The Informal Empire: Two Middle Powers, One Test

08/16/2026 By Robbin Laird and Ken Maxwell For the past several years, Western policymakers have comforted themselves with a story: that economic interdependence with China would eventually civilize the relationship, that trade would do the work diplomacy could not, and that rising Chinese power would express itself the way past rising powers did, through fleets, flags, and borders redrawn by force.… Read more »

The KC-130J at WTI 2-26: Sustaining the Distributed Force

08/12/2026 By Robbin Laird The photos accompanying this article were taken at Pinal County Airpark near Marana, Arizona on April 4, 2026, during the Weapons and Tactics Instructor (WTI) course 2-26, hosted by Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One (MAWTS-1). They tell a story worth examining carefully not just as a training vignette, but as a window into how the… Read more »

The King Stallion and the Impact Force: Heavy Lift at the Center of Marine Corps Transformation

08/10/2026 By Robbin Laird The United States Marine Corps is in the midst of the most consequential transformation in its modern history. That transformation is not, at its core, about new platforms or revised force structure tables, though both are part of the story. It is about something more fundamental: a shift in what the Marine Corps is for and how… Read more »

The Army’s Way Ahead and the Marine Corps’ Impact Force

08/06/2026 By Robbin Laird A recent CSIS conversation between the Honorable Michael Obadal, Under Secretary of the Army, and the Honorable Ryan McCarthy, former Secretary of the Army moderated by Jerry McGinn of CSIS's Center for the Study of the Industrial Base offered a candid look at how senior Army leadership is thinking about the service's future. I listened to it… Read more »

The AH-1Z and Personnel Recovery: When the Hunter Becomes the Rescued

08/04/2026 By Robbin Laird Eight photographs from April 4, 2026, at Combat Village near Yuma, Arizona, document an AH-1Z tactics exercise with an unusual premise: the attack helicopter pilot as the person being recovered. The simulated personnel recovery exercise conducted by Maj. James Turner, an AH-1Z Viper pilot with MAWTS-1, turns the standard relationship between the attack helicopter and the rescue… Read more »

An Odyssey, Not the Career: A Prologue to Two Twentieth Century Men in the 21st Century

08/04/2026 By Robbin Laird I have never had a career. I want to say that plainly, at the start, because it is the truest thing I know about my own life, and because it took me the better part of four decades to be able to say it without apology. A career is a path. It has rungs. Someone above you… Read more »