From Challenge to Strategy: Germany’s New Military Doctrine and the Fulfillment of a Long-Anticipated Turn

05/12/2026 By Robbin Laird In the spring of 2020, Murielle Delaporte and I completed our book, The Return of Direct Defense in Europe: Meeting the 21st Century Authoritarian Challenge. The book was built on years of field research across Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe, and on extensive interviews with German generals, defense experts, and government officials during a visit to Germany… Read more »

Breaking Strategic Inertia: Asking New Questions in an Age of Chaos

05/11/2026 By Stephen Kuper Defence Connect 8 May 2026 As the post-World War II rules-based order continues to erode and a more competitive multipolar world emerges, Australia can no longer afford to ask the same questions; we need to start asking radically different ones The end of the Cold War was meant to usher in a more orderly age. With the… Read more »

Nacelle Improvements and the New Calculus of Military Readiness: Managing Availability in the Age of Chaos

05/11/2026 By Robbin Laird The V-22 Osprey's nacelle improvement program represents far more than a maintenance initiative for an aging tiltrotor aircraft. It serves as a revealing case study in how military forces must reconceive readiness itself as they transition from episodic crisis management to persistent chaos management. The challenge of keeping Ospreys available and operationally effective illuminates broader tensions facing… Read more »

Lessons in Military Transformation: From the RMA to the Drone Wars

05/07/2026 For four decades, the Western defense establishment has pursued revolutions. The Revolution in Military Affairs promised to transform warfare through precision strike and information dominance. Network-centric warfare would lift the fog of war through seamless connectivity. Effects-based operations would allow strategic objectives to be achieved without traditional attrition. Each concept arrived with elegant briefing slides, confident timelines, and the implicit… Read more »

Green Machines and Dirty Lists: BYD in Brazil and the Contradictions of China’s EV Ambition

05/07/2026 [caption id="attachment_149311" align="alignnone" width="962"] Screenshot[/caption] Brazil was supposed to be one of the cleaner chapters in the story of China's global industrial rise. BYD, the Shenzhen-based electric vehicle giant that has become a symbol of Beijing's technological ambitions, was not arriving as a resource extractor or a commodity trader. It was coming as a manufacturer—bringing jobs, technology transfer, and the… Read more »

Alliances as Documents, Alliances as Games: Two Frameworks for Understanding Strategic Commitments

05/06/2026 By Robbin Laird A useful analytical distinction has been drawn by Paul Bracken between how alliances are understood in political science and how they function in game theory. In political science, alliances are negotiated documents — formal texts that commit states to one another across a range of contingencies. In game theory, alliances do not exist as general artifacts at… Read more »