Chaos Management

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
05/26/2026

Traditional crisis management, scenario prediction, linear cause‑and‑effect, and efficiency‑optimized structures, is presented as inadequate in such conditions. Instead, the book proposes a shift to chaos management, defined as building adaptive capacity so that organizations can maintain operational coherence and learn faster than both adversaries and the surrounding turbulence.

This adaptive capacity rests on three pillars: intellectual flexibility (treating strategies as living hypotheses and valuing multiple analytic frames), institutional resilience (accepting some inefficiency to gain redundancy, diverse pathways, and preserved institutional memory), and social cohesion (trust, shared identity, and mutual commitment that sustain coordination under pressure).

The book details the cognitive and emotional skills needed by leaders, adaptive thinking, pattern recognition under uncertainty, metacognition, and emotional regulation, and argues these can be deliberately developed through simulation, red‑teaming, and structured reflection, producing “Chaos Navigators” who can act effectively without certainty.

It then translates the framework into a phased 12–24‑month playbook: initial diagnosis of vulnerabilities, systematic capability building across the three pillars, and a final phase focused on leading through transition and institutionalizing adaptation so the organization does not revert to pre‑chaos optimization.

A set of leadership imperatives and a concise “Chaos Management Cheat Sheet” conclude the book, positioning chaos management as a distinct discipline for senior leaders in government, defense, and business who must redesign their institutions for an era where turbulence is the norm rather than the exception.

Designing for Strategic Advantage: Lessons from the Return of Direct Defense in Europe

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
05/20/2026

By Robbin Laird

Before a nation asks what threats it faces or what allies expect, it should ask a prior and more fundamental question — what are our genuine strategic advantages, and what force design maximizes them?

That framing is right. It is also not new. The same foundational question animated the best European defense thinking of the period examined in The Return of Direct Defense in Europe, the 2020 book Murielle Delaporte and I wrote as Europe was still absorbing the strategic shock of 2014 and the cascading crises that followed.

Reading both works together reveals a consistent analytical logic: the nations that navigated the return of direct defense most effectively were those that understood their genuine advantages with precision and designed their forces accordingly rather than simply buying what larger partners were buying or reflexively rebuilding what had been dismantled after the Cold War.

The common failure mode across both periods is identical: force design driven by external pressures and bureaucratic momentum rather than by a rigorous accounting of what the nation actually brings to the fight. In the post-Cold War decade, European militaries dismantled their direct defense capabilities because the threat had apparently disappeared and alliance membership seemed to substitute for sovereign credibility. They shaped themselves instead for expeditionary operations in distant theaters, counter-insurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq, stabilization in the Balkans, hollowing out the mass, readiness, and territorial depth that direct defense requires. When Russia re-entered the equation in 2014, the hollowing out was exposed. The question that confronted every European government from Warsaw to Oslo to London was the same one the Williams seminar posed in a different context: what do we actually have, why does it constitute a genuine advantage, and what force design follows from it?

The answers varied sharply and the variation itself is instructive. Countries that had never fully dismantled their direct defense posture, or that had specific geographic, cultural, and alliance-architectural advantages they understood and were prepared to exploit, adapted faster and more effectively than those that had to rebuild from institutional memory alone.

Geography as Operational Logic, Not Background

The Williams framework identifies the first and most fundamental advantage audit question as geographic, not the geography of the schoolroom map, but operational geography that determines how a force actually fights. The same distinction runs through the entire analysis in The Return of Direct Defense in Europe. One of the book’s central arguments is that the collapse of the Soviet Union did not produce a strategic geography; it produced a radically different one, and that difference was systematically misread by Western governments for two decades.

The old Central Front logic, a clear primary axis of Soviet advance through Germany, flanks serving the center, dissolved with the Warsaw Pact. What replaced it was a new and more complex geography: newly independent Baltic states directly exposed on Russia’s northwestern border, a Poland now fronting the NATO alliance without a deep buffer, a Nordic region linking the Atlantic approaches to the Baltic Sea, and a Russia that retained its Eurasian continental mass while losing the imperial glacis that had separated it from Western power. The nations that grasped this new geography earliest and designed their forces around it rather than around Cold War legacy structures were the ones best positioned when the 2014 shock arrived.

Norway is the most instructive case. The Nordic chapter of our 2020 book details how Norway systematically rebuilt its direct defense posture from the early 2010s onward, driven by an honest geographic assessment. Norway sits astride the approaches to the North Atlantic and shares a border with Russia in the High North. Its maritime geography, the Norwegian Sea, the GIUK gap, the Svalbard archipelago gives it a specific and irreplaceable role in any Atlantic conflict. Rather than designing a scaled-down version of a generic NATO land force, Norway invested in capabilities that exploited its specific geographic position: maritime patrol aviation, submarine forces oriented toward high-north operations, special operations capacity suited to its terrain, and integration with American naval and air assets in ways that leveraged Norway’s positional value directly. The result was not a mirror of what larger partners already had; it was a force genuinely shaped around what Norway uniquely contributes.

Finland offers the parallel lesson on land. Finland’s approach to direct defense was never abandoned in the way that most Western European states dismantled their territorial defense postures after 1991. The geographic logic was too obvious and too close to ignore: a long land border with Russia, limited strategic depth in the south, a national memory of the Winter War that inoculated Finnish defense planning against the comfortable assumption that the threat had permanently disappeared. The force design that followed from this geographic and historical honesty, large reserve army, integrated territorial defense, serious investment in fire suppression and counter-battery capability, was not fashionable by NATO standards of the 2000s. It was, however, exactly right for the threat Finland actually faced. When Finland and Sweden ultimately joined NATO in 2023-24, they brought force structures genuinely suited to the northern flank challenge, not forces that needed to be rebuilt from scratch to perform that mission.

Alliance Architecture as Strategic Advantage

The Williams framework’s fourth audit question — what does the alliance architecture actually provide, and what must the nation supply for itself? — maps directly onto one of the central arguments in our 2020 book. The return of direct defense in Europe was not simply a military question; it was a question about the real operational value of the alliance structures through which European nations were organized. NATO and the European Union provided frameworks, but frameworks do not fight. What mattered was whether specific nations, in specific geographic and political contexts, had built genuine operational integration with the partners whose assistance they would actually need in a crisis.

The two great intelligence partnerships of the 1980s, the Gordievsky affair, which linked British and American intelligence at the highest levels, and the Farewell affair, which created an operational channel between French internal security and the Reagan White House, illustrate this principle with unusual sharpness. What made both partnerships effective was not that Britain and France were simply members of NATO. It was that specific individuals in specific governments had built working relationships of sufficient depth and trust to handle material of the most sensitive kind, outside normal bureaucratic channels, in ways that produced strategic results. The Gordievsky operation modified the ABLE ARCHER nuclear exercise in real time, reducing the risk of catastrophic Soviet miscalculation. The Farewell dossier contributed to shaping Reagan’s Star Wars announcement at precisely the moment Soviet technical intelligence was being rolled up. Neither outcome was the product of alliance machinery in the abstract. Both were the product of specific bilateral integration, built deliberately and maintained carefully.

The lesson for contemporary force design is direct. An alliance contribution, properly understood, is not simply about interoperability standards and combined exercises. It is about the capacity to function as a genuine force multiplier for specific partners , providing capabilities, intelligence, basing, or operational access that those partners cannot replicate from within their own resources, and building the institutional depth needed for that contribution to function under crisis conditions. The nations that invested in this kind of deep bilateral integration before 2014 were significantly better positioned to respond when the strategic environment changed. Those that had relied on the alliance framework in the abstract, assuming that NATO membership was itself a guarantee of operational coherence, found that the framework was thinner in practice than it had appeared on paper.

Poland is the clearest contemporary example of a nation that understood this distinction and acted on it. Our 2020 book’s chapter on Polish defense transformation traces how Warsaw, from 2014 onward, combined a genuine investment in territorial defense mass, rebuilding conventional ground forces at a scale no other European NATO member was contemplating — with a deliberate deepening of the bilateral relationship with the United States. The Polish calculation was not that NATO would fail; it was that the contribution Poland could make to alliance deterrence was inseparable from the sovereign credibility of Polish forces. A Poland that relied entirely on allied reinforcement was a Poland that could be coerced in the interval before that reinforcement arrived. A Poland that combined genuine territorial defense capability with deep bilateral US-Polish integration was a Poland that denied Russia the exploitation window that hybrid operations depend on.

Human Capital and Institutional Culture as Advantage

The Williams framework identifies human capital as one of the most consistently underanalyzed dimensions of national military power, the quality, adaptability, and efficiency of personnel relative to the resources invested in them. The observation is equally applicable to the European case. What the Nordic and Baltic states demonstrated after 2014 was not simply that they had maintained more territorial defense infrastructure than their Western European counterparts. They had maintained something harder to rebuild: the institutional cultures, the command competencies, and the reserve integration mechanisms that allow smaller forces to fight effectively against larger ones.

The distinction matters because institutional culture cannot be procured. Platforms can be bought, training cycles can be accelerated, doctrines can be revised. The tacit knowledge embedded in a professional military culture that has never stopped taking direct defense seriously, the judgment about when to hold ground, when to yield depth, how to operate under communications degradation, how to integrate with reserve and civil defense structures, is not recoverable on any procurement timeline. Finland’s military had it because Finland never stopped practicing it. Germany’s military did not, because Germany had spent two decades reorienting toward out-of-area operations and was by 2014 operating a force whose organizational culture was built around stabilization operations, not territorial combat.

The Williams framework’s observation about the Royal Australian Air Force, delivering more practical firepower per person and per dollar than larger counterparts, points to the same underlying dynamic. A smaller force, operating without the institutional mass that absorbs suboptimal performance in larger militaries, tends to develop individual excellence and adaptive thinking as substitutes for numbers. That efficiency is the product of deliberate cultivation: realistic training, demanding exercises, and cultures that reward initiative over compliance. Where that culture exists and is maintained, it constitutes a strategic advantage no platform purchase can replicate. Where it is allowed to atrophy as happened across much of Western European military culture during the post-Cold War decade, it can take a generation to rebuild.

The Industrial Dimension: Sovereign Depth Under Pressure

The industrial audit question in the Williams framework asks not simply what the defense industrial base produces in peacetime, but what sovereign knowledge and manufacturing depth would allow a nation to sustain, repair, adapt, and scale capability under wartime conditions. This question was almost entirely absent from European defense thinking during the post-Cold War decade. The assumption of globalized supply chains and allied industrial interdependence made it seem redundant. The return of direct defense exposed that assumption as strategically dangerous.

The 2020 book addresses this through the lens of what was called the “infrastructure challenge”, encompassing not only munitions stocks and maintenance depth but the broader question of what economic and industrial dependencies adversaries could exploit. The Russian strategy against Europe was never simply a military one; it was a combined economic, informational, and military pressure campaign that sought leverage points in European infrastructure, energy dependencies, and supply chain vulnerabilities. The European nations that had maintained genuine industrial sovereignty not as a protectionist reflex, but as a deliberate defense investment were less exposed to that leverage.

The COVID-19 crisis, which arrived as the book was being completed, underscored the point with unusual vividness. The over-dependence of Western economies on Chinese supply chains which the pandemic made visible in medical manufacturing and supplies was precisely the same logic applied in a different domain. Nations that had assumed that global supply chains would remain accessible under stress discovered that this assumption had structural limits. The same lesson applies to defense industrial capacity: sovereignty is not free and not automatic, but its absence is discovered at the worst possible moment.

The Temporal Dimension: Strategic Clocks and Institutional Calendars

The Williams framework’s fifth audit question — what is the actual strategic horizon, not the planning cycle that budgetary processes impose? — may be the hardest to act on and the most important to get right. The European experience after 2014 illustrates why with painful clarity.

The strategic shock of Crimea was recognized as a turning point almost immediately. The Wales Summit committed NATO members to the 2% GDP defense spending target in 2014. The Enhanced Forward Presence was stood up. The Very High Readiness Joint Task Force was created. These were genuine responses, not empty gestures. But the pace of institutional response consistently lagged the pace of strategic change, because institutional calendars and procurement timelines operate on schedules that strategic adversaries do not respect. A nation that correctly diagnoses a threat in 2014 but designs its response around a decade-long recapitalization program may find that the window of risk it identified has narrowed or closed by the time the force structure changes it planned arrive in the field.

The book’s chapter on Germany illustrates this temporal mismatch most sharply. German political culture, shaped by deep historical aversion to military power, had built institutional processes for defense decisions that were structurally resistant to rapid change. The 2014 turning point was recognized in Berlin; the Zeitenwende — the declared structural shift in German security policy — would not come until 2022, in response to full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Eight years elapsed between the strategic signal and the institutional response. That gap is not unique to Germany; it reflects a broader pattern in how liberal democracies process strategic change. But the gap is not inevitable, and the nations that managed it most effectively after 2014, Poland, the Nordic states, the Baltics, did so because they had built institutions with lower latency between strategic recognition and operational response.

The Williams seminar’s argument for a ten-month readiness plan running in parallel with decade-long recapitalization, rather than treating the former as derivative from the latter, reflects the same lesson in the Indo-Pacific context. Advantages not exploited at the moment of strategic stress are not advantages; they are potential, unrealized. The conversion of potential into operational effect requires both the right force design and the right timeline for achieving it. Getting the timeline right requires the intellectual honesty to separate the strategic clock from the institutional calendar and to act at the pace the former demands rather than the pace the latter prefers.

Distinctiveness as Alliance Contribution

The Williams framework’s most important practical conclusion is that a nation designed around its genuine advantages will look different from its allies and that this distinctiveness is the precondition for genuine allied complementarity rather than a problem to be managed. An alliance of nations each exploiting their own advantages brings something no alliance of scaled-down copies of the same force template can produce: asymmetric capacity that an adversary cannot easily map, target, or defeat.

This conclusion runs through the entire European analysis in our 2020 book, though it is expressed differently in each national case. France’s contribution to European defense is not interchangeable with Germany’s, Norway’s, Poland’s, or the United Kingdom’s and the strength of the European defense architecture depends on the distinctiveness being maintained and exploited, not homogenized away in the name of standardization. France’s nuclear deterrent, expeditionary culture, and independent intelligence services represent genuine advantages that French force design should maximize. Britain’s maritime tradition, special relationship with American intelligence, and power projection capacity represent a different set. Poland’s geographic position, demographic weight, and political will to maintain large conventional ground forces represent a third.

What the book documents is that the return of direct defense forced a productive rediscovery of this complementarity logic. The coalition-building that occurred from 2014 onward, the Nordic-Baltic-Polish defense corridor, the UK’s reinforcement of the northern flank, the deeper French engagement in central and eastern Europe, was more than a set of bilateral or multilateral arrangements. It was a working-out in practice of what a genuinely complementary alliance architecture looks like: nations contributing what they uniquely have, to a collective whole that is more capable than the sum of its scaled-down parts.

The Method Is the Lesson

The methodology the Williams seminar applied to Australia is portable because the questions it poses are universal. Any nation serious about its own defense can conduct this kind of audit. The European experience with the return of direct defense demonstrates both what happens when nations fail to ask these questions with honesty and what becomes possible when they do.

The nations that navigated the post-2014 environment most effectively were those that already had answers to the five foundational questions, even if they had never framed them in those terms: they knew their operational geography and were designing forces to exploit it. They had maintained or rebuilt the institutional cultures that convert human capital into military efficiency; they had invested in deep bilateral alliance integration rather than relying on abstract membership in multilateral frameworks. They had retained genuine industrial and sustainment depth; and they were operating with a strategic clock that matched the actual tempo of threat rather than the comfort of a decade-long procurement cycle.

The lesson is not that any particular force structure is universally correct. Norway’s answer differs from Poland’s, which differs from Finland’s, which differs from France’s. The lesson is that the method of analysis is the same in each case, starting from a rigorous and honest accounting of genuine advantages rather than from threat catalogues, alliance expectations, or acquisition market offerings. A nation that conducts this analysis with sufficient candor and acts on its conclusions with sufficient urgency will field a force that contributes distinctively rather than redundantly, that deters effectively rather than symbolically, and that fights well rather than simply showing up.

That is the enduring lesson of the return of direct defense in Europe. It is also, plainly, the lesson that the Williams Foundation seminar was trying to apply to Australia.

Fight Tonight: Exploiting Australia’s Strategic Advantage

 

Lewis B. Puller and the Mine Warfare Mission at the Strait of Hormuz

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
05/19/2026

By Robbin Laird

USS Lewis B. Puller (ESB-3) embodies a straightforward but strategically important proposition: if you want to keep the Strait of Hormuz open against the threat of mines, you put the mine-warfare force where the mines are likely to be laid. The expeditionary sea base brings aviation, unmanned systems, small craft, explosive ordnance disposal teams, and command-and-control together on a single, relatively low-cost hull positioned just outside the chokepoint, transforming mine clearance from a commuting activity into a persistent, on-scene campaign. That proposition has moved from theoretical to urgently operational.

Since early 2026, Iranian forces have laid mines in the strait and its approaches, U.S. forces have begun clearance operations using a combination of surface, subsurface, and airborne assets, and the Puller-centered sea-base concept has been stress-tested under real combat conditions for the first time.

This article describes the ship, explains its role in the mine-countermeasures mission, and offers a notional day-in-the-life of ESB-based operations to show how it compresses time and distance in mine prosecution. It also places the current crisis in a broader strategic context, one that analysts working in the mobile basing space had been developing well before Iran laid its first mine in 2026.

Lewis B. Puller is not a classic warship in the sense of a destroyer or frigate; it is a purpose-built sea base, derived from an Alaska-class commercial tanker hull and adapted to carry a large flight deck with multiple helicopter spots, a mission deck with cranes and handling gear, aviation support facilities, berthing for hundreds of embarked personnel, and significant fuel and stores capacity. Commissioned in Bahrain in August 2017, a decision driven by the evolving threat environment in the Fifth Fleet area of operations—the ship’s redesignation from USNS to USS underscored that it is not merely a logistics asset but an operational tool capable of sustaining combat support functions over time close to contested waters.

The Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz are tailor-made for this kind of platform. The geography is constricted, the threat is chronic, and the requirement is less about episodic high-intensity engagements than about day-in, day-out presence, surveillance, and readiness to respond to mines, harassment, or coercion. Puller’s hull form and systems are optimized for precisely this profile: long on-station periods at modest speed, with ample deck space for helicopters, small boats, and unmanned systems, and the ability to host detachments from multiple communities—mine warfare, special operations, maritime security, and aviation support on a single afloat base.

The strategic case for Puller in the Gulf is not simply a mine-warfare argument. It reflects a broader insight about how mobile basing works as a driver of crisis management and combat effectiveness for the joint and coalition force, an insight that Jim Strock, former Director of the Seabasing Integration Division at the USMC, had been articulating for years before the Hormuz crisis brought it into sharp relief.

Strock’s core argument, developed in conversations in January 2022, was that the shift from thinking about seabasing as a Marine Corps amphibious affair to thinking about it as a joint and coalition capability was the fundamental strategic innovation still waiting to be fully exploited. As he put it:

“The other part of mobile basing we worked on 10 years ago was the afloat piece. We were focusing on Navy and Marine Corps capabilities across amphibious ships, across maritime repositioning ships, across joint high-speed vessels, across a variety of connectors at the strategic, operational, and tactical level to move units around. And certainly, those assets today are key enablers for any sort of mobile basing concept of operations we would construct, but to expand this thinking to the joint or coalition force is really the new dimension that I don’t think anyone has seriously thought through—as well as finding ways to integrate fully those capabilities for the force design and operations of those forces.”

The Puller in the Gulf is a working example of exactly that integration challenge. It hosts not just Navy mine-warfare teams but special operations forces, EOD detachments, and aviation assets from multiple communities—functioning as what Strock described as a node within an operational network that can extend sea power ashore and deliver effects across warfighting functions. The ship is, in miniature, the kind of mobile base from which distributed, integrated operations become possible.

Strock also identified a critical insight about the value of sea control in an era of long-range fires: that the missile-strike force—carriers, submarines, destroyers—and the expeditionary force operating from interconnected sea bases are complementary capabilities, not competing ones. In his words:

“Sea control against adversaries that are relying on long-range fires to push our fleet back further is a key challenge. The carriers, the submarines, the DDGs provide significant firepower and can extend sea control in terms of firing solutions. But the expeditionary force based on the interconnected sea bases from which one can project an air and ground integrated force provides a very different but complementary capability to the largely missile strike force.”

The Puller at Hormuz illustrates this complementarity directly.

When destroyers USS Frank E. Peterson and USS Michael Murphy made the first transit of the Strait in the clearance phase of operations, they did not bring the mine-warfare enterprise with them—they created the conditions for it. The ESB was already there, already positioned, providing the persistent operational base that the strike force could lean on. This is the architecture Strock was describing: a layered mobile basing system in which the sea base provides the dwell time, the logistics depth, and the integrated command space that episodic strike assets cannot.

Strock also highlighted the significance of autonomous systems as emerging connectors within this framework: USVs, UUVs, and aerial systems that could serve as extensions of the sea base into the extended battlespace. That vision has become reality at Hormuz, where UUVs and USVs have been central to the mine-clearance effort, operating as sensors and neutralization platforms launched from and controlled aboard the ESB.

Before examining what Puller can do, it is essential to understand the institutional backdrop against which it now operates. The Navy dismantled its Mine Warfare Command in 2006, and in the years that followed, both surface and airborne MCM capabilities steadily eroded. The last four forward-deployed Avenger-class minesweepers—USS Devastator, Sentry, Dextrous, and Gladiator—were decommissioned in a ceremony in Bahrain in September 2025. The MH-53E Sea Dragon helicopter fleet, the historic backbone of airborne minesweeping, has dwindled to a single squadron and is scheduled for complete retirement by the end of 2027. The Navy’s planned replacement, Independence-variant Littoral Combat Ships carrying MCM mission packages—has been plagued by delays and readiness shortfalls.

When Iranian forces began laying mines in early 2026, the operational picture was stark. Of the three Independence-variant LCSs homeported in Bahrain with MCM mission packages, USS Canberra, Santa Barbara, and Tulsa, only Canberra was immediately available in theater; the other two were in Southeast Asia for scheduled maintenance. The four remaining Avenger-class vessels, homeported in Sasebo, Japan, were half a world away; USS Chief and USS Pioneer were tracked transiting toward the Middle East in mid-April only after hostilities had already begun. The Navy found itself scrambling to reconstitute precisely the capability it had spent two decades drawing down. Against this backdrop, the value of a persistent, forward-based platform like Lewis B. Puller becomes impossible to overstate.

The institutional lesson here is one Strock had identified in a different context years earlier: that the combat commanders’ actual needs in a crisis, distributed, integratable, forward-present force—are often poorly served by acquisition programs built around episodic high-end engagements. A persistent sea base requires persistent investment in the force packages it supports. The Hormuz crisis demonstrated what happens when those packages are allowed to hollow out.

Puller’s presence near Hormuz carries strategic weight that goes beyond its organic capabilities. It signals that the United States has prepositioned not just general-purpose naval power but specialized mine-warfare capability close to the chokepoint itself. Rather than relying on assets commuting from Bahrain or surging from Japan, the ESB allows helicopters, small boats, and unmanned systems to live forward in the area of operations, reducing warning times and shortening the decision cycle for any actor considering mines as a coercive tool.

That presence is also politically calibrated. An ESB, unlike a carrier or big-deck amphibious ship, is a relatively low-signature symbol: clearly a naval vessel associated with operations, but without the escalatory weight of a carrier strike group surge into the Gulf. The ship’s persistent, workmanlike posture, hovering near the Strait, launching helicopters and small boats, maintaining radar and UAS coverage, matches the message Washington often wants to send in these crises: resolve without theatrical escalation. In this sense, Puller is simultaneously a military enabler and a tool of competitive coexistence at sea.

The mobile basing literature captures this well. As Strock noted, the strategic importance of mobile basing rises precisely with the importance of complicating the adversary’s targeting solutions and force-projection targets. A sea base that lives near the chokepoint is harder to dismiss and harder to counter than one that commutes from a fixed port. Its mobility is itself a form of deterrence.

The core power of Puller in mine warfare lies in its function as a camp afloat for the entire mine-countermeasures stack. On its flight deck, the Navy can embark MH-53E Sea Dragon AMCM helicopters, which tow Mk 105 hydrofoil sleds or other airborne MCM gear; staging just outside the Strait, these aircraft cut transit time to suspected minefields dramatically compared to shore-based operations. On its mission deck and via its cranes, the ship can deploy small MCM craft, rigid-hulled inflatable boats, and unmanned surface vessels that tow influence sweeps or carry unmanned underwater vehicles for high-resolution sonar searches.

Layered above these are unmanned aerial systems, ScanEagle has been documented operating from Puller during Strait transits, that provide persistent surface coverage, track commercial traffic, monitor IRGC patrol activity, and cue surface and subsurface sensors to areas of interest. The ESB’s command spaces fuse data from these platforms and network it with the broader 5th Fleet MCM architecture: LCS-MCM ships, remaining Avenger-class minesweepers, coalition mine vessels, and supporting destroyers.

Because all of these capabilities are co-located, the ship collapses the find-fix-finish cycle. A UUV or USV detects a suspicious contact; that data is reviewed aboard Puller, where an MH-53E crew, an EOD detachment, and a small-boat team are within shouting distance of the analysts and planners. Decisions about classification, investigation, or neutralization can be made and executed within hours rather than days.

The MH-53E caveat bears emphasis. With the fleet reduced to a single squadron and retirement approaching in 2027, planners are transitioning toward MH-60S helicopters carrying the Airborne Mine Neutralization System (AMNS) and Airborne Laser Mine Detection System (ALMDS), and toward UUV-centric concepts that reduce human exposure. This is precisely the kind of connector evolution Strock had flagged as essential to keeping the seabasing enterprise relevant—new platforms that extend the sea base’s reach into the contested battlespace while reducing the risk to personnel.

Mine warfare is rarely the only mission in the Strait. Iran’s operational playbook blends mines with harassment of shipping, seizures, UAV overflights, and the threat or actual use of anti-ship missiles and fast-attack craft. Puller’s design acknowledges this reality. It can host special operations forces and VBSS teams, launch and recover their boats, and act as a staging base for interdiction operations, meaning that even while a mine-clearance campaign is underway, the same platform can support boardings of suspicious merchantmen, interdiction of weapons shipments, or rapid response to distress calls from commercial shipping.

This is what Strock had in mind when he argued that Naval Expeditionary Forces with evolving aviation capabilities should be able to operate across all the warfighting functions — C2, fires, maneuver, logistics, force protection, and ISR — from seabases. The Puller at Hormuz is doing exactly that, operating as a multi-function node in an integrated force rather than a single-mission platform.

Force protection for MCM operations has always been a challenge in contested areas: the slow, deliberate nature of sweeping makes minesweepers and AMCM aircraft vulnerable. By hosting security forces and coordinating closely with nearby destroyers or LCS escorts, Puller provides an on-scene protective umbrella for the delicate work of mine clearance. In the current conflict, with A-10s operating over the Strait and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers providing initial transit to establish clearance corridors, this layered protection concept has moved from doctrine to practice.

This operational cycle underscores three core contributions the ESB makes to mine warfare at Hormuz.

  • First, it compresses distance: by putting the mine-warfare force on a hull that lives near the chokepoint, the Navy reduces transit time for all clearance assets and increases the fraction of each sortie spent in productive work.
  • Second, it compresses time: co-locating sensors, shooters, and decision-makers means that detection, classification, and neutralization can occur within hours rather than days.
  • Third, it reduces friction: integrated logistics, maintenance, and berthing shrink the overhead of sustaining a mixed force, allowing commanders to tailor the package—more helicopters one week, more unmanned systems the next without changing the basic platform.

But there is a broader lesson here that extends beyond mine warfare. The Puller at Hormuz is a proof of concept for the mobile basing vision Jim Strock articulated: a sea base functioning as a multi-mission node in a distributed, integrated joint force, positioned forward, sustaining operations across warfighting functions, and serving as a platform from which autonomous systems extend reach into the contested battlespace. The ship does not need to be glamorous to be decisive.

The 2026 Hormuz crisis has validated these contributions while simultaneously exposing the institutional gaps that have accumulated around them. With Avenger-class minesweepers retired or scrambling from Japan, with the MH-53E fleet in its final years, and with LCS-MCM packages absent from theater at the moment of greatest need, the burden on ESB-centered operations has been disproportionate.

The lesson is not that the ESB concept is flawed. It is that the sea base works best as the apex of a layered, sustained MCM enterprise—not as a partial substitute for capabilities that have been allowed to atrophy. Strock’s 2022 observation that the services had not yet seriously thought through how to integrate seabasing capabilities fully with shore-based and airborne mobile capabilities proved painfully prescient.

For a theater in which mines, harassment, and political coercion are likely to remain enduring features, Lewis B. Puller provides a way to anchor that enterprise at sea, near the point of friction. It will not launch strikes or appear in carrier strike group photographs. But by sustaining a quietly decisive presence at the chokepoint and by demonstrating in practice what mobile basing as a strategic capability actually looks like, it remains essential to any serious strategy for keeping the Strait open.

Featured image: An MV-22 Osprey assigned to Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron (VMM) 262 and UH-1Y Venom assigned to Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron (VMM) 262 land on the flight deck of the Lewis B. Puller-Class Expeditionary Mobile Base (ESB) USS John L. Canley (ESB 6) in the East China Sea, Jan. 30, 2025. In support of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Special Operations Command Pacific, in conjunction with Pacific Fleet, Pacific Air Force, Marine Forces Pacific and U.S. Cyber Command, conduct air and maritime operations in the East China Sea to increase joint force lethality and readiness and demonstrate peace through strength for a free and open Indo-Pacific. Naval Special Warfare provides maritime SOF capability to enable Joint Force lethality and survivability inside denied and contested areas. (Photo courtesy of U.S. Navy).

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“Navy to Use Underwater Drones to Help Clear Iranian Mines from Strait of Hormuz.” DefenseScoop. April 12, 2026. https://defensescoop.com/2026/04/11/strait-of-hormuz-mine-clearance-navy-centcom-underwater-drones/

“Flurry of Navy Minesweepers Appear to Be Heading Toward the Middle East.” The War Zone. April 13, 2026. https://www.twz.com/sea/flurry-of-navy-minesweepers-appear-to-be-heading-toward-the-middle-east

“U.S. Navy Stages for Mine Clearance as Hormuz Blockade Begins.” Naval News. April 14, 2026. https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2026/04/u-s-navy-stages-for-mine-clearance-as-hormuz-blockade-begins-showing-strain/

“US Navy Conducts Autonomous Minehunting Operations in the Strait of Hormuz.” Navy Lookout. April 2026. https://www.navylookout.com/us-navy-conducts-autonomous-minehunting-operations-in-the-strait-of-hormuz/

“Pentagon Assures Safe Passage Through Strait of Hormuz Despite Presence of Mines.” Navy Times. May 5, 2026. https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2026/05/05/pentagon-assures-safe-passage-through-strait-of-hormuz-despite-presence-of-mines/

“US Navy Lags in Minesweeping, Despite Years of Warnings.” Christian Science Monitor. March 20, 2026. https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2026/0320/strait-hormuz-navy-mines-iran-war

“What Do We Know About Sea Mines in and Around the Strait of Hormuz?” Al Jazeera. April 13, 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/4/13/what-do-we-know-about-sea-mines-in-and-around-the-strait-of-hormuz

“Navy Will Commission All Expeditionary Sea Bases as USS Warships.” USNI News. January 21, 2020. https://news.usni.org/2020/01/21/navy-will-commission-all-expeditionary-sea-bases-as-uss-warships

Military Sealift Command. “Ship in the Spotlight: USS Lewis B. Puller.” April 13, 2025. https://www.msc.usff.navy.mil/Press-Room/News-Stories/Article/4154715/ship-in-the-spotlight-uss-lewis-b-puller/

“The Mine Gap: America Forgot How to Sweep the Sea.” Foreign Policy Research Institute. March 16, 2026. https://www.fpri.org/article/2026/03/the-mine-gap-america-forgot-how-to-sweep-the-sea/

“Dark Shipping and IRGC Activity Intensify Around Hormuz.” Windward. May 10, 2026. https://windward.ai/blog/commercial-shipping-around-hormuz-is-increasingly-going-dark/

Second Line of Defense. “USNS Lewis B. Puller.” https://sldinfo.com/gallery/usns-lewis-b-puller/

220806-A-EQ028-1164 RED SEA (Aug. 6, 2022) Sailors prepare to lower the MANTAS T-12 unmanned surface vessel during hoist training aboard the expeditionary sea base USS Lewis B. Puller (ESB 3) during hoist training, in the Red Sea, Aug. 6. Lewis B. Puller is deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations to help ensure maritime security and stability in the Middle East region. (U.S. Army Photo by Spc. Frederick Poirier)
220806-A-EQ028-1177 RED SEA (Aug. 6, 2022) Sailors prepare to lower the MANTAS T-12 unmanned surface vessel during hoist training aboard the expeditionary sea base USS Lewis B. Puller (ESB 3) during hoist training, in the Red Sea, Aug. 6. Lewis B. Puller is deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations to help ensure maritime security and stability in the Middle East region. (U.S. Army Photo by Spc. Frederick Poirier)
220806-A-EQ028-1200 RED SEA (Aug. 6, 2022) Sailors prepare to lower the MANTAS T-12 unmanned surface vessel during hoist training aboard the expeditionary sea base USS Lewis B. Puller (ESB 3) during hoist training, in the Red Sea, Aug. 6. Lewis B. Puller is deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations to help ensure maritime security and stability in the Middle East region. (U.S. Army Photo by Spc. Frederick Poirier)
220806-A-EQ028-1205 RED SEA (Aug. 6, 2022) Sailors lower the MANTAS T-12 unmanned surface vessel during hoist training aboard the expeditionary sea base USS Lewis B. Puller (ESB 3), in the Red Sea, Aug. 6. Lewis B. Puller is deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations to help ensure maritime security and stability in the Middle East region. (U.S. Army Photo by Spc. Frederick Poirier)
220806-A-EQ028-1343 RED SEA (Aug. 6, 2022) An MH-60S Seahawk helicopter assigned to Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 26 hoists a MANTAS T-12 unmanned surface vessel during hoist training aboard the expeditionary sea base USS Lewis B. Puller (ESB 3), in the Red Sea, Aug. 6. Lewis B. Puller is deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations to help ensure maritime security and stability in the Middle East region. (U.S. Army Photo by Spc. Frederick Poirier)
220806-A-EQ028-1366 RED SEA (Aug. 6, 2022) An MH-60S Seahawk helicopter assigned to Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 26 carries a MANTAS T-12 unmanned surface vessel to the expeditionary sea base USS Lewis B. Puller (ESB 3), in the Red Sea, Aug. 6. Lewis B. Puller is deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations to help ensure maritime security and stability in the Middle East region. (U.S. Army Photo by Spc. Frederick Poirier)
220806-A-EQ028-1397 RED SEA (Aug. 6, 2022) An MH-60S Seahawk helicopter assigned to Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 26 carries a MANTAS T-12 unmanned surface vessel to the expeditionary sea base USS Lewis B. Puller (ESB 3), in the Red Sea, Aug. 6. Lewis B. Puller is deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations to help ensure maritime security and stability in the Middle East region. (U.S. Army Photo by Spc. Frederick Poirier)

The Next Chapter of Military Transformation: From Noriega to Maduro

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
05/18/2026

By Robbin Laird

The U.S. capture of Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1989 and of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela in 2026 frame a striking transformation in American military power. Both operations targeted a hostile ruler in the Western Hemisphere. Both aimed to reset a regional balance of power. Yet the ways and means could hardly be more different.

Panama was a compact but unmistakable invasion. Joint formations seized key terrain, dismantled the Panamanian Defense Forces, and underwrote a political transition on the ground. Venezuela was a decapitation raid embedded in a wider campaign: a small elite force, covered by a global intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and strike complex, grabbed a single man and his inner circle, then disappeared offshore. No American tanks in the capital. No American proconsul managing the aftermath.

Seen together, Noriega and Maduro trace the U.S. move from an invasion-first model of intervention to a raid-first model built around precision, networks, and leadership removal. The change is not merely technical. It reflects shifts in doctrine, in domestic political appetite, and in how Washington defines success when it chooses to use force.

Objectives: Regime Replacement vs. Leadership Removal

The contrast begins with the political aim. In Panama, Washington did not intend a narrow, surgical arrest. The mission combined several objectives: protect U.S. lives and treaty interests, secure the Panama Canal, dismantle the Panamanian Defense Forces as a coherent institution, install an opposition government, and remove Noriega as the regime’s symbol and organizer.

Those aims demanded control of terrain and institutions. You cannot destroy an army, protect a capital, and midwife a new government with a commando squad and a few airstrikes. Hence the decision to conduct a multi-axis assault, seize airfields and bridges, roll armor into urban areas, and visibly occupy key sites until resistance collapsed and a successor government could consolidate.

In Venezuela, the aim was deliberately narrower. The United States wanted Maduro and his tight security entourage out of power and in U.S. custody. It wanted to fracture his immediate protection network, open space for a negotiated political process with opposition and regional actors, and regain leverage over Venezuelan oil and state behavior. What it did not want was any version of an Iraq-style occupation: no extended ground presence in Caracas, no wholesale reengineering of Venezuelan institutions, no long-term U.S. responsibility for governing a broken state.

That compression of political purpose drives everything that follows. If you intend to topple and rebuild, you design for seizure and stewardship of a capital. If you intend to remove a leader and create a shock in the regime’s inner circle, you design for finding, isolating, and extracting that leader at speed then handing the aftermath to others.

Operational Design: Theater Entry vs. Nested Raid

Panama’s Operation Just Cause reflected late–Cold War thinking about joint theater entry. The core problem was how to bring a large force to bear across a small but defended country quickly enough that the enemy could not organize meaningful resistance. The answer was multiple, coordinated blows. Airborne and Ranger units seized airfields and critical nodes. Light infantry and armor moved into urban areas to dismantle PDF units and secure government centers. Psychological operations and information efforts reinforced the perception that resistance was hopeless.

Noriega’s capture, in that design, was important but not singular. He was hunted in the wake of the broader campaign: the regime’s institution was shattered, its military scattered, its capital occupied. The decisive operation was the seizure and neutralization of the entire adversary apparatus, not a single compound.

By 2026, the template in Venezuela had inverted. The decisive act was a predawn raid by a small special operations element. That raid did not occur in a vacuum. It sat inside Operation Southern Spear, a larger interagency and joint campaign built on sanctions, regional diplomacy, an offshore U.S. military buildup, and selective strikes on Venezuelan defenses and security infrastructure. But the theater-wide shaping effort existed to create a window for the raid, not the other way around.

The operational logic ran roughly as follows. First, an intensive period of information preparation of the environment built a detailed picture of Maduro’s movements, safe houses, security rotations, and communications. Second, a short, violent burst of standoff strikes, cyber effects, and electronic warfare blinded parts of Venezuela’s air defense and command systems, sowed confusion, and fixed key units in place. Third, under that cover, a small assault force moved rapidly against the chosen compound, breached, secured the target and key associates, and exfiltrated them to a ship offshore before the regime could react coherently.

In Panama, the raid element was subordinate to the invasion. In Venezuela, the invasion element was everywhere and nowhere, manifest in offshore platforms and regional posture, but the raid was the point.

Force Composition: From Massed Formations to Compressed Elite Teams

The difference in force structure is visible even to a casual observer. Just Cause involved tens of thousands of U.S. troops in theater once you count those already stationed in the Canal Zone and those rapidly introduced. Airborne divisions, Rangers, light infantry, and armored and mechanized units all played roles. Securing multiple airfields and urban districts simultaneously, guarding critical infrastructure, conducting urban raid and cordon-and-search missions, and then supporting the transition government all required substantial numbers.

Even with overwhelming qualitative superiority, Panama was manpower-intensive. If you want to occupy and stabilize key parts of a country, you need people on the ground, in neighborhoods, at checkpoints, and outside key buildings. Noriega’s eventual surrender took place against that backdrop of overwhelming physical presence.

In Venezuela, by contrast, the force that physically seized Maduro was small, dozens of operators rather than brigades, though it was enabled by a much larger ecosystem. That ecosystem included ISR analysts, cyber operators, aircrews, planners, and naval and air assets deployed in the region or on call from longer ranges. But most of that capability never set foot in Caracas.

This illustrates a core feature of contemporary U.S. power: force compression. Effects that once required large formations inside the engagement area can now be delivered by small teams backed by global networks of sensors and shooters. The mass still exists, but it is distributed and often displaced from the point of physical contact. Panama generated decisive effects by putting mass in the capital. Venezuela generated decisive effects by putting mass in the network and a small, precise instrument at the target.

From Platform-Centric to Network-Centric: Kill-Web Operations

The doctrinal underpinning of this shift is the move from platform-centric to network-centric operations. In 1989, precision munitions and sophisticated ISR systems existed, but they had not yet reshaped the character of operations. Each major platform, a fighter, a gunship, a tank, largely found and engaged targets within its own sensor horizon under a relatively slow, hierarchical command-and-control system. Intelligence was powerful but episodic; updates took time to propagate.

In Panama, that meant airborne operations and air support were well planned and coordinated but still bounded by the communications and computing of the era. A Ranger company and an airborne battalion might attack different objectives simultaneously, supported by air, but their view of the wider fight was limited. Sensor-to-shooter links were present but narrow.

By 2026, operations like the Maduro seizure are best understood as manifestations of a kill web, a distributed, multi-node network in which sensors, decision nodes, and shooters are tightly coupled across domains. Satellites, drones, cyber penetrations of security communications, human sources, and signals harvesting all contribute to a live picture of the target environment. That picture is fused and shared in near real time with aircraft, standoff missile units, electronic-warfare platforms, and the special operations team moving toward the compound.

The operators on the ground are no longer executing a plan that freezes the world at the moment of last reconnaissance. They are moving inside a living web that can update them if Maduro shifts location, if a security element behaves unexpectedly, or if an air-defense radar flickers back to life. Likewise, their own actions, breach noises, gunfire, changes in signatures, feed back into the network and shape how supporting fires and ISR are retasked.

Where Just Cause showed what joint operations could do when planned and synchronized, the Maduro raid demonstrates what joint operations can achieve when they are also densely networked. The decisive quality is not any single exquisite platform but the connectivity that allows disparate systems to act as one.

Politics and the Design of Force

The transformation is also inseparable from domestic politics. After Iraq and Afghanistan, sustained large-scale ground interventions have become politically toxic in the United States. Yet presidents still want options for shaping events and neutralizing hostile leaders. The result is a strong preference for operations that are brief, tightly focused, and sold as precise and limited, especially those that can be framed as counter-terrorist or law-enforcement-like actions rather than wars of occupation.

Panama took place in a different political climate. There was concern about casualties and international perception, but the threshold for deploying divisions into a foreign capital was lower. The memory of Vietnam had faded enough, and confidence in the late–Cold War U.S. military was high enough, that a compact invasion to secure the Canal and remove Noriega could be justified and executed without triggering an existential domestic backlash.

By 2026, any operation that resembled Iraq 2.0 was politically dead on arrival. That fact is not a footnote; it is a design parameter. It shapes the questions policymakers ask and the answers their military planners develop. Can we achieve the political effect without occupying the capital? Can we keep the kinetic phase short enough that the American public sees it as a strike, not a war? Can we push the long-term political work onto local actors and regional organizations rather than onto American ground forces?

Those questions favor the kind of force package used in Venezuela: global ISR and strike, special operations, offshore posture, and a small footprint at the decisive point. They disfavor the kind of force package used in Panama: large ground formations, visible occupation, long-term stabilization tasks. Political constraints and military innovation have reinforced each other, pushing the United States toward a raid-first model whenever feasible.

What Noriega and Maduro Reveal About Transformation

Taken together, the Noriega and Maduro cases crystallize several dimensions of U.S. military transformation that deserve to be stated plainly.

The United States has moved from achieving effects through massed ground formations to achieving them through small, elite teams backed by precision strike and pervasive sensing. Mass is not gone, but its physical concentration at the point of contact is no longer the default. Effectiveness now rests less on individual platforms and more on the ability to connect many sensors and shooters into a resilient web. The Maduro raid is as much an expression of that web as it is of the operators who breached the door.

In 1989, removing a hostile head of state meant seizing his capital and dismantling his regime from top to bottom. In 2026, it meant removing the person and his closest protectors while leaving the rest of the state to be managed externally and locally. The United States is increasingly unwilling to carry the burden of post-conflict governance — and that reluctance channels strategy toward operations that end when the target is killed or captured, not when the country is reconstructed.

Operations are also now designed to fit within political narratives of limited, necessary action. The Maduro raid was structured so that policymakers could credibly insist it was a targeted removal of a criminal regime’s leadership, not the opening gambit of a new occupation.

The deeper point is this: between the invasion that toppled Noriega and the raid that seized Maduro, the United States did not simply acquire better weapons. It built a different kind of military instrument, one optimized not for holding ground but for reaching into defended spaces, removing specific individuals, and exiting before the costs of presence begin to accumulate. That instrument is the product of decades of doctrinal evolution, technological investment, and hard operational experience. It is also the product of political learning about what American society will sustain.

Panama represented the apex of the Cold War joint force, heavy, synchronized, and capable of theater-level combined arms warfare even in a small country. Venezuela represents something different: a force whose decisive quality is not its weight but its reach, its speed, and above all its ability to act as a unified sensor-shooter network across vast distances and multiple domains.

What unites both operations, and what remains constant across the transformation, is the underlying American conviction that the right use of force, applied at the right moment, can reshape political outcomes without necessarily reshaping entire societies. Panama tested that conviction with divisions. Venezuela tested it with a raid. The conviction endures. The instrument has changed beyond recognition.

One further observation deserves emphasis. The Iranian operation has now made clear that the kill web design model is not a theoretical construct but a proven operational architecture, one capable of integrating global ISR, standoff strike, cyber effects, and elite ground action into a single, seamless campaign. Venezuela demonstrated the model’s application in the Western Hemisphere; the Iranian operation demonstrated its reach, depth, and scalability in a far more contested environment.

Yet the full measure of what that operation achieved militarily remains to be assessed. The depth of the military action itself, the layering of effects, the sequencing of domains, the precision applied at operational scale, will write the next chapter in the ongoing story of military transformation. Those who seek to understand where warfare is heading should study it closely.

Note: The idea to conduct this comparision was suggested by Murielle Delaporte and reinforced in my conversations with Ed Timperlake, my co-developer of the kill web comcept.

Note: My latest book looks precisely at how military transformation actually works.

Here is the description of the book as provided on Amazon:

Over four decades, Western militaries have chased revolutions in warfare—from the Revolution in Military Affairs and network‑centric warfare to fifth‑generation airpower and today’s drone‑saturated battlefields. Much has been promised. Far less has actually worked in practice.

In Lessons in Military Transformation, Robbin Laird cuts through the rhetoric and asks a harder question: how did transformation really happen inside squadrons, on flight decks, in command centers, and across allied coalitions when theory collided with operational friction and adaptive adversaries? Drawing on decades of field research and direct engagement with operators, commanders, maintainers, and policymakers, he traces an arc from Desert Storm and the early RMA debates to Ukraine’s drone wars and distributed maritime operations.

Through case studies ranging from MAWTS‑1 and 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing to RAF Lossiemouth, Eurofighter modernization, the Aegis global enterprise, tiltrotor and heavy‑lift aviation, Italian fifth‑generation training, Australian force design, and the Coast Guard’s Deepwater experience, Laird shows:

  • Why the most important innovation often comes from practitioners, not planners.
  • How fifth‑generation aircraft, digital helicopters, and autonomous systems only become transformative when embedded in new ecosystems of training, sustainment, and command and control.
  • How allies have quietly led in operational concepts for integration, kill webs, and distributed operations.
  • Why drone warfare in Ukraine and at sea is less a clean break than the latest phase of an unfinished revolution that began with precision strike.

Laird argues that the real shift is not from one technology to another, but from “crisis management” to “chaos management”: from trying to restore stability to learning how to fight, adapt, and deter effectively inside persistent complexity.

Lessons in Military Transformation is essential reading for defense professionals, military leaders, analysts, and informed citizens who want to understand how armed forces actually change and what it will take to stay ahead in an era where learning faster than your adversary is the only lasting advantage.

 

Ocius and the Blue Bottle USV: An Update May 2026

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
05/17/2026

By Robbin Laird

When I first visited the Ocius build facility, it was tucked inside the University of New South Wales, an enthusiastic team of smart young engineers clustered around Robert Dane’s vision of what an uncrewed maritime surface vessel could become. There was genuine energy and real technical imagination, but it had the character of a university lab: what I would call a mom-and-pop operation, where passion was the primary engine. I came away impressed by the people and the concept, somewhat less certain about the path to scale.

My recent visit to Ocius told a very different story. The company has moved into a proper industrial facility in a Sydney business park, and the contrast could not be more stark. This is no longer a university project. It is a production enterprise with real contracts, real customers, and a growth trajectory that reflects how rapidly the world’s navies are waking up to the operational value of uncrewed maritime systems.

I sat down with Robert Brezniak, Ocius’ Chief Growth and Market Development Officer, to understand where the company now stands and what the next phase of growth looks like. The conversation ranged from current contracts to the broader strategic logic of Australia’s maritime situation and why the so-called hull gap, so often treated as a source of national embarrassment, is better understood as one of the most significant strategic opportunities Australia has had in decades.

From Lab to Production Floor

The headline fact is this: Ocius has been awarded a major acquisition contract with the Royal Australian Navy for 40 vessels, to be delivered over five years from this year. Every one of those Bluebottles will be built in the Sydney facility where we spoke.[1],[2] That is not a prototype order. That is not a demonstration contract. That is a production commitment, and it represents a significant vote of confidence by the Royal Australian Navy in the Bluebottle’s capabilities, particularly for counter-undersea threat missions using towed line arrays.

Beyond the Navy contract, Ocius is operating vessels for Maritime Border Command, Australia’s coast guard equivalent, out of an operations center in the same Sydney building. Two vessels are in service with the Royal New Zealand Navy, with strong interest in expanding that relationship. In the United States, the company partners with Thayer Mahan, which operates six Bluebottles and is actively seeking more. Interest is building across Asia — North Asia, Southeast Asia — as well as Europe and the Southwest Pacific.

What has accelerated this international interest is, in part, the Royal Australian Navy contract itself. Other navies that had been watching the concept from a distance, uncertain whether autonomous undersea surveillance at scale was operationally credible, saw the RAN’s decision to commit at volume as a validation. As Brezniak described it: “Since the announcement by the Royal Australian Navy for 40 vessels, we’ve had a lot of interest from other navies who’ve been looking at it as maybe a concept and then realized that the Australian Navy’s backing Ocius to do that undersea surveillance at scale for them.”

The workforce has matured correspondingly. The early talent base from the University of New South Wales remains a source of pride, those were genuinely impressive young engineers, but the company has layered on substantial industry experience. A new head of production has just come aboard. Finance, contracting, business development, supply chain, human resources — all have been professionalized. As Brezniak put it, you have to reinvent the company as it grows because what works at one scale simply does not work at the next.

A Different Kind of Supply Chain

One dimension of the Ocius story that deserves more attention than it usually receives is the supply chain logic underpinning the Bluebottle. This is not a traditional military procurement supply chain — narrow, specialized, dependent on a small set of defence-specific contractors operating on long lead times and at correspondingly high costs.

The Bluebottle is built substantially around commercial off-the-shelf components, chosen for proven performance, ready availability, and cost-effectiveness. This gives Ocius a supply chain that is broader, more resilient, and easier to mobilize than what a capital ship builder deals with. It also reduces costs significantly and expands the pool of potential suppliers. When people talk about Australia’s industrial mobilization capacity or the ability to surge production rapidly in a crisis, this kind of supply chain architecture matters enormously. You are not dependent on a single specialized vendor for a critical component.

There are, of course, parts of the vessel that cannot come off a commercial shelf. The hull, the towed array, the rudder and flipper assembly — these require either in-house production or specialized subcontractors. On the array side, Ocius has worked with a notably diverse set of suppliers: Thayer Mahan, Thales, SEA and Opti11 from Holland. That diversity is itself a strategic asset, giving the company deep comparative knowledge of array performance across different use cases and price points, and positioning it, as Brezniak argued, as a world leader in array deployment on uncrewed surface vessels.

The conceptual point here is important. The Bluebottle is not a platform in the classic sense of a capital ship: a sealed, highly integrated system where the platform and its capabilities are inseparable. It is better understood as a payload delivery vehiclevehicle, and the payload drives the platform’s value, not the reverse. The Bluebottle you see today will look largely the same on the outside in five years. What will have changed — continuously — are the sensors, the arrays, the cameras, the communications architecture, and the software that ties it all together. Payloads that have platforms, as I put it to Brezniak, rather than platforms that have payloads.

Capability That Evolves in Service

This brings us to what I regard as the most analytically important aspect of the Ocius model: the relationship between the company and its operational customers, and how capability is developed and refined through that relationship.

The classic defence acquisition model works something like this: requirements are defined up front, a development program proceeds over years, a platform is eventually delivered, and then it is periodically upgraded on a slow cycle, often five to ten years between significant capability refreshes. The gap between requirement definition and operational deployment can be a decade or more, during which threat environments, technology options, and operational concepts all evolve in ways the original requirements did not anticipate.

Ocius works entirely differently. The 24/7 operations contract with Maritime Border Command has served as a continuous feedback loop between the company and the users of the data the Bluebottle generates. Mission duration has grown from 30 days to well over 100 days as standard. New sensors, new cameras, new radar configurations, aerial drones, all have been trialled in service, evaluated against real operational requirements, and either incorporated or rejected based on actual evidence rather than PowerPoint projections. The vessel and its payloads are being shaped, continuously, by the people who depend on the data they produce.

As Brezniak described it: “The feedback loop that we get from working with and talking to the users of the data — the users have the need — and feeding that back into the vessel is really important for both sides.”

I want to be precise about what this is and what it is not. It is not prototyping. Prototyping is a pre-operational activity aimed at demonstrating feasibility. What Ocius is doing is delivering operational capability today and evolving that capability within live operations, building for tomorrow inside the operations of today. The iteration happens at operational speed, not acquisition program speed. This is an entirely different model, and it is the right model for maritime autonomous systems, where unit costs are relatively low and the pace of technology change in sensors, software, and autonomy is rapid enough that a ten-year acquisition cycle is not just inefficient but operationally disqualifying.

The contrasting example is instructive. InSitu’s ScanEagle program with the U.S. Marine Corps was structured as a data services contract — InSitu provided data, not a platform, which left the company free to evolve the aircraft continuously as technology and mission requirements changed. When the U.S. Navy later sought to develop the Blackjack system under a platform ownership model, they found they could not iterate at the speed the system required. Blackjack never achieved operational status. The lesson, not widely understood, is that calling something a platform and managing it like a platform when it is fundamentally a data-delivery tool is a path to obsolescence before delivery.

Surveillance, Deception, and the Mesh Fleet Concept

Beyond the specific Bluebottle program, our conversation touched on what this class of systems makes possible operationally and the conceptual leap required to fully understand it.

Brezniak articulated the core value proposition clearly: “With a task force, if you lose a vessel, you’ve lost a huge capability, you’ve lost a lot of lives, a lot of money. If you lose a Bluebottle, you’ve lost a pixel on a screen. You’ve still got your other pixels. You’ve still got your data coming back from your other vessels. You’ve only lost one pixel. So the mission continues.”

This is not a marginal improvement over the existing model. It is a fundamentally different architecture for maritime surveillance. And it extends, as Brezniak noted, into the domain of deception as well as detection. A mesh of uncrewed surface vessels, operating as acoustic and electronic sensor platforms, can simultaneously surveil a large maritime area and, if configured appropriately, present an adversary with a confusing signature picture, multiple potential contacts to track, assess, and respond to, at a fraction of the cost of the crewed assets that would otherwise be needed to generate that kind of presence.

Surveillance and deception are, in this context, two sides of the same operational coin.

I spent considerable time during one visit to MARTAC studying imagery of multiple autonomous vessels operating together at sea. It took me several hours to understand what I was actually looking at. There was no epicenter. There was no single vessel whose destruction would collapse the capability. What I was looking at was a mesh and that is a genuinely different mental furniture for maritime operations. Destroying one node in a mesh does not destroy the mesh. This is not how anyone has historically thought about a surface task force, where the flagship or the capital ship at the center is both the source of command authority and the primary target.

The Hull Gap as Strategic Opportunity

I have been coming to Australia since 2014, and I have watched the evolution of its maritime capability with considerable attention. The current situation, a significant hull gap, an extended period in which Australia will not have anywhere near the number of crewed capital ships it will eventually require, is regularly framed as a national failure, a consequence of delayed decisions and inconsistent procurement strategy. There is something to that critique.

But I want to offer a different frame. The hull gap is also a strategic opportunity, perhaps one of the most significant Australia has had in a generation, to build the doctrinal, operational, and industrial foundation for a genuinely new kind of maritime force before the new hulls arrive.

The frigates and the AUKUS submarines are coming, eventually. When they do arrive, the question will be whether they enter a fleet that already knows how to think about hybrid operations — manned and unmanned, networked, mesh-structured, with payloads and data flows organized across multiple nodes — or whether they enter a fleet that is still operating with the mental furniture of the twentieth-century capital ship navy, and must learn the new model from scratch while simultaneously absorbing a major platform transition.

This decade is the window to answer that question correctly. Autonomous systems like the Bluebottle are available now. The operational experience is accumulating now. The concepts of operation for how mesh fleets connect with land-based assets, air assets, and crewed maritime platforms can be developed now, not in ten years when the new hulls are delivered, but in the years before, so that when the new hulls arrive, they enter an environment already organized to leverage what they bring.

My work on military transformation suggests it takes roughly five years after a new platform enters service to understand how to use it, and ten years to fully integrate it with the wider force. Starting that learning process now, with autonomous systems as the leading edge, gives Australia a running start on the transformation the new crewed fleet will require.

Brezniak put the practical dimension of this simply: “We can provide meaningful capability through uncrewed systems built with fiberglass that can be done more quickly and more cheaply and providing effect today.” That is not a consolation prize for the absence of capital ships. It is a genuine capability, available on a timeline measured in years, not decades and building industrial depth, supply chain resilience, and operational knowledge that will serve Australia well regardless of when the new hulls arrive.

The question is whether Australia’s defence establishment, its government, and its public discourse can make that conceptual shift: from treating the hull gap as a failure to be endured to treating it as an opportunity to be seized. Ocius, the Royal Australian Navy’s Maritime Autonomous Systems Unit, and the broader community of autonomous maritime developers are doing their part. The rest requires strategic imagination and institutional will.

[1] The Ocius Bluebottle USVs are named after the Bluebottle marine animal (known as a Portuguese Man of War in Northern Hemisphere) that lives at sea, uses its body as a sail and carries a sting in its tail.

[2] The Australian Minister for Defence Industry, the Hon Pat Conroy said of the “sting” (11MAR26): ‘Just as when you see at one of our beaches a bluebottle jellyfish, that’s a signal to get out of the ocean, I want potential adversaries to realise when they see one of these, it’s a signal to get out of our ocean’.

Ghost Shark and the Strategic Opportunity: A Conversation with David Goodrich of Anduril Australia

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
05/15/2026

The transition from prototype to production is rarely as simple as it sounds in procurement documents. But for Anduril Australia, the journey with Ghost Shark — the large autonomous underwater vehicle now in steady-state production for the Royal Australian Navy — represents something far more consequential than a contract milestone. It is the opening chapter of a fundamental redesign of how Australia thinks about maritime power.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with David Goodrich, Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Anduril Australia and Asia Pacific, in Sydney. Goodrich leads Anduril’s growth and operations across Australia and the broader Indo-Pacific, bringing to the role a career spanning defence, infrastructure, and technology. The conversation ranged from the specifics of the Ghost Shark program to the broader strategic logic of what Australia is attempting to build and the risks if it fails to seize the moment.

From Prototype to Production at Scale

The most immediate news from the conversation concerns where the Ghost Shark program now stands. In September of last year, Anduril Australia was awarded a $1.7 billion contract to deliver Ghost Shark at scale. Three months after contract award, the company delivered its first production variant. As Goodrich put it plainly: “We are now in steady-state production.”

The numbers in the contract remain classified, but Goodrich was clear that the company is delivering “dozens and dozens” of Ghost Sharks under the agreement. What is publicly known is the program’s design philosophy: every single year, Ghost Shark will be updated and upgraded, in continuous partnership with Navy operators who set mission requirements and capability priorities.

This is a crucial distinction from the traditional acquisition model. The power of the program, as Goodrich explained, is not a fixed capability delivered on a schedule. It is a continuously evolving system driven by operational experience. “We do not design based on anything other than operational experience,” he said. “There is no other way.” The operators are not passive recipients of a finished product. They are the driving force behind what Ghost Shark becomes.

This philosophy mirrors what I have been arguing for many years about the difference between the kill chain approach — where platforms are acquired as exquisite, infrequently-upgraded systems — and the kill web approach, where adaptability, integration, and continuous software evolution are the core of capability. Goodrich acknowledged this directly, noting that discussions about production were the first thing on the agenda when we initially met. For those of us who have long argued for affordable mass working in hybrid combination with exquisite capabilities, it is genuinely significant to see a major program built from the outset around this philosophy.

The Hybrid Fleet and the Balance Being Recast

One of the most important threads in our conversation concerned what the Ghost Shark program represents in the context of Australia’s broader maritime posture. Goodrich was careful not to claim more clarity than currently exists, but he was emphatic that the fundamental direction is understood: “The numbers that we are producing to for the five-year contract will be vastly exceeded in the future. They will have to be.”

The balance between exquisite, crewed platforms and autonomous systems is being recast but we are at the very early stages of that transition. It is worth being precise about what “hybrid” means in this context. It does not mean autonomous systems replace capital ships. It means the fleet of the future will be organized around the integration of manned and unmanned assets, with each type performing the missions it is best suited for and each enhancing the effectiveness of the other.

Goodrich was direct about this: “Of course there’ll be no all-autonomous force. It’s always a hybrid.” The analytical question is where the balance should be set and that question cannot be answered in the abstract. It can only be answered through operational experience, mission assignment, and the kind of iterative learning that a continuous-update program like Ghost Shark is uniquely positioned to generate.

The Hull Gap as Strategic Opportunity

Perhaps the most important framing to emerge from our conversation concerns what I have been calling the “hull gap” or the period in which Australia will not have anywhere near the number of capital ships it will eventually require, as legacy vessels age out and the new frigates and AUKUS submarines are still years from delivery. This gap is often framed as a problem, a period of strategic vulnerability to be endured.

I want to reframe it as an opportunity and Goodrich agreed. The hull gap, if seized intelligently, is a historic window for reinventing how Australia’s maritime fleet operates. Rather than simply waiting for the new hulls to arrive and then reverting to a replacement-fleet logic, the ADF and the Navy have the chance to spend the next five to ten years developing operational doctrine, acquiring practical experience, and building institutional knowledge around the integration of autonomous and manned maritime assets. If that work is done, then when the Mogami-class frigates and the AUKUS submarines do arrive, they will be coming into a force that already understands how to operate in a hybrid fleet concept, not discovering it for the first time.

Goodrich expressed confidence that this journey has begun. Senior Navy commanders and fleet leaders understand what is needed. The goal, as he described it, is not to create an autonomous systems unit as a “special snowflake” off to one side while the “real” Navy continues as before. The intent is integration: Ghost Shark as a normal part of fleet business, not a laboratory curiosity. “Royal Australian Navy has got it,” he said. “Fleet command has got it.”

But the challenge of realizing this opportunity cannot be underestimated. It requires, as I put it to Goodrich and as he immediately confirmed, both operational redesign and acquisition redesign and the two must happen together, driven by the operational voice rather than the acquisition voice. “The operational voice needs to be louder than the acquisition voice,” he said. “At the moment it is always the acquisition voice that has the volume and controls what happens. Reform in that area is absolutely crucial, and I don’t see it happening at the speed it needs to.”

Enterprise Transformation and the People Problem

There is a dimension of this challenge that goes beyond organizational charts and procurement regulations. Goodrich raised it with characteristic directness: to redesign the enterprise, you need to bring new types of people into it. If the same people with the same mental frameworks continue to fill the same roles, you get the same enterprise printed again. This is not a small point. It is arguably the central challenge of military transformation.

The Australian Defence Force is a small force by global standards. Australia is a small country by population. Its defence budget, while growing and the recent budget increases have been welcomed and are significant remains modest relative to the major powers it must deter or work alongside. In that context, every decision about where to invest, which capabilities to prioritize, and how to organize institutional learning matters enormously.

The external lessons from Ukraine and from the recent conflict involving Iran are instructive here. What they demonstrate, above all, is the exceptional importance of adaptability — operational adaptability and design adaptability, pursued at speed. Goodrich agreed with this framing entirely. The force that learns faster, adjusts faster, and integrates new capabilities faster will have an asymmetric advantage that no amount of exquisite but slowly-upgraded hardware can fully compensate for.

A Word on Public Discourse

One element of this conversation that I want to highlight concerns the public narrative around Ghost Shark and autonomous maritime systems more broadly. As operational and manufacturing capabilities develop, there is a need for some form of public discourse to accompany that progress, not to compromise operational security or hand adversaries a road map, but to ensure that the Australian public understands what is being built on their behalf and why it matters.

This is not a trivial challenge. There is a real tension between transparency and operational security, and Goodrich acknowledged it clearly. But a mysterious force operating without any public rationale is a force whose political sustainability is fragile. The ADF and the government will need to find a way to articulate, at an appropriate level of generality, what these systems are doing for Australia’s security and why the investment is sound. That articulation will itself be part of building the public confidence that sustains the long-term program.

The Stakes

The Ghost Shark program is genuinely significant, not just as a capability, but as a proof of concept for a new way of building and sustaining military systems. Anduril Australia has delivered on what it promised, which matters: it has given the government confidence that backing this company produces results. The $1.7 billion contract, the production milestone, the continuous upgrade architecture, these are real achievements in a domain where real achievements are rare.

But the larger significance lies in what comes next. The next five to ten years — the hull gap period — represent a one-off strategic opportunity to reinvent Australian maritime power. If the ADF, the Navy, and the government treat this period as merely a difficult interlude before the “real” fleet arrives, the opportunity will be lost. If they treat it as a design laboratory, an operational proving ground, and a period of genuine enterprise transformation, Australia may emerge from it with a maritime capability that is genuinely suited to the threat environment of the 2030s and beyond.

The preconditions for that outcome are being laid. As Goodrich put it: “We have started that journey.” The question is whether the institutional momentum, the operational voice, the acquisition reform, and the public narrative can be brought together at the speed the strategic moment demands.

That is not a question for Anduril to answer alone. It is a question for Australia.

Note: This is the first of a five part series on the hull gap as a strategic opportunity.

The U.S. Marine Corps and the Australia–Indonesia Amphibious Turn: Quiet Co-Invention in the Littorals

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
05/14/2026

By Robbin Laird

The recent Australia–Indonesia Defence Cooperation Agreement and the expansion of Exercise Keris Woomera have largely been framed as a bilateral story: two neighbours with a complicated history discovering that they now need each other to manage the shared archipelagic space between them. That framing is accurate as far as it goes. But it leaves out a third actor whose influence is woven through nearly every aspect of what Australia brings to the littoral and, by extension, what Indonesia is now seeing and absorbing.

The United States Marine Corps is the unspoken third leg of a co-invention triangle linking US, Australian, and Indonesian amphibious practice. It does not appear in the order of battle for Keris Woomera. Its flag is not on the beach. Yet the intellectual and operational DNA of the exercise traces back, in substantial measure, to a decade of sustained Marine engagement in northern Australia and across the Indo-Pacific.

The USMC in the Background: Concepts and Presence

Formally, Keris Woomera is an ADF–TNI activity nested within Australia’s Indo-Pacific Endeavour deployment, not a US-led exercise. Both Canberra and Jakarta are deliberate about this framing. Each has compelling reasons to demonstrate that it can plan and execute complex amphibious operations without Washington in the lead.

But deliberate framing does not change operational reality. Over the past decade, Marine Rotational Force–Darwin has made northern Australia a sustained laboratory for US and Australian experimentation in expeditionary operations—from traditional amphibious assaults to humanitarian assistance and disaster relief scenarios. The same Marine Corps wrestling with Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations, stand-in forces, distributed fires, and contested logistics has been shaping how the ADF thinks about land power in the littoral.

The evidence is not subtle. Australian Army work on littoral operations, and the creation of a new Littoral Manoeuvre Group, sit squarely within this intellectual ecosystem. ADF amphibious standard operating procedures, command and control constructs, and scenario design have been refined through repeated contact with Marines during Talisman Sabre and related bilateral activities. Those are precisely the tools and mental models now being applied in Keris Woomera alongside Indonesia.

Trilateral Practice: The Same Beaches, Different Flags

Beyond doctrine, there is concrete trilateral practice that ties the USMC, ADF, and TNI together even when they are not all on the same manifest.

In US-led exercises such as Super Garuda Shield, Indonesia hosts a multinational force, including U.S. Army and Marine elements and at times Australian participants—for combined armour and amphibious training along the East Java coast. Marine Rotational Force–Darwin has run humanitarian-oriented amphibious training alongside ADF and TNI elements in northern Australia, developing shared skills in civil-military coordination and disaster relief that map directly onto the second-phase scenarios of Keris Woomera.

These activities form a lattice of shared experience. Marines are often present when Australians and Indonesians first attempt something difficult together, or they serve as the reference point against which a given evolution is benchmarked. Keris Woomera then becomes the venue where Australia and Indonesia attempt to reproduce or adapt that practice in a deliberately non-US-led environment—retaining the concepts while asserting the bilateral relationship.

Co-Invention Across Three Lanes

The result is a three-lane co-invention cycle in which ideas, people, and techniques flow continuously across overlapping relationships.

In the U.S.–Australia lane, USMC and ADF experiment with EABO-style concepts, land-based anti-ship fires, and distributed command and logistics from bases in northern Australia, supported by platforms such as the Amphibious Combat Vehicle and Australian LHDs. In the U.S.–Indonesia lane, Super Garuda Shield and related training expose the TNI to US joint and amphibious standards across coastal East Java. In the Australia–Indonesia lane, the Defence Cooperation Agreement and Keris Woomera apply a carefully selected subset of these techniques in a bilateral setting that foregrounds archipelagic geography and political sensitivity—with Australia in the lead and Indonesia as full partner.

This is not a formal program.. It is an emergent property of overlapping exercises and relationships. The USMC provides a conceptual and technical impulse; the ADF adapts it to Australian strategy and geography; Indonesia engages with the adapted model while retaining a direct line into U.S. practices through its own bilateral access. The co-invention is genuine on all sides—each partner is transforming what it receives rather than simply replicating it.

Advantages and Frictions

This triangular arrangement carries real advantages and frictions that are often glossed over.

On the positive side, it accelerates learning at every node. Indonesian officers and NCOs are not merely absorbing Australian methods; they are absorbing a hybrid of USMC and ADF practice filtered through their own archipelagic requirements. That gives Jakarta a richer menu of options as it seeks to professionalise the TNI and modernise its amphibious and coastal forces. For Australia, the ability to demonstrate that its littoral formations can operate effectively with both the USMC and the TNI with compatible procedures and shared scenario design is a powerful operational and political asset. It positions the ADF as a connector force capable of knitting together U.S. and regional partners in precisely the spaces that matter most to Australian defence strategy.

But tensions exist. The more USMC concepts drive the ADF’s amphibious transformation, the greater the risk that Australian–Indonesian cooperation will be read in Jakarta as an extension of U.S. force-posture objectives, especially if trilateral activities are not carefully calibrated. Indonesia’s longstanding sensitivity to foreign basing arrangements and formal alliance structures has not disappeared. The Defence Cooperation Agreement and Keris Woomera are framed as mutual capacity-building and military diplomacy precisely to reassure Indonesian domestic audiences that they are not backdoor alignment mechanisms.

Equally, U.S. planners will need to accept that some of the most strategically significant littoral work in the Australia–Indonesia nexus will occur without U.S. flags on the skyline. That is a feature, not a deficiency, of a maturing regional security architecture. Washington’s concepts travel furthest when local partners can adapt and own them.

Where the USMC Piece Goes Next

Looking forward, three areas stand out where the USMC’s role in this triangular story could deepen, if politics, resources, and trust align.

The first is littoral fires and sea denial. Marines and Australian forces are already experimenting with land-based anti-ship missiles and dispersed firing units in northern Australia. Bringing Indonesian observers and eventually small units into selected aspects of that experimentation, within the limits of U.S. export and technology-transfer constraints, would directly shape TNI thinking about coastal defence and archipelagic sea-denial.

The second is distributed humanitarian and civil-military operations. Trilateral HADR exercises out of Darwin provide a politically comfortable setting to refine distributed command, logistics, and information-sharing under operational stress. The same architectures that move aid and evacuees can, with different payloads and permissions, move precision weapons and reconnaissance assets. In this space, USMC, ADF, and TNI officers are already building a shared mental model of how to manage complexity and contested access in littoral environments.

The third is professional military education. More Indonesian officers moving through courses and attachments that expose them simultaneously to USMC and ADF perspectives would institutionalise the co-invention process rather than leaving it dependent on episodic exercises. That is where ideas about EABO, littoral manoeuvre, and archipelagic defence can be debated, contested, and genuinely adapted, rather than transmitted as finished product.

A Quiet but Consequential Role

In public messaging, Keris Woomera will continue to be presented as a story about Jakarta and Canberra building trust across a historically complicated relationship. That story is true and important. It deserves to be told on its own terms.

But underneath it, the U.S. Marine Corps plays a quiet and consequential role: providing much of the conceptual grammar and operational experience from which both the ADF and the TNI are constructing their own amphibious dialects. The exercise is bilateral in ownership and presentation. The intellectual foundation is trilateral in character.

If Australia and Indonesia are co-inventing amphibious power in the archipelago, they are doing so in a workshop whose tools, blueprints, and many of the instructors carry a USMC stamp whether or not the eagle, globe, and anchor is visible on the beach on any given day.

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Fight Tonight: Exploiting Australia’s Strategic Advantage

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
05/13/2026

Australia’s “fight tonight” question has become urgent. Fight Tonight: Exploiting Australia’s Strategic Advantage distils the 23 April 2026 Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminar, where practitioners, commanders, industry and allies examined what the ADF can actually deploy, sustain and adapt in the opening weeks of a major Indo‑Pacific conflict.

The report argues that “fight tonight” is a demanding whole‑of‑nation standard, not a slogan. It shows how compressed warning times and China’s rapid build‑up are eroding the comfort that high‑end war is a distant contingency, and how geography, industry, alliances and critical infrastructure must be organised to turn Australia’s home‑team advantages into usable combat power at speed.

Anchored by Mike Pezzullo’s “ten months, not ten years” challenge, Fight Tonight forces a choice between early preparation and dangerous improvisation under fire.