Wings of Gold: Chief of Naval Air Training’s Charge to a New Generation of Naval Aviators

09/29/2026 By Robbin Laird At a winging ceremony held for the U.S. Navy's newest naval aviators, Rear Admiral Max McCoy, the 39th Chief of Naval Air Training (CNATRA), delivered a speech that did more than mark a rite of passage. It laid down, in plain and forceful terms, what it means to inherit the culture of naval aviation at a moment… Read more »

Unbundling the Rules-Based Order: Function, Institution, and the New Contest Over Global Rules

09/27/2026 By Robbin Laird It is no accident that I am writing this essay early in the morning in Canberra, Australia. There is no government which uses the term "rules based order" more than the Australian one does. For most of the postwar period, the phrase "rules-based order" carried a single, largely unexamined meaning: a body of rules invented by the… Read more »

The Requirement for Air Combat Mass and Depth in the Indo-Pacific

09/25/2026 Preview: Sir Richard Williams Foundation Seminar, 1 October 2026, National Gallery of Australia By Robbin Laird On 1 October, the Sir Richard Williams Foundation returns to the question that has quietly reshaped Australian airpower debate over the past two years: not whether the Royal Australian Air Force can support the Integrated Force, but whether it can generate the scale, endurance,… Read more »

Two September Elevenths, Four Hundred and Thirty-Six Years Apart

09/25/2026 By Robbin Laird There are dates that carry weight beyond the events that fall on them, and September 11 is one of them. For anyone born in the last sixty years, the date needs no elaboration: it means the destruction of the Twin Towers, the wounding of the Pentagon, the field in Shanksville, and the opening morning of what became… Read more »

Adaptation Is Not the Same as Preparedness

09/24/2026 The first installment in this series on General Pasquale Preziosa's foreword to The Unfinished Pillar takes up the argument that gives the book its title and its sharpest edge. The unfinished character of the European pillar, Preziosa argues, was never primarily an institutional story. It is a story about the growing distance between political structure and strategic capacity. He argued… Read more »

The Unfinished Pillar: Why a 1991 Argument Still Matters

09/24/2026 By Robbin Laird There are books whose relevance to the moment of publication is a matter of good timing, and there are books whose relevance was built in from the start because the argument they're built on never stopped being tested. The Unfinished Pillar belongs to the second category. The book's core material dates to the late 1980s and early… Read more »