrote in April 2012 of 'a tale of two competitions,' I was describing a Brazil suspended between options, still debating the merits of the Dassault Rafale, the Boeing F-18 Super Hornet, and the Saab Gripen NG while simultaneously wrestling with the politics of Embraer's Super Tucano in the American market. Brazil had first opened its… Read more »

The Speed of Alliance: Japan’s HVGP and Glide‑Phase Defense with the U.S.

04/06/2026 [caption id="attachment_149311" align="alignnone" width="962"] Screenshot[/caption] Japan’s role in the hypersonic enterprise is no longer peripheral or symbolic; it is becoming one of the central test cases for how offensive hypersonic strike, hypersonic defense, and alliance politics can be woven together into a coherent Indo‑Pacific deterrence posture. The way Tokyo is moving—from “missile‑defense client” to co‑producer of prompt strike and glide‑phase… Read more »