By Robbin Laird
As I reflect on 2025 from my vantage point as a defense analyst with over four decades of experience observing military transformation and strategic shifts, this year stands out as a watershed moment in the evolution of warfare and international security architecture. The patterns I witnessed throughout 2025 represent not merely incremental changes, but fundamental transformations in how nations prepare for and conduct military operations in an era of major power competition.
My field research in Italy this year crystallized a realization that has been building for the past decade: we are witnessing the death of platform-centric warfare and the birth of truly integrated, network-centric operations. At Italy’s International Flight Training School, I observed firsthand how the M-346 aircraft program represents far more than just another training platform. It embodies a complete reimagining of how we prepare aviators for fifth-generation warfare.
The Live-Virtual-Constructive training environment I encountered there isn’t simply a technological innovation. It’s a philosophical revolution. Traditional pilot training focused on mastering a specific aircraft. What I saw in Italy was training designed from the ground up to prepare aviators not for platform operation, but for participation in kill web operations where information dominance and network integration matter more than individual platform capabilities. This shift from teaching students to fly planes to teaching them to orchestrate complex multi-domain operations represents the most significant evolution in military aviation training since the jet age.
Throughout 2025, as I prepared for additional research visits to Italian Air Force facilities, this theme kept resonating: the F-35 program is serving as a forcing function for broader military transformation. It’s not just about acquiring a new fighter aircraft; it’s about fundamentally rewiring how air forces think, train, and operate. The integration challenges that seemed so daunting a decade ago are now driving innovations that ripple across entire defense establishments.
The Ukraine conflict, which I’ve been documenting intensively for my forthcoming books on “The Global War in Ukraine,” has evolved throughout 2025 in ways that validate a concept I’ve been developing: the shift from crisis management to chaos management in military operations.
This isn’t semantic wordplay. It represents a fundamental change in how militaries must prepare for and respond to conflict in the 21st century.
Crisis management assumes a relatively stable international order occasionally disrupted by discrete crises that can be contained and resolved. Chaos management acknowledges that we now operate in an environment of persistent competition and overlapping conflicts where traditional boundaries between peace and war have blurred beyond recognition. The war in Ukraine has accelerated this transition, demonstrating how regional conflicts rapidly metastasize into global confrontations involving not just military forces but economic systems, information domains, and technological competition.
What struck me most forcefully in 2025 was how the conflict has catalyzed the formation of the multi-polar authoritarian world or an authoritarian axis linking Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. This isn’t a formal alliance in the traditional sense, but rather a convergence of interests and capabilities that poses unprecedented challenges to democratic nations. Simultaneously, we’ve witnessed the awakening of European defense consciousness and the transformation of Nordic security arrangements in ways that would have seemed impossible just five years ago.
One of the most significant developments I tracked in 2025 was the acceleration of autonomous maritime systems deployment, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region.
The Philippines’ embrace of mesh fleets. distributed networks of autonomous and semi-autonomous systems operating in coordinated fashion, embody similar network-centric principles I observed in aviation training. They represent a move away from concentrated, high-value platforms toward distributed, resilient systems that are far harder for adversaries to neutralize.
What makes this particularly significant is how it challenges traditional naval thinking. For decades, naval power was synonymous with large capital ships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers. The mesh fleet concept suggests a future where naval power might increasingly reside in the coordinated action of hundreds or thousands of smaller, autonomous platforms. This isn’t just a technological shift; it’s a conceptual revolution in maritime strategy.
My ongoing analysis of the V-22 Osprey’s evolution across different strategic periods has taken on new relevance in 2025. The Osprey serves as a perfect case study for understanding how military platforms must adapt to radically different strategic contexts. The aircraft that was conceived during the Cold War, refined during the Pacific Pivot era, and now operates in an environment of renewed great power competition hasn’t fundamentally changed but its role and the operational concepts surrounding it have transformed completely.
This phenomenon, platforms serving different strategic purposes as the international environment shifts, is something I’ve observed across multiple systems and nations in 2025. It underscores a critical lesson: military transformation isn’t just about acquiring new hardware. It’s about continuously reimagining how existing capabilities can be employed in novel ways to address emerging challenges. The most successful militaries in 2025 have been those that demonstrated this intellectual flexibility, not necessarily those with the newest equipment.
Throughout 2025, I’ve been particularly struck by the increasingly important role of middle powers in the evolving international security architecture. For example, the transformation of Nordic defense cooperation, accelerated by Finland and Sweden’s NATO accession process, demonstrates similar dynamics. These aren’t nations that can compete with major powers in terms of raw military mass. Instead, they’re leveraging technological sophistication, operational innovation, and strategic positioning to punch above their weight. The networks and partnerships they’re forming represent a new model of collective defense that complements traditional alliance structures.
We are publishing a book with Kenneth Maxwell on the relationship of Brazil and Australia with China which looks at the role of the middle powers in the evolving global system.
My collaboration with Kenneth Maxwell on our co-autobiography project has provided an interesting counterpoint to my defense analysis throughout 2025. Examining our parallel intellectual journeys from the 1950s to the present day has reinforced something I learned from my time studying under Zbigniew Brzezinski at Columbia: the importance of historical perspective in understanding contemporary events.
Having witnessed firsthand the collapse of the Soviet Union, European integration processes, and now the return of major power competition, I’m struck by both the continuities and discontinuities in international affairs. The authoritarian impulses we’re seeing from Russia and China aren’t new, but the technological and economic context in which they’re playing out is radically different from the Cold War era. Similarly, the democratic coalition responding to these challenges operates in an information environment that would have been unrecognizable to policymakers of previous generations.
As 2026 begins and 2025 has concluded, the trajectories I’ve been tracking, military transformation, great power competition, alliance realignment, technological innovation, seem poised to accelerate rather than stabilize. The war in Ukraine continues to reshape global security calculations in ways that extend far beyond Eastern Europe. The Indo-Pacific remains the focal point of great power competition, with technological and military innovations emerging at an unprecedented pace.
But beyond specific research projects, what drives my work is a conviction that understanding these transformations matters, not just for defense professionals, but for citizens of democracies who must ultimately make informed decisions about national security in an increasingly complex and dangerous world.
After more than four decades of analyzing defense issues, I remain convinced that the most dangerous threat isn’t any particular adversary or weapons system. It’s intellectual complacency or the assumption that future conflicts will resemble past ones, that existing frameworks remain adequate, that yesterday’s solutions will work for tomorrow’s problems.
2025 has reinforced that conviction while demonstrating once again that military organizations and nations capable of fundamental reconceptualization, not just incremental improvement, will be the ones that thrive in the challenging decades ahead.
The transformation from platform-centric to kill web warfare, from crisis management to chaos management, from concentrated to distributed forces, these aren’t just technical or tactical shifts.
They represent a fundamental reimagining of how nations organize, prepare for, and conduct military operations in the 21st century.
Understanding and documenting that transformation has been the privilege and challenge of my work in 2025, and it will continue to be as we move into an even more uncertain future.
The 2025 Book Publishing Year for Second Line of Defense: 16 New Titles