Adaptation Is Built, Not Briefed: A Conversation with the Nevada Guard’s Land Component Commander

10/16/2026 By Robbin Laird This week I had dinner with Brig. Gen. Randy Lau, the Land Component Commander of the Nevada Army National Guard and his Sgt Major. We talked about leadership, warfighting, and how to prepare people and organizations for a world that doesn't follow the plan. Afterward, Lau summed up the evening in a line better than anything I… Read more »

The Bluebottle Program in the Hull Gap: Robert Dane on Service, Learning, and the Capital Ship

10/16/2026 By Robbin Laird When I spoke with Robert Dane, founder and CEO of Ocius, on September 30, the Bluebottle program had moved past the "will it work" phase. It is now in the harder phase of deciding how navies and border agencies should build a force around a system that works. Dane does not use my vocabulary. He never mentions… Read more »

When the Signal Lies: GPS Interference and the Next Phase of Maritime Domain Awareness

10/15/2026 By Robbin Laird Britain's Maritime and Coastguard Agency has just told shipowners something that would have sounded alarmist a decade ago: satellite navigation can no longer be taken for granted in some of the world's busiest shipping regions. In a new Marine Guidance Note, MGN 719, the MCA warns that interference across the Baltic, the Black Sea, the Middle East… Read more »

Stalin, Putin, and Ukraine: Two Faces of the Same Imperial Logic

10/14/2026 Vladimir Putin has spent much of the past decade insisting that Ukraine has no independent claim to nationhood, that it is, in his formulation, an artificial construct carved out of "historical Russia." It is worth remembering that this is not a new argument. It is Stalin's argument, updated for a different century and pursued by different means. What connects the… Read more »

The Hedger’s Fortnight: India, Russia and the Global War in Ukraine

10/13/2026 By Robbin Laird On August 31, on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek, Narendra Modi told Vladimir Putin, “We must move away from endless war towards an end to the war.” He described a peaceful resolution of all issues as the call of humanity and said that this is India’s message. Eleven days later Modi was… Read more »

Two ASW Modernization Stories, One Kill Web Logic: The Osprey Sonobuoy Test and Lockheed Martin’s SensorMax

10/10/2026 By Robbin Laird Two stories crossed my desk within weeks of each other in September, both about the U.S. Navy's anti-submarine warfare enterprise, and neither one mentions the other. But read together, they describe the same institutional problem being solved from opposite ends of the sensor-to-shooter chain: the platforms that deliver ASW sensors and the people, now increasingly the algorithms,… Read more »