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

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
09/25/2026

By Robbin Laird

There are dates that carry weight beyond the events that fall on them, and September 11 is one of them.

For anyone born in the last sixty years, the date needs no elaboration: it means the destruction of the Twin Towers, the wounding of the Pentagon, the field in Shanksville, and the opening morning of what became a two-decade war.

But September 11 has another entry in the ledger of Western history, one buried deep enough in memory that most people, even most students of military affairs, have never encountered it: September 11, 1565, the day the Ottoman fleet finally withdrew from the waters around Malta, ending the Great Siege that had begun almost four months earlier under Suleiman the Magnificent.

The coincidence of calendar dates is, on its face, just that: a coincidence. Nothing connects the Gregorian date on which a sixteenth-century armada limped out of Grand Harbour to the date on which nineteen hijackers boarded four American aircraft in 2001.

But coincidences of this kind are worth pausing on, not because they prove anything mystical about history, but because they offer a disciplined excuse to hold two moments side by side and ask what each reveals about the other about how civilizations under existential pressure behave, about what “victory” and “defeat” mean in protracted contests, and about how the West has narrated its confrontations with power projected from the eastern Mediterranean and beyond.

The Siege That Nearly Wasn’t Remembered

The Great Siege of Malta is one of those events that once occupied the same rank in European memory that Stalingrad or Midway occupy in twentieth-century memory, a battle understood, in its own time, as civilization-defining. Voltaire’s line that “nothing is better known than the siege of Malta” was not hyperbole for its era; it was simply true.

A tiny garrison of Knights Hospitaller and Maltese irregulars, numbering perhaps six to eight thousand, held out against an Ottoman expeditionary force several times its size, a force dispatched by an empire at the height of its Mediterranean reach, commanded by veterans of Rhodes and Preveza, intent on erasing the last forward base from which Christian corsairs harried Ottoman shipping lanes.

The siege was not won cleanly or early. Fort St. Elmo fell. The defenders were reduced to a fraction of their starting strength.

What broke the siege was not a single battle but exhaustion compounding exhaustion, the Ottoman force worn down by disease, by the death of its most capable admiral, Turgut Reis, by the onset of the sailing season’s closing weeks, and finally by the arrival of a modest relief force under Don García de Toledo.

By early September the outcome was no longer seriously contested, What remained was the mechanics of withdrawal. The fleet’s departure is variously dated across the surviving accounts, some sources have the bulk of it clearing Marsamuscetto Harbour on the 11th, others place the final ships gone by the 13th, but the 11th has become the date most consistently cited as the effective end of the siege, and it is the date inscribed on the modern commemorations Malta still holds each year.

What matters for this article is less the precise hour of departure than what the withdrawal represented: the first unambiguous check on Ottoman westward momentum in a generation, delivered not by a great power but by a militant religious order defending a rock the Ottomans themselves considered barely worth the name of island. It did not end the Ottoman-Habsburg contest for Lepanto was still six years away, Vienna still 118 years off but it broke a psychological spell. Suleiman’s fleets, until Malta, had seemed unstoppable. After Malta, they were merely formidable.

The Asymmetry Between the Two Elevenths

Here the comparison with 2001 becomes genuinely instructive, precisely because the two events sit on opposite sides of a strategic ledger. Malta 1565 was a siege, a sustained, symmetrical military campaign in which one organized state power attempted to physically seize territory from another organized power, using armies, fleets, and artillery arrayed in the conventional grammar of early modern war. It ended in a battlefield decision: the besieging force withdrew because it had been defeated in the field.

September 11, 2001 was not a siege in that sense at all. It was a single, asymmetric strike by a non-state actor, executed with the machinery of civil aviation rather than fleets or armies, aimed not at seizing ground but at producing psychological and economic shock disproportionate to the physical means employed. Malta was won and lost by attrition over 108 days; 9/11 was decided in roughly 102 minutes.

Malta’s outcome was legible immediately: the fleet sailed away, the siege was over. The strategic outcome of 9/11 took twenty years to fully play out, and arguably is still being adjudicated by the trajectory of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the broader reordering of American strategic attention that followed.

This asymmetry is the point, not an inconvenience to the comparison.

It illustrates how dramatically the character of civilizational confrontation has changed between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries, from set-piece siege warfare, in which the defending side’s endurance was itself the decisive instrument, to a landscape in which a handful of operatives could compress centuries of siege logic into a single morning, and in which the “siege” that followed — the Global War on Terror — stretched not for four months but for two decades, fought without walls, without a Grand Harbour to defend, and without a single date on which anyone could say, as Malta’s defenders could say on the 11th of September 1565, that the enemy fleet had gone.

What the Convergence Is Useful for Analytically

It would be a mistake to lean on the date convergence for more meaning than it can bear. Suleiman’s Ottoman Empire and the ideology behind the 2001 attacks are not the same civilizational actor separated by centuries, and treating them as a continuous “East versus West” thread, a temptation some commentators indulged in the years after 2001, flattens histories that deserve to be read on their own terms. The Knights of St. John were fighting to hold a fortress island against an imperial navy; al-Qaeda in 2001 was a stateless network exploiting the very interconnectedness of the modern world that the Ottoman Empire never possessed and never needed.

Where the convergence earns its keep is as a discipline for thinking about resilience and about the deceptive comfort of “decisive” dates. Malta’s defenders got their decisive date, September 11, 1565, and even then the wider contest with Ottoman power ran on for more than a century afterward, through Lepanto, through the second failed siege of Vienna in 1683, through a slow Ottoman retreat that took generations to complete.

The lesson worth carrying into any assessment of the post-9/11 period is that single dates, however dramatic, rarely close a strategic contest; they open a phase of it.

The Knights of Malta understood this instinctively, Valletta itself, the fortified capital built in the years immediately after the siege with money that poured in from a grateful Christian Europe, was constructed not in celebration but in anticipation of the next assault.

The West’s institutional response after 2001, new intelligence architectures, new alliance postures, two decades of continuous operations, reflected the same instinct, however imperfectly executed: a victory, or a survival, is not an ending. It is an instruction to fortify for what comes next.

That, more than the calendar itself, is the convergence worth holding onto.

Adaptation Is Not the Same as Preparedness

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
09/24/2026

The first installment in this series on General Pasquale Preziosa’s foreword to The Unfinished Pillar takes up the argument that gives the book its title and its sharpest edge.

The unfinished character of the European pillar, Preziosa argues, was never primarily an institutional story.

It is a story about the growing distance between political structure and strategic capacity.

He argued that Robbin Laird’s original analysis dates to the last years of the Cold War, when the strategic architecture that had structured Europe for four decades was dissolving. The questions that produced it — how to build a meaningful European defense capacity within the Atlantic Alliance, how to convert economic and industrial weight into usable military power — have returned under conditions the original analysis could not have anticipated: major war on the continent, renewed nuclear coercion, and open uncertainty over how responsibilities within the Alliance will be distributed going forward.

What makes the book valuable, in Preziosa’s reading, is precisely that it isn’t a straight retrospective. It places the strategic imagination of 1991 — actors reasoning before they knew how events would unfold — directly beside the strategic reality that took thirty-five years to arrive. History, predictably, didn’t move in a straight line.

The European pillar was neither completed nor abandoned. NATO enlarged. Political consultation deepened. The European Union acquired security and defense mechanisms that would have been difficult to imagine at the outset of the 1990s.

And yet, across the same period, Europe allowed much of the military and industrial substance required for large-scale direct defense to erode.

That divergence. institutional adaptation running ahead of strategic completion, is the thread that runs through the whole foreword, and it’s worth sitting with before moving further into the series.

A Pillar That Adapted Well and Still Fell Behind

The post-Cold War Alliance adapted remarkably well to the missions it was actually handed: enlargement, crisis management, counterterrorism, stabilization, expeditionary warfare. What it didn’t do is convert that adaptation into the capabilities a different strategic environment would eventually require. Continental warfighting capacity, ammunition stocks, industrial depth, reinforcement infrastructure, the sheer ability to generate force over time, all of it declined even as European political integration continued to deepen.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine didn’t create that gap. It exposed the accumulated consequences of a divergence that had been building for a generation, and forced the Alliance to adapt under the pressure of sustained war rather than on its own schedule.

Preziosa’s framing here is deliberately precise: the unfinished pillar is not an institutional project left incomplete at the end of the Cold War. Its unfinished character lies in the gap between political structures and strategic capacity between building institutions and being able to generate, sustain, and regenerate military power. Finishing the pillar today, in this reading, cannot mean completing the architecture imagined in the 1980s. It has to mean redefining what the pillar is for, under conditions radically different from the ones that produced the original design.

The Core Argument: Adaptation Is Not Preparedness

This is where the foreword makes its most consequential move, and the one that gives this installment its title. It would be easy to read Europe’s post-Cold War record as a story of failure to adapt.

Preziosa argues the opposite is closer to the truth, and more troubling for it: NATO adapted very effectively, just to one particular strategic environment, not to the one that eventually arrived.

The Alliance’s expeditionary transformation after 2001 was real. It became more deployable, more interoperable, and accumulated genuine experience sustaining multinational operations far from member territory. Those adaptations answered real strategic requirements of the period.

But they also shaped force structures, procurement priorities, logistics, command systems, training, professional experience, and political expectations around an assumption that territorial war in Europe was remote, that warning time would be sufficient, that supply chains would hold, and that high-intensity conflict against a peer competitor was increasingly unlikely.

None of those assumptions were unreasonable at the time they were made. That’s precisely the point.

The problem was never that NATO failed to change.

The problem is that an institution can become more capable and less prepared at the same time and that successful adaptation to a given set of conditions is not the same thing as adaptive capacity, the underlying ability to keep changing as the environment itself keeps moving.

The Cost of Optimizing for the Present

Preziosa calls this accumulated cost an adaptation debt: the deferred strategic price of optimizing for today’s requirements while allowing the capabilities, knowledge, infrastructure, industrial capacity, and organizational alternatives needed for other possible futures to quietly decline. Efficiency eliminates redundancy. Specialization reduces diversity. Institutional success reinforces the very assumptions that most need to stay open to challenge.

That debt is invisible for as long as the environment keeps validating the assumptions embedded in force structure, industrial policy, and doctrine. It becomes visible, and expensive, the moment those assumptions stop holding and by then the clock has already started on a much harder problem, because different parts of a strategic system move at very different speeds. Governments can shift policy in months. Military doctrine takes longer to absorb. Ammunition production lines, transportation infrastructure, industrial skills, procurement systems, reserve structures, and strategic culture can take years or decades to rebuild.

Strategic systems, in other words, have memory. Past choices remain embedded in factories, organizations, professional identities, supply chains, budgets, and expectations. When the environment changes, strategy doesn’t start from a blank page. It has to work through the accumulated material and institutional consequences of assumptions made years or decades earlier.

The shocks of 2014 and 2022, Preziosa suggests, shouldn’t be understood as moments when the strategic environment suddenly changed. They were moments when transformations already underway became impossible to keep interpreting through the assumptions of the previous order.

Next in the Series

The next installment picks up where this one leaves off: Preziosa’s treatment of strategy itself as a wager made before its consequences are known, and why the relationship between strategic options, compatible at one stage of a transition, harder to hold together as the system evolves, is the more demanding problem sitting underneath the adaptation-debt argument.

 

The Unfinished Pillar: Why a 1991 Argument Still Matters

Posted on | by Robbin Laird

By Robbin Laird

There are books whose relevance to the moment of publication is a matter of good timing, and there are books whose relevance was built in from the start because the argument they’re built on never stopped being tested.

The Unfinished Pillar belongs to the second category.

The book’s core material dates to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the strategic architecture that had structured Europe for four decades was dissolving in real time. That original analysis asked a specific question: could Europe build a meaningful defense capacity of its own within the Atlantic Alliance, one that matched its economic and industrial weight? The question was shelved, not answered, as the Cold War ended and the “peace dividend” reshaped Western priorities for the next three decades.

The Unfinished Pillar is not a nostalgia project revisiting that shelved question.

It is a three-part structure: the original 1991 strategic assessment, reproduced as it was written capturing what informed actors believed before they knew how the story would turn out set alongside a full rewrite that brings the analysis into the present, and framed by a retrospective assessment of what actually happened across the intervening thirty-five years.

The result is less a history of European defense cooperation than a controlled experiment in strategic foresight: what did the architects of European defense expect in 1991, what did they get, and why does the gap matter now that Europe is once again confronted with major war on the continent, nuclear coercion, and hard questions about the durability of the Atlantic relationship?

A Foreword From Someone Who Lived the Adaptation

The book’s foreword comes from General (ret.) Pasquale Preziosa, former Chief of Staff of the Italian Air Force someone who spent a career inside the institution the book is examining, watching NATO adapt to enlargement, counterterrorism, and expeditionary warfare, and then watching the strategic ground shift again after 2014 and 2022.

Preziosa’s foreword does something a conventional book introduction rarely attempts: it doesn’t just summarize the argument, it extends it.

His central claim is that the European “pillar” was never simply an unfinished institutional project interrupted at the end of the Cold War. Institutions survived and even deepened — NATO enlarged, the EU acquired security mechanisms unimaginable in 1991.

What eroded instead was the material and industrial substance behind those institutions: continental warfighting capacity, ammunition stocks, reinforcement infrastructure, the ability to generate and regenerate military power over time. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine didn’t create that gap. It exposed one that had been accumulating, unremarked, for a generation.

From there, Preziosa builds an argument with real teeth: that an alliance can adapt very effectively to one strategic environment and become less prepared for the next one at the same time. NATO’s post-2001 expeditionary transformation was genuinely successful and that very success shaped procurement, doctrine, and professional experience around an assumption that territorial war in Europe was remote. Successful adaptation, in other words, can be the mechanism that produces the next vulnerability.

He calls this an “adaptation debt” or a deferred strategic cost that stays invisible exactly as long as the environment keeps validating the assumptions built into it.

Why This Argument Travels Well Beyond Europe

What makes the foreword worth serializing on its own, separate from the book itself, is that Preziosa doesn’t stop at diagnosis.

He works through the practical implications: how the center of gravity within European defense has shifted from the Franco-German relationship toward a genuinely networked pillar, with the Nordics, Poland, and even Ukraine contributing distinct forms of strategic value; why NATO, the EU, and smaller coalitions need to be understood as functionally differentiated rather than competing for the same job; why deterrence has what he calls an “industrial clock” that political cycles rarely match and why the deepest form of strategic atrophy is cognitive or the quiet erosion of expertise and institutional memory that happens whenever a threat appears to recede.

The foreword’s final move connects directly back to a body of work readers here will recognize: the shift from crisis management — an approach built for a stable environment with contained, resolvable disruptions — to what Preziosa, drawing on the book’s own framework, refers to chaos management, where instability is structural rather than episodic and each crisis changes the conditions under which the next one unfolds.

Finishing the pillar, in this reading, was never going to mean arriving at a final institutional design.

It means building a permanent capacity to generate, regenerate, and reconfigure power as the strategic environment keeps moving.

What’s Ahead

Over the coming weeks, this series will work through Preziosa’s foreword section by section:

  • The adaptation-debt argument and what it means for preparedness;
  • The networked, post-Franco-German geography of European defense;
  • The industrial and temporal dimensions of strategic power;
  • The cognitive erosion that accompanies every peace dividend;
  • And the case for why democratic systems’ real advantage lies not in diversity itself but in the capacity to convert that diversity into coherent action.

The series closes where Preziosa’s foreword closes with the argument that finishing the pillar was never about completing an architecture, but about acquiring the permanent capacity to keep adapting when the next transformation arrives, because it always does.

 

Australia and Brazil: Gold and Primitive Rebels

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
09/23/2026

Our newly published book, The Australian, Brazilian, and Chinese Dynamic: An Inquiry into the Evolving Global Order, argues that Australia and Brazil are authentic Global South actors, commodity-exporting democracies shaped over centuries by colonial extraction and structural dependence, a category entirely different from authoritarian powers such as China Russia which merely invoke “Global South” solidarity as a strategic instrument.

Brazil, as the book puts it, was “extracted of its gold, and agricultural wealth for centuries” on its way to independence; Australia developed as a settler-colonial supplier of raw materials, first to the British Empire and now to Asia.

Both nations still carry that inheritance into how they navigate a resource-hungry, assertive China today.

This piece goes back to where that inheritance was forged.

Long before either country had to reckon with Beijing, both were built, quite literally, on gold: Brazil’s eighteenth-century boom in Minas Gerais, and Australia’s nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century rushes in Victoria and Western Australia.

Both booms shaped the population, the labor systems, and the export economies each country would carry into the modern era and both threw up, in Lampião and Ned Kelly, outlaws who turned the resentments of an extractive frontier economy into enduring national legend. The gold rushes that first drew Brazil and Australia into the world economy are, in that sense, the deep backstory to the structural condition the book examines, and the primitive rebels who emerged from them are worth remembering as more than colorful history.

Both Brazil and Australia have more in common than they think.

In Brazil there is Lampião (Virgulino Ferreira da Silva), the leader of the rural bandits of the Brazilian backlands, the “cangaceiros,” of northeastern Brazil. In Australia there is Ned Kelly (Edward “Ned” Kelly), an Australian bushranger, outlaw, and gang leader in rural Victoria. Both countries had major gold rushes: Brazil’s in the eighteenth century, Australia’s in the nineteenth and early twentieth.

The Brazilian and Australian gold rushes profoundly influenced both nations’ population growth, social development, ethnic and racial makeup, and global standing.

Ned Kelly was born in 1854 or 1855 to Irish parents in Victoria, Australia. He was (in)famous for his homemade suit of bulletproof armour and was hanged in Melbourne. Ned Kelly’s father was a transported convict, deported from County Tipperary, Ireland, for stealing two pigs, to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). He moved to Port Phillip (Melbourne, Victoria) in 1848, and during the Victoria gold rush acquired enough money to buy a small freehold in Beveridge, north of Melbourne. In 1864 he moved to Avenel, near Seymour, and later to Greta in northeast Victoria. He died in 1866, leaving Ned Kelly, then twelve, as the eldest male in the household. Ned Kelly served two prison terms, the longer from 1871 to 1872.

A violent confrontation between police and the Kelly family led to the imprisonment of Ned Kelly’s mother, Ellen, who was brought to trial in Melbourne by Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick. Ned Kelly joined a gang of bushrangers and later formed his own notorious Kelly Gang. The Kellys were a poor “selector” family, downtrodden by the “Squattocracy,” which controlled most of the arable land in Victoria and had acquired vast wealth in sheep and by exporting wool to the British market. The Squattocracy also, in effect, controlled the local politicians and police. The Kelly Gang carried out raids on gold shipment coaches and daring robberies in the Victoria–New South Wales borderlands between 1878 and 1880.

In 1879, in the small town of Jerilderie, New South Wales, where his gang had carried out an armed robbery, Kelly dictated to a fellow gang member, Joe Byrne, a 56-page, 7,391-word handwritten document intended for publication in the Jerilderie and Urana Gazette, arguing that the Squattocracy should share their wealth with the rural poor (it was not published in full until 1930). In the “Jerilderie Letter,” Ned Kelly praised the Irish rebellion against the English, described in detail his conflicts with the police and neighbors, and attacked what he saw as the unjustified accusations and corruption of the Victoria police: “There never was such a thing as justice in the English law.”

He continued: “The brutal and cowardly conduct of a parcel of big, ugly, fat-necked, wombat-headed, big-bellied, magpie-legged, narrow-hipped, splay-footed sons of Irish bailiffs or English landlords, better known as officers of justice, or Victoria police, whom some call honest gentlemen.” He ended: “To all those who have reason to fear me, had better sell out and give $10 out of every hundred to the widows’ and orphans’ fund. […] Abide by the consequences, which shall be worse than the rust in wheat in Victoria or the drought of a dry season to the grasshoppers of New South Wales. I do not wish to give the order full force without giving timely warning, but I am a widow’s son, outlawed, and my order must be obeyed.”

Ned Kelly’s most famous confrontation with the police took place at Glenrowan, where the Kelly Gang took dozens of hostages in Ann Jones’s Railway Hotel and he engaged in a twelve-hour siege and shootout with police while wearing his homemade suit of bulletproof armour. He was the only member of his gang to survive, though badly wounded. Tried and convicted in Melbourne, he was hanged in Melbourne Gaol in 1880 despite 32,000 angry citizens having signed a petition for clemency.

The Victoria government mobilized police reinforcements to protect the gaol and government buildings. Ned Kelly was buried in the old Melbourne Gaol; his body was later exhumed and reburied in a mass grave at Pentridge Prison in 1929. In 2011 forensic examiners identified his skeleton, which was returned to his descendants; after a requiem mass at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Wangaratta, he was buried in 2013 at Greta cemetery, close to his mother’s unmarked grave, encased in concrete to prevent looting. His skull, reportedly once kept on the desk of Victoria’s police detectives, was stolen on more than one occasion, most recently in 1978. A Royal Commission established after the Kelly trial and hanging found widespread corruption within the police force.

Ned Kelly became a national icon. Ballads have been written and feature films made about his life. He is today one of Australia’s most recognized national symbols.

Lampião (“Lantern” or “oil lamp”), a cangaceiro known as “the king of the Cangaceiros,” led a gang of around 100 armed bandits who roamed the dry, semi-arid Sertão (backlands) of northeastern Brazil on horseback and on foot, armed with stolen Mauser and Winchester rifles and Luger and Mauser semi-automatic pistols, between the 1920s and 1938. Feared for their raids, extortion, and the killing of over a thousand people, the Lampião gang also became a folk hero for his support of the poor sharecroppers of the sertão, who often sheltered him and his gang from the pursuing military police. Lampião’s lover, Maria Bonita (Maria Gomes de Oliveira, 1910–1938), like Lampião, dressed in an inimitable, extravagant backlands style. She was a devotee of Padre Cícero, another legendary messianic figure of northeastern Brazil. Lampião died in a shootout in Sergipe in 1938; his decapitated head, together with those of ten of his companions and of Maria Bonita, was exhibited first in Piranhas and later kept in Salvador, Bahia, before being finally buried in 1969. He was the most successful bandit of twentieth-century Brazil.

Brazil and Australia also share a history of gold rushes, taxes seen as unjust, and the social discontent and revolt that followed.

Gold was first discovered in Brazil in the late seventeenth century, in the mountainous interior of the Portuguese colony, by “bandeirantes” (explorers of mixed indigenous and Portuguese descent from São Paulo). Brazilian gold set off the first great gold rush of the modern era, to Minas Gerais (“General Mines”) and later to Goiás on the far western frontier. By the mid-eighteenth century Brazil had become the world’s leading gold producer. Diamonds were also discovered in Minas Gerais, and a “Diamond District” was delineated there to control and tax diamond mining and to secure, for the Portuguese Crown’s financial benefit, a monopoly over the distribution of Brazilian diamonds in Europe.

These rich alluvial strikes brought thousands of miners, along with their enslaved African and Afro-Brazilian workers, beyond the coastal mountains and up the São Francisco River from Bahia into the goldfields, and inland from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Conflict broke out between the bandeirantes and the “Emboabas,” the bandeirantes’ term for the Portuguese and Bahian newcomers. Enslaved African and Afro-Brazilian labor provided almost all the workforce in the goldfields, much of it drawn from the Bight of Benin, where many had prior experience mining and refining gold. Brazilian gold and diamond production reached its height in the mid-eighteenth century. By 1772–1782 the population of Minas Gerais had reached 319,769, or 20.5 percent of the total population of colonial Brazil. In 1786 the free population of Minas Gerais numbered 188,712; the enslaved population numbered 174,135, or 47.9 percent of the total.

There were revolts against the taxes imposed on miners.

The Vila Rica rebellion took place between June 28 and July 19, 1720, sparked by the creation of foundry houses, in Vila Rica, Sabará, São João del-Rei, and Vila do Príncipe, where all gold was to be smelted, the royal fifth deducted, and the resulting bars marked with the royal seal. The circulation of gold dust was prohibited, and special monopolies over cattle, tobacco, liquor, and salt were granted to those born in Portugal (reinóis). There was also discontent over a panning tax of twelve oitavas of gold per miner (an oitava equals 3.5859 grams). The Portuguese governor, Pedro Miguel de Almeida Portugal e Vasconcelos, Count of Assumar, deployed the Dragoons to suppress the revolt, arrested its charismatic leader, Filipe dos Santos, and had the houses of the rebels burned. The bodies of the rebel leaders were quartered and publicly displayed; Filipe dos Santos, his arms and legs tied to four horses, was torn apart.

In 1788–1789 another revolt was planned in Minas Gerais, driven by the imminent imposition of a draconian tax (a “derrama”) intended to recover the colossal unpaid arrears on the annual gold quota — the Royal Fifth — owed to the Portuguese Crown. Again, Vila Rica (today Ouro Preto) was the center of the planned revolt. The Minas conspirators were betrayed, and their leader, the Alferes (the lowest officer rank in the Minas Dragoons) Joaquim José da Silva Xavier (1746–1792), known by his nickname Tiradentes (“tooth-puller,” after his work as a dentist), was hanged, decapitated, and had parts of his body displayed at the entrances to Minas Gerais.

The other conspirators, all of higher social standing than Tiradentes, were exiled to Africa, and the priests among them were confined to monasteries in Portugal. Tiradentes’s severed head was exhibited on a pole in the principal square of Vila Rica, capital of Minas Gerais. After the Republic was established in Brazil in 1889, Tiradentes was proclaimed a national hero, and April 21, the day he was hanged, is observed each year as “Tiradentes Day,” a national holiday.

Gold was first discovered in Australia in February 1823 by assistant surveyor James McBrien at the Fish River in New South Wales, but the gold rush proper began with the Victoria discoveries of the 1850s. Victoria’s population grew from 430,000 in 1851 to 1.7 million in 1871. Between 1852 and 1860, 290,000 migrants arrived from the British Isles, 15,000 from other European countries, and 18,000 from the United States, many from the California goldfields, bringing with them their experience and the Chilean mill. In 1855, 11,493 Chinese migrants entered Melbourne, and that year the colony of Victoria enacted the Chinese Immigration Act. Most came from Guangdong province; by 1859 Chinese migrants made up as much as a fifth of Victoria’s population. The Victoria newspaper The Argus called this an “invading army.”

The Victoria Act of 1855 imposed a poll tax of £10 on each Chinese passenger arriving by sea, and in November 1857 the Victoria government imposed a £1 licence, renewable every two months for an additional £1, to remain in the colony. Anti-Chinese riots followed in Bendigo and Buckland, Victoria, the origin of the “White Australia” policy. By 1852, 35,000 miners were already at work in the Victoria goldfields.

Anti-licence associations and the Ballarat Reform League grew, inspired by the British Chartist movement, and the standoff over gold licences culminated in the Eureka Stockade of 1854. Victoria’s “diggers” were increasingly unhappy with government taxation: from 1852, a licence fee of thirty shillings a month carried a penalty of £6 for non-payment and up to six months’ imprisonment, with half the fine going to the informer or prosecutor. The Lieutenant Governor of Victoria, Captain Sir Charles Hotham (1806–1855), had issued secret orders to intensify licence-fee hunts and double the payments. The crisis came to a head when a Scottish miner, James Scobie, was killed at the Eureka Hotel near Ballarat, a death blamed on the hotel’s proprietor, Bentley, a Tasmanian ex-convict. The police magistrate discharged Bentley, though it later emerged that the magistrate, John D’Ewes, had taken bribes from him. A riot followed in which the hotel was burned down.

The Ballarat Reform League — led by John Basson Humffray, a Welshman; Peter Lalor; Frederick Vern, a Hanoverian; Raffaello Carboni, an Italian teacher; Timothy Hayes, an Irishman; and George Black, a well-educated Englishman — took its grievances to Governor Hotham, a naval officer who had seen service in South America and dismissed them. He sent 150 British soldiers of the 40th Regiment of Foot to the Eureka diggings at Ballarat to confront the diggers, who had burned their licences.

Flying a blue flag emblazoned with the stars of the Southern Cross, and swearing to “stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties,” the miners built a stockade. On Sunday, December 3, 1854, 276 armed troops, cavalry, and mounted police attacked. The diggers had some fifty rifles and revolvers between them. Sixteen miners were killed and eight later died of their wounds; 114 prisoners were taken, of whom thirteen were tried in Melbourne but, in the face of massive popular opposition, all were acquitted. The Eureka Stockade entered Australian history as a defining moment of democratic assertion. Gold exported to Britain from Australia in the 1850s paid off the whole of Britain’s foreign debt.

The lure of Australian gold was fed by the discovery of huge nuggets: the Viscountess Canterbury nugget, 970 ounces (27.5 kg), found at Rheola, Victoria, in October 1870; the Poseidon nugget, 953 ounces (27 kg), found at Tarnagulla, Victoria, in December 1906; and the Normandy nugget, 899 ounces (25.5 kg), found in a dry creek bed near Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. The 1885 discoveries at Kimberley, Western Australia, fueled a fresh gold frenzy, and in London speculators shifted from the “Kaffir” (South African) market to the “Kangaroo” (Western Australian) one. Horatio Bottomley and Whitaker Wright, two of the most notorious figures of this “Kangaroo capitalism,” set up corporations for West Australian shares known as “Westralians,” pocketing investors’ cash rather than putting it into mining operations, though the capital they raised did allow legitimate promoters to broaden their base, buy plant, deepen shafts, and amalgamate operations. The young Calouste Gulbenkian, who later became one of the richest men in the world on the strength of his 5 percent holding in Middle Eastern oil production, also made early investments in this Western Australian gold speculation.

Western Australia had been little appreciated before the gold rush. The Portuguese and the Dutch had explored its coast and found nothing of interest. In 1829 Captain James Stirling urged England to establish its first non-convict colony there, and 4,000 settlers arrived at the Swan River Colony in 1829–1830. Between 1850 and 1868, landowners in need of cheap labor persuaded Britain to send 10,000 male convicts to Western Australia, and for a time the convict population outnumbered free citizens by 9,700 to 7,300. The City of Perth was established in 1856 and recognized as such by Queen Victoria. The port of Fremantle, founded with the Swan River Colony in 1829, was for a time the haunt of the American-born “Bully” Hayes, the self-styled “last of the buccaneers”, a ship’s captain, swindler, and blackbirder notorious for transporting Pacific Islanders to plantations in Tahiti, Fiji, and Australia between 1860 and 1870, and protected for a time by Fremantle’s harbourmaster, whose daughter was among his many lovers. The harbour was deepened in 1883, and its inner basin opened in 1897, becoming the gateway to Western Australia at the height of the gold rush.

The discovery of the Southern Cross goldfield in 1885 set off the Yilgarn gold rush; a major strike followed in 1892, when Arthur Bayley and William Ford found gold at Coolgardie, and in 1893 further strikes followed at Mount Charlotte, near Kalgoorlie. The Kalgoorlie discovery brought a surge in population and the construction of roads and railways, including, in 1896, the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme, chief engineer Charles Yelverton O’Connor’s 380-mile (610 km) pipeline from Perth to Kalgoorlie, essential to sustaining the gold workings. Western Australia’s population rose from 49,782 in 1891 to 184,124 in 1901. On October 17, 1917, the Port Augusta–Kalgoorlie railway was completed, crossing 1,051 miles (1,691 km) of desert plain, including the world’s longest stretch of straight track — and avoiding the treacherous waters of the Great Australian Bight, cementing Western Australia into the Australian Commonwealth.

The Western Australian goldfields were a punishing environment, where epidemic disease, typhoid fever above all, heat, snakes, crime, and claim-jumping by frustrated prospectors were constant threats. Women and children lived in tents or ramshackle huts, and the early mining settlements became centers of gambling and prostitution; camels and bicycles were the chief means of transport. Gold fever drew prospectors, and prostitutes, from around the world. Australia’s oldest surviving brothel, the Questa Casa, known locally as “the Pink House”, has operated on Hay Street, Kalgoorlie, since 1904; it is the last of the eighteen brothels once found there, always illegal but home to generations of sex workers. In the 1890s Western Australia produced 6.9 million troy ounces of gold (214 tonnes), and the state remains a major source of the world’s gold today.

The parallels sketched above are not accidental. Ned Kelly and Lampião both belong to what the historian Eric Hobsbawm, in his 1959 study Primitive Rebels, called “social banditry”, outlaws operating at the margins of an unequal frontier society, whose crimes were read locally as rough justice against landlords, police, and an absent or corrupt state, and who were mythologized by the rural poor even as they were hunted by the powerful. Kelly’s quarrel was with the “Squattocracy” and the compromised constabulary of colonial Victoria; Lampião’s was with the great landowning colonels of the Brazilian sertão and the “flying columns” the state sent after him. Both left behind a body of writing and legend, the Jerilderie Letter on one side, the cordel ballads sung about Lampião and Maria Bonita on the other — that outlived their violent deaths and turned them into national symbols, however uneasily that inheritance sits with the descendants of those they robbed, extorted, or killed.

The gold rushes that framed both societies belong to a different order of comparison: a story of mineral wealth reshaping demography, labor, and the reach of the state across two very different colonial systems.

In Brazil, gold financed the Portuguese Crown for the better part of a century, drew hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans into the mining interior, and provoked revolts, at Vila Rica in 1720, and again around Tiradentes in 1789, that were crushed with exemplary brutality precisely because crown revenue depended on obedience. In Australia, gold overturned the colonial order within a single decade, financing Britain’s imperial finances even as it imported the immigration restrictions, labor politics, and republican symbolism, the Southern Cross flag of the Eureka Stockade chief among them — that still anchor Australian civic memory.

Where Brazil’s mining society rested on slavery and crown monopoly, Australia’s rested on free and indentured immigrant labor and a colonial administration that, however reluctantly, eventually answered to the diggers it had taxed. Both extractive booms, in their own idiom, produced their own primitive rebels: men who turned the resentments of a frontier economy into legend, and whose gangs, rifles, and grievances still say something about how wealth, taxation, and inequality shape a nation’s founding stories.

Swearing Allegiance to the /Southern Croat by Charles A. Daudiet (public domaine).
The Eureka Stockade Riot by J. B. Henderson (public domaine).
Ned Kelly in his home made suit of armour in his shootout with the police.
Ned Kelly’s armour and rifle displayed at the state library, Victoria, The helmet, Brest plate and shoulder pads show 19 bullet marks.
1873 portrait of Ned Kelly.
The Trans-Australian Railway.
The heads of Lampião and Maria Bonita on display…
Lampião.
Ned Kelly’s armour.
Lampião..Museu da gente Sergipana. Sergipe (photo. Kenneth Maxwell)
Ned Kelly holding up a gold shipment coach in the outback.
Felipe dos Santos in the Vila Rice revolt of 1720…(panting, public domaine)
Lampião and Maria Bonita, folk heroes (from the museu da gente sergipana, photo, Kenneth Maxwell)
The Martirio de Tiradentes [The Martydom of Tiradentes] [The Martyrdom of the Tooth Puller) Aurelio de Figueiredo (1893). Andre Figueiredo Rodrigues, Maria Alda Barbosa Careira, “Em Busca de Um Rosto: A República e a Representação de Tiradentes, com prefácio de Kenneth Maxwell” (Sao Paulo, Humanitas, 2020) p. 167.

The Club Goes Inside the Wire: What Moving Valdai from Sochi Says About Putin’s Russia

Posted on | by Robbin Laird

By Robbin Laird

When the Valdai Discussion Club opens its twenty-third annual meeting on September 28, it will not be on the Black Sea coast. Invitations initially named Sochi, but organizers told participants in late August that the meeting was moving to the Moscow region, and two sources told the Financial Times that Russia’s Federal Protective Service insisted on the change. The organizers’ website now lists the Moscow region, September 28 to October 1, under the theme “Responsibility for the Future: The Limits of the Possible or Possibilities Without Limit?”

A change of venue is a small thing. A discussion club is not an army, and a conference is not a campaign. But for two decades Valdai has been the most consistent instrument through which Vladimir Putin speaks to the world’s foreign-policy elites, and instruments reveal the hand that holds them. Where the Kremlin stages its outreach, and what forces it to change the stage, says something about the confidence, priorities and vulnerabilities of Putin’s Russia in 2026.

Two clarifications keep the analysis honest. Valdai has not always met in Sochi. The Club’s own record shows Moscow hosting in 2020 and 2022, with Sochi the venue in most other years since 2014. The 2020 meeting came in a pandemic year. What distinguishes 2026 is the reason, and the reporting points to drones. The security explanation also rests on anonymous sources, not on an official Russian statement. It is nonetheless highly plausible, as the rest of this article argues.

A Stage Built for Openness

The Club dates to 2004. Political scientist Sergei Karaganov was among its founders. It was never an ordinary think-tank gathering. Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy of Brookings, after attending the 2011 meeting, described it as an initiative of officials and analysts in and around the Kremlin, financed through the state news agency, which brought roughly forty foreign experts, academics, journalists and politicians to Russia each year. They added that Putin was the one government figure foreign participants met every year. Scholars of Russian influence have framed it as a soft-power effort to win goodwill among Western intellectuals, create networking opportunities between Russian and Western elites, and provide a testing ground for the Kremlin’s foreign policy initiatives.

The design was clever. Putin got hours of unscripted-looking exchange with people who write, teach and advise on Russia, and the guests got access that most governments do not offer. In the Club’s own telling, it moved in 2014 away from explaining Russia to the world and toward shaping the global agenda. That was also the first of six consecutive Sochi meetings. Putin’s much-cited 2014 address there came months after the annexation of Crimea and the start of the Donbas conflict.

Sochi mattered as scenery. Its Olympic-era polish, subtropical calm and proximity to Putin’s own residence gave the event a message before anyone spoke: this is a confident country that can host the world’s experts by the sea and tell them, at leisure, how the international order is changing. The venue was part of the argument.

What Weitz Saw in Sochi in 2016

Richard Weitz’s reporting for Second Line of Defense from the 2016 meeting shows the machinery at work. He spent four days at the annual Valdai Conference in Sochi, attended by Putin and other senior Russian officials as well as more than one hundred foreign experts, many of them former high-level officials or long-time Russia specialists. He came to Sochi after weeks of meetings in Moscow at institutions ranging from the Gorbachev Foundation and Moscow State University to the Russian International Affairs Council. Valdai was one node in a larger system of engagement, and the system had several layers.

The plenary as message delivery. The meeting fell in the last days of the American presidential campaign, and Putin used it to address the election directly. Weitz reported that Putin pledged to work with whomever Americans elected while making plain his preference for Trump as a future interlocutor. Putin also offered a sociological argument. In his view, citizens of even the most advanced democracies feel a growing gap between their interests and the elite’s vision, and when the establishment loses a major vote it blames Russian propaganda. Weitz added that Russian speakers on the “Democracy 2.0” panel accused U.S. media and other establishment institutions of helping Clinton. The piece was published on November 5, three days before the vote. The Kremlin’s framing of the American election reached Western readers through a Western analyst, before the ballots were counted.

The plenary as grievance narrative. In the closing session Putin listed the alliance’s war against Serbia, the Iraq invasion, the Libya intervention and Western missile defenses as the events that ruined relations with the West. The core of the complaint was that Russia had expected equal dialogue and received unilateral solutions instead. Weitz also captured a subtler move on the Europe panel. Putin said Russia regretted the animosity and wanted a strong Europe, and accused NATO leaders of talking up the Russian threat to sustain military budgets, noting that NATO’s population was more than four times Russia’s. Weitz noted that the sincerity of the pro-Europe statements could be questioned. That was a fair reading, and it is the kind of skeptical filtering that gives Valdai reporting its value.

The panels as wedge-building. Weitz found that pessimism about Europe’s global power potential was pervasive at the conference, with many speakers, Russian and otherwise, describing a continent in generation-long decay. Karaganov, in Weitz’s account, advocated that Russia build deeper ties with Asia and Eurasia, which he believed would eventually make Russia a more attractive partner for Europeans. Some Europeans in the room noted that Russia had been able to circumvent the EU as an institution and cultivate good relations with key European leaders across left and right. The Kremlin was listening as well as speaking. It was mapping which European constituencies were open to it.

The closed sessions as reality check. On domestic questions, Weitz reported that Putin declined to discuss his retirement plans, that most experts expected him to run again in March 2018, and that Russian officials in closed sessions argued the economy could thrive without political transformation, citing Singapore and China. He also reported that a former Russian official argued that constraints on civil society were seriously limiting the country’s development. In a separate piece on the sanctions debate, he recorded that the Russian economy shrank by about 3.8 percent in 2015, that nearly half of the federal budget came from oil and gas export revenue, and that sanctions had restricted access to Western financing.

Taken together, the 2016 meeting was a platform, a listening post, a cultivation mechanism for relationships with former Western officials, and an amplifier, because every guest who writes carries the message home. The Weitz articles are the proof of concept. An American analyst attended, filed and published in Western channels, and the Kremlin’s argument about Trump, NATO and Europe entered the Western debate with his skeptical annotations attached. The Kremlin got its message across and paid nothing for the distribution.

From Persuading the West to Instructing the Rest

The rhetoric changed long before the venue did. Al Jazeera’s analysis of the 2022 meeting noted that from the mid-2000s to the early 2010s Putin would spend hours answering questions about Russia’s democratic development and openness to the world, whereas the 2022 speech in Moscow was radically different, dominated by complaints about the West. By 2025 the stance had hardened into doctrine. The 22nd meeting carried the theme “The Polycentric World: Instructions for Use.” One analysis from the New Eurasian Strategies Centre argued that multipolarity, which once implied a search for a new balance with the West, had become a political justification for breaking off relations altogether, with Putin proclaiming a “post-global” era of managed chaos.

Karaganov’s own trajectory tracks the shift. In 2016 he was telling Weitz’s audience that an Asian pivot would eventually make Russia more attractive to Europe. In the years since the full-scale invasion he has become one of Moscow’s most prominent advocates of a harder nuclear posture toward the West. The Club’s audience has changed with it. The 2016 event courted Western opinion leaders, while the 2025 event addressed an audience for whom Western approval is optional and Western rules are an imposition. Valdai’s target moved from persuasion to instruction, and from the West to what Moscow calls the global majority.

That is the frame in which the 2026 move should be read.

What the Move Symbolizes

First, the geography of Russian normalcy is shrinking. Sochi was the place where the Kremlin could stage normalcy. That is no longer easy. Ukrainian forces have repeatedly struck targets on Russia’s Black Sea coast, including an oil refinery in Sochi, and on the evening of September 9 Ukrainian sea drones attacked the Sochi waterfront, injuring about 30 people. The Russian Telegram channel Astra also reported fires at two fuel depots in and beside the resort after overnight drone strikes, as relayed by Euromaidan Press, which also reported attacks on Russian air defenses in the city. The Russian president’s own travel tells the story. Before the full-scale invasion, in 2021, Putin visited Sochi 24 times; he has been there only twice in recent years, and not at all since the previous Valdai in October 2025. A resort that its owner cannot safely visit is a poor venue for showing the world that everything is under control.

Second, the leader’s mobility has become a strategic variable. In the language we use at SLD, the Ukrainian deep-strike campaign resembles a kill web more than a kill chain. It combines cheap long-range drones, sea drones, persistent reconnaissance and rapid iteration, all aimed at seams and soft spots and not at any single exquisite target. A defender facing a distributed offensive system has to choose where to concentrate its protection, and it cannot protect everything. A four-day conference bringing the head of state, senior ministers and around a hundred international guests together in one place is precisely the kind of concentrated, high-value node that a security service will not leave exposed. Foreign Minister Lavrov, Deputy Prime Minister Novak and Putin aide Oreshkin are expected to participate. The Federal Protective Service’s judgment reflects a simple assessment that the Moscow region is better defended than a Black Sea resort.

The protection is relative, however. President Zelensky has confirmed Ukrainian long-range strikes that damaged two major Russian logistics sites in the Moscow and Tambov regions. Moscow is safer than Sochi only in degree. The relocation shows a regime spending scarce defensive capacity on protecting its own theater.

Third, security has overruled communications. Organizers had invited guests to Sochi, and the change came in late August, for an event that has to be planned across a year. That is improvisation at the top of a highly choreographed system, and it shows the ordering of priorities. When the protective service and the propaganda service disagree, the former wins. Euromaidan Press notes that Putin has spent much of his time in Moscow, St. Petersburg and his residence near Lake Valdai, with more trips east of the Urals, areas farther from Ukraine’s long-range drone reach. That is one outlet’s interpretation, but it is consistent with the pattern. The Kremlin’s calendar is now shaped by the range of the adversary’s weapons, and no amount of stagecraft outweighs that.

Fourth, the outreach machine still runs, and that is part of the message. The reported guest list is about 120 guests representing approximately 40 countries. The comparison with the more than one hundred foreign experts Weitz counted in 2016 is rough, since the 2026 figure may include Russian participants. But the order of magnitude is similar. Ten years, a full-scale invasion and one of the most sweeping sanctions regimes in modern history later, Moscow can still assemble a global audience for its leader. Any analysis that reads the relocation as a sign of collapse misreads it. Russia’s outreach infrastructure is resilient. What has changed is the setting, which looks less like a resort and more like a fortress.

Fifth, the theme becomes ironic. A meeting about “responsibility for the future,” staged in a hardened venue because the war has reached the leader’s summer retreat, carries a message no program committee intended. The Kremlin wants to talk about the limits of the possible in a multipolar world. The venue tells the guests where the limits of its own security currently lie.

Reading the Meeting

There is a case against over-reading, and it deserves a hearing. Moscow has hosted Valdai before. Putin has always spent most of his time in and around the capital. A Moscow-area location is easier for ministers and for logistics, and the Kremlin may present it as a simple convenience. All of that is true. But the FT’s sources point to the protective service insisting, and the Sochi strikes are documented. The most economical explanation is also the most likely one.

For observers, the meeting itself, running from September 28 to October 1, offers several tests. The first is whether Putin’s final-day address and question-and-answer session, traditionally held on the last day, keep their customary length and looseness or are trimmed. The second is how he frames the drone campaign, as terrorism, as escalation by Western sponsors, or not at all. The third is the guest list, and above all whether any sitting Western officials or prominent former ones appear, since those are the guests who made the 2016 meeting such a rich source for Weitz. The fourth is how much the Russian organizers reveal about the security perimeter. A meeting that used to advertise openness may this year hide its own logistics.

The larger point is about what kind of power Putin’s Russia now projects. In 2016 the Kremlin used Valdai to argue with the West, to court it, divide it and explain its grievances to it, and Weitz’s reporting captured a leader confident enough to speculate about American sociology in public. In 2025 the club was used to announce a world in which Western opinion barely mattered. In 2026 the venue itself concedes something the speeches will not: a war launched to restore Russia’s place in the world has brought the world’s drones to the edge of the president’s own resort. Valdai will go on. The Sochi era, which staged a confident Russia by the sea, is over.

Sources

Meduza, “Financial Times: Valdai Club meeting moved from Sochi to Moscow region over threat of Ukrainian strikes” (Sept. 15, 2026). https://meduza.io/amp/en/news/2026/09/15/financial-times-valdai-club-meeting-moved-from-sochi-to-moscow-region-over-threat-of-ukrainian-strikes

Euromaidan Press, “Putin moves Valdai forum from Sochi” (Sept. 15, 2026). https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/09/15/putin-moves-valdai-forum-from-sochi/

Mezha, “Russia Moves Valdai Forum From Sochi to Moscow Region.” https://mezha.net/eng/news/d1b2591e_russia_moves_valdai/

UNN, “Putin moved the Valdai forum from Sochi to Moscow due to the threat of Ukrainian drones.” https://unn.ua/en/news/putin-moved-the-valdai-forum-from-sochi-to-moscow-due-to-the-threat-of-ukrainian-drones-ft

Richard Weitz, “Putin’s Perspectives on Working with the Next Administration,” Second Line of Defense (Nov. 2016). https://sldinfo.com/2016/11/putins-perspectives-on-working-with-the-next-administration/

Richard Weitz, “Perspectives at the Valdai Conference on Russia, Europe and the United States,” Second Line of Defense (Nov. 2016). https://sldinfo.com/2016/11/perspectives-at-the-valdai-conference-on-russia-europe-and-the-united-states-what-will-be-impact-of-the-coming-to-power-of-president-elect-trump/

Richard Weitz, “Valdai Conference Insights on Russia’s Political and Economic Development,” Second Line of Defense. https://sldinfo.com/2016/11/valdai-conference-insights-on-russias-political-and-economic-development/

Richard Weitz, “The Russian Sanctions Debate at the Valdai Conference,” Second Line of Defense. https://sldinfo.com/2016/11/the-russian-sanctions-debate-at-the-valdai-conference/

Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, “Putin’s Next Move in Russia: Observations from the 8th Annual Valdai International Discussion Club,” Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/putins-next-move-in-russia-observations-from-the-8th-annual-valdai-international-discussion-club/

“Valdai Discussion Club” (meeting history by year; soft-power scholarship), Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valdai_Discussion_Club

“2014 Valdai speech of Vladimir Putin,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Valdai_speech_of_Vladimir_Putin

Al Jazeera, “Putin wants the world to forget Ukraine” (Nov. 2022). https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/11/3/putin-wants-the-world-to-forget-ukraine

New Eurasian Strategies Centre, “Valdai 2025: Betting on a long war with the West” (Oct. 2025). https://nestcentre.org/valdai-2025/

Under Southern Eyes, “Vladimir Putin’s Valdai Speech (2025): how to live in the emerging polycentric world” (Oct. 2025). https://undersoutherneyes.edpinsent.com/vladimir-putins-valdai-speech-2025/

The Transformation of Maritime Domain Awareness: Why the Old Model No Longer Works

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
09/22/2026

Maritime domain awareness, the ability to know what is happening at sea and to understand what it means, has been redefined over the past three decades. The concept itself has not changed much on paper: the International Maritime Organization still defines it as the effective understanding of anything associated with the maritime domain that could affect the security, safety, economy, or environment of a state or region.

What has changed is everything beneath that definition: the volume of traffic to be watched, the tools available to watch it, the ownership of those tools, and the nature of the threats hiding within the noise. The maritime security challenge of 2026 bears little resemblance to that of the mid-1990s and treating maritime domain awareness (MDA) as a continuation of Cold War naval surveillance, rather than as a fundamentally new problem set, is a strategic error with real operational consequences.

The challenge is also behavioral. A vessel’s reported position and identity are only part of the picture; the operational question is whether its movements, transmissions, and interactions are consistent with its declared activity. “Going dark” should therefore be treated as a cue for further investigation, not as proof of illicit conduct. Maritime domain awareness must connect tracking with behavioral analysis, using multiple sources to distinguish routine activity from potential concealment or deception.

This matters because the instinct in defense planning is to solve maritime awareness gaps with more of the same: more patrol aircraft, more surface combatants, more national radar sites. That instinct made sense in a bounded, state-centric world. It makes considerably less sense in a world where the ocean is crowded with tens of thousands of vessels a navy will never own a sensor pointed at, where identity itself has become a contested, manipulable data field, and where the actors generating risk are as likely to be a sanctioned tanker or a civilian-flagged militia boat as a warship.

MDA has shifted from a sensor-coverage problem to a data-fusion and behavioral-analysis problem, and the institutions, acquisition strategies, and workforce models built for the old problem are increasingly mismatched to the new one.

The Baseline: A Bounded, State-Centric Problem

Thirty years ago, maritime awareness was largely a state-owned, platform-dependent activity. Navies and coast guards built their picture of the sea through organic sensors — maritime patrol aircraft, surface combatants, submarines, coastal radar chains, and national intelligence collection. The Cold War model was built around counting and tracking a known, finite set of adversary platforms: Soviet submarines, surface combatants, and the merchant vessels used as intelligence collectors. The maritime domain itself was vast, but the set of actors that mattered to national security was comparatively small, symmetric, and state-based. A watch officer’s job, in effect, was to find and classify a known type of needle in a haystack whose size changed slowly.

Merchant shipping, by contrast, was largely invisible to security establishments unless a vessel entered a monitored strait or approached a coastline under active surveillance. There was no global, persistent, unclassified means of tracking commercial traffic. A ship’s location, identity, and behavior were known chiefly to its owner, its flag state, and whichever coast guard happened to be nearby at a given moment. This was a bounded problem in large part because global trade itself was smaller and structurally simpler. Global seaborne trade volumes have roughly tripled since 1990, rising from about four billion tons loaded to well over twelve billion tons today, while world container throughput grew from thirty-six million TEU in 1980 to nearly 850 million TEU by the early 2020s. Fewer ships, less complexity in ownership and flagging, and a narrower set of state adversaries meant that platform-centric, nationally-owned surveillance was, for its era, adequate to the task but it was never elegant, never complete, but manageable against a finite number of hulls and airframes.

That baseline is worth stating plainly because so much of the current debate over maritime security acquisition still implicitly assumes it holds. It does not, and the reasons why are not a single technological disruption but three distinct, mutually reinforcing forces that broke the old model roughly simultaneously.

Three Forces That Broke the Old Model

(1) The scale and opacity of global shipping outgrew national surveillance capacity

The sheer growth of maritime traffic changed the nature of the problem before any adversary did. The global container fleet alone expanded from roughly 4.5 million TEU of capacity in 2000 to over 33 million TEU by 2025, with the number of vessels rising from about 2,600 to nearly 7,500. Add the tanker fleet, the dry bulk fleet, the fishing fleet, numbering in the hundreds of thousands of vessels worldwide, and the general cargo and roll-on/roll-off fleets, and the scale of what a comprehensive maritime picture would need to encompass becomes clear.

No coast guard or navy, however well-resourced, can maintain a comprehensive picture of a domain this size using organic sensors alone. A frigate can occupy one piece of ocean at a time; a maritime patrol aircraft can sweep a corridor for a few hours before returning to base. Neither scales to a global merchant fleet numbering in the tens of thousands of hulls, let alone the artisanal and small-craft traffic that dominates numerically in many contested waters. Awareness, in other words, had to become a data problem before it could be addressed as an intelligence problem. The bottleneck moved from “can we get a sensor there” to “can we ingest, correlate, and make sense of what tens of thousands of platforms are broadcasting, or failing to broadcast, at any given moment.”

(2) Identity and location became technically knowable and technically fakeable

The introduction of the Automatic Identification System, mandated under the IMO’s SOLAS convention in 2002 and required fleet-wide by the end of 2004, was the first structural break with the old model. For the first time, a large share of the world’s merchant fleet was continuously broadcasting its own identity, position, course, and speed. This was transformative: a technology built for collision avoidance and safety of navigation became, almost as a side effect, the first genuinely global layer of maritime transparency.

The second break came when that signal moved to space. The first AIS-detecting nanosatellite flew in 2008, and by 2017 satellite-based AIS had matured into a persistent, near-real-time global tracking service. Overnight, in historical terms, a cooperative safety signal became the backbone of global maritime surveillance, available not just to states with national collection systems, but to any commercial or academic actor with the money to buy the feed. Shipping insurers, port authorities, environmental researchers, journalists, and open-source analysts all gained access to a global tracking picture that a generation earlier had been the exclusive province of naval intelligence.

But a cooperative signal is also, definitionally, a signal that can be switched off, falsified, or spoofed, and the same three decades that gave the world persistent tracking also gave bad actors persistent means to defeat it. AIS spoofing and “dark” transits or vessels that disable or falsify their transponders to mask identity, position, or both are now a well-documented and extensively studied evasion technique, prompting a parallel industry in synthetic aperture radar (SAR), radio-frequency (RF) geolocation, and electro-optical detection designed specifically to find the ships that do not want to be found. Awareness and evasion have been locked in a continuous technical race ever since AIS became mandatory, and it is that race — not the original safety technology in isolation that constitutes the actual substance of modern MDA. Every advance in cooperative tracking generates a corresponding advance in non-cooperative detection, and every advance in detection generates more sophisticated evasion tradecraft in turn. This is not a problem that gets solved and stays solved; it is a competitive dynamic that must be managed continuously.

(3) Commercial capability displaced the state monopoly on maritime intelligence

A state-owned constellation of patrol aircraft and warships has been supplemented, and in important respects superseded, by a commercial architecture of small-satellite operators. A cluster of commercial providers now supply persistent SAR imaging, RF geolocation, and AIS correlation services once the exclusive preserve of national intelligence agencies. Maritime analytics firms such as Windward fuse these commercial data streams — AIS, SAR, RF, and behavioral analytics — to detect vessels that have gone dark, identify anomalous loitering or ship-to-ship transfer patterns tied to sanctions evasion or illegal fishing, and flag identity manipulation at machine speed.

This is not an incremental improvement on the old model; it is a structural inversion of it. Governments are now often consumers of commercially generated maritime intelligence rather than its sole producers, and the practical ceiling on MDA is increasingly set by data fusion and analytic tradecraft rather than by the number of hulls or airframes a navy can put to sea. The organizations best positioned to lead on MDA are not necessarily the ones that own the most sensors, but the ones that can most effectively integrate sensor feeds they do not own into an actionable picture, a fundamentally different competency than the one naval staffs were built around, favoring organizations comfortable with public-private partnership and continuous software integration over ones built around platform acquisition cycles measured in decades.

From “Seeing” to “Understanding”: The Rise of Sub-Threshold Threats

The technology shift would matter less if the threat picture had stayed simple. It has not. The last decade in particular has populated the maritime domain with actors and behaviors that the 1990s framework was never built to characterize, because they are deliberately designed to stay below the threshold of open conflict and inside the seams of jurisdiction and attribution.

Russia’s response to Western sanctions produced a so-called shadow fleet of aging tankers, estimated by different trackers at anywhere from roughly 1,000 to over 3,000 vessels depending on methodology, representing an estimated seventeen to nineteen percent of the world’s tanker capacity, that move sanctioned crude while manipulating flags, ownership records, and AIS signals to frustrate identification. This fleet did not exist in any meaningful form before 2022 and has grown roughly thirtyfold in three years — a pace of adversary adaptation no static architecture, built around slowly changing Cold War order-of-battle assumptions, can plausibly keep up with.

In the South China Sea, China’s People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia has conducted hundreds of documented incidents of harassment, blocking, and ramming against neighboring states’ vessels since 2012, using ostensibly civilian fishing boats as an instrument of state coercion that deliberately complicates naval response and legal attribution. A militia vessel that looks, on radar and even on AIS, indistinguishable from an ordinary trawler is precisely the actor a platform-classification model is poorly equipped to characterize, because the relevant question is not what the vessel is but what it is doing, and on whose behalf.

In the Red Sea, a non-state armed group has, since late 2023, used missiles and uncrewed systems to threaten commercial shipping on one of the world’s most important trade arteries, a capability and intent a 1990s coastal-defense threat model would not have anticipated from that kind of actor at all. The case is instructive because it collapses categories MDA planners have traditionally kept separate: it is simultaneously a maritime security problem, a counter-terrorism problem, an air and missile defense problem, and a freedom-of-navigation problem, and no single service or sensor architecture owns all four pieces of it.

In the Baltic Sea, a series of at least eleven undersea cable and pipeline incidents in fifteen months prompted NATO to stand up a dedicated multinational patrol mission, Baltic Sentry, to protect infrastructure that did not exist as a maritime-security concern a generation ago. And in the Black Sea, Ukraine has used a fleet of low-cost uncrewed surface vessels to drive a conventional navy from its own coastal waters and is now adapting those platforms into launch systems for attack drones, demonstrating that a state without a traditional navy can generate a maritime effect older threat models would have reserved for blue-water fleets.

None of these cases is a conventional military confrontation in the Cold War sense. Each exploits the same structural weakness: an MDA architecture built to identify and count known state platforms is poorly suited to characterizing intent among ambiguous, deniable, or non-state actors operating inside civilian shipping lanes and behind the legal protections civilian status confers. The core analytic task has shifted from “seeing” or locating a vessel to “understanding” or determining whether a vessel’s owner, cargo, route, and behavior indicate sanctions evasion, gray-zone coercion, smuggling, or hostile intent. That is a fusion and behavioral-analytics problem, not a sensor-coverage problem, which is why data fusion and pattern-of-life analysis, rather than additional patrol assets, have become the leading edge of maritime security investment.

Pattern-of-life analysis has become central for a specific reason. A vessel that goes dark for six hours in open ocean is not automatically suspicious; ships lose AIS signal for entirely innocent reasons. A vessel that goes dark for six hours specifically while transiting a known ship-to-ship transfer zone, having previously exhibited a pattern of similarly timed disappearances correlated with a change of registered owner, is a different matter entirely. Distinguishing the two requires a historical baseline, machine-assisted anomaly detection across large populations of vessels, and human analytic judgment applied at the point where the algorithm flags something worth a closer look, a fundamentally different workflow than the Cold War model of a watch officer classifying a discrete contact.

The Persistent Vulnerability Beneath the Waterline

The MDA problem has also expanded vertically, into the undersea domain, in ways the 1990s framework barely addressed. Fiber-optic cables and pipelines now carry the overwhelming majority of the world’s data traffic and significant volumes of energy, yet they sit largely unmonitored on the seabed, identifiable from public charts and vulnerable to any vessel dragging an anchor or deploying a submersible asset. The Baltic Sea incidents illustrate that critical infrastructure protection is now inseparable from maritime domain awareness, requiring persistent surface and subsurface monitoring of an environment conventional AIS and radar cannot see into at all. Surface tracking tells an analyst where a vessel was; it does not tell an analyst what that vessel dragged behind it or dropped over the side.

This is a second and distinct MDA gap layered atop the surface-traffic gap, and closing it will require sensors, tradecraft, and legal authorities that are still being built. Attribution is the hardest part of this problem. Determining that a cable was cut is comparatively straightforward; determining that a specific vessel’s anchor caused the damage, and that the damage was deliberate rather than the result of poor seamanship or heavy weather, requires a chain of evidence combining AIS or satellite tracking, seabed forensics on the break itself, and often signals or human intelligence on intent, none of which any single sensor or agency possesses in full. The undersea layer is likely to remain the least mature part of the MDA architecture for some time, because it cannot be addressed by simply extending existing surface-tracking approaches; it requires investment in a largely separate sensing and analytic discipline.

Institutional and Acquisition Implications

If the diagnosis above is correct that MDA has become a data-fusion and behavioral-analytics discipline layered on a sensor-collection discipline, not replacing it several implications follow for how governments organize, staff, and buy for maritime security.

First, the workforce implication is real and underappreciated. An organization built to train watch officers to classify discrete contacts against a known adversary order of battle is not automatically equipped to train analysts who can interrogate a fused, multi-source, commercially generated dataset for anomalous behavior across tens of thousands of vessels. The skills involved, data science, behavioral analytics, an understanding of shipping economics and flag-state practice, and the judgment to know when an algorithmic flag warrants escalation, sit closer to those of a financial-crimes investigator than a traditional naval intelligence officer.

Second, continuing to measure maritime security investment primarily in hulls, airframes, and radar sites will produce a force well-equipped for a threat picture that no longer exists. Organic sensors are not obsolete, a warship on scene still has authorities, weapons, and physical presence no satellite feed can replicate, but the marginal dollar spent on data fusion and analytic tradecraft is, for a wide range of current problems, likely to generate more actionable awareness than the marginal dollar spent on an additional patrol platform.

Third, public-private integration needs to be treated as a core institutional competency, not a supplementary arrangement. Commercial providers of SAR, RF, and AIS correlation services are not a stopgap until governments rebuild organic capacity; in most plausible futures they are a permanent, growing part of the architecture, because the economics of small-satellite constellations and software analytics favor continuous commercial iteration over the multi-decade acquisition cycles navies typically operate on. Governments that treat these providers as long-term integration partners will out-perform those that treat them as occasional vendors.

The Core Argument

Maritime domain awareness has not simply become “more difficult” over the past thirty years. It has become a categorically different discipline. The scale of global shipping outran what any navy’s organic sensors could cover. A cooperative identification signal, AIS, created both the first global tracking layer and a permanent evasion incentive, locking awareness and evasion into a continuous technical race. Commercial space and analytics companies displaced state intelligence agencies as the primary generators of maritime data, forcing governments to become integrators and customers of an architecture they no longer own outright. A widening cast of state and non-state actors, sanctioned tanker operators, maritime militias, armed non-state groups, and uncrewed-system operators, learned to exploit the seams of jurisdiction, attribution, and civilian cover that a platform-counting model was never designed to penetrate. And the domain itself has expanded vertically, into an undersea infrastructure layer the surface-tracking architecture cannot see into at all.

The practical consequence is that maritime security today is won or lost in data fusion, behavioral analytics, and public-private intelligence architecture rather than in hull counts or patrol hours. Any policy or acquisition approach that still frames the challenge as “more ships, more planes, more radar” is answering a version of the problem that stopped existing sometime in the last fifteen years. The states, alliances, and companies that recognize this shift earliest and reorganize their workforce, acquisition priorities, and public-private relationships accordingly will close the gap between what needs to be known about the maritime domain and what is, in practice, known. Everyone else will keep buying yesterday’s answer to a question the sea has already stopped asking.

Bibliography

International Maritime Organization, “Maritime Domain Awareness,” https://www.imo.org/en/ourwork/security/pages/maritime-domain-awareness.aspx

Statista, “Total Volume of Global Sea Trade,” https://www.statista.com/chart/24527/total-volume-of-global-sea-trade/

Port Economics, Management and Policy, “World Container Throughput,” https://porteconomicsmanagement.org/pemp/contents/part1/maritime-shipping-and-international-trade/world-container-throughput/

Vector Logistics Group, “Container Fleet Expands Eightfold in 25 Years,” https://vectorlogisticsgroup.com/container-fleet-expands-eightfold-in-25-years/

International Maritime Organization, “Automatic Identification Systems (AIS),” https://www.imo.org/en/ourwork/safety/pages/ais.aspx

Windward, “Looking Beyond AIS,” https://windward.ai/blog/looking-beyond-ais/

S&P Global, “Shadow Fleet Expands to Maintain Sanctioned Oil Flows,” https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/news-research/latest-news/crude-oil/090325-factbox-shadow-fleet-expands-to-maintain-sanctioned-oil-flows

Reuters, “Shadow Tanker Fleet Grows More Slowly as Western Sanctions Target Russian Oil,” https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shadow-tanker-fleet-grows-more-slowly-western-sanctions-target-russian-oil-2025-08-13/

RAND Corporation, research report on China’s Maritime Militia, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2954-1.html

Small Wars Journal, “Beyond Swarming,” https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/02/16/beyond-swarming/

NATO, “NATO Launches Baltic Sentry to Increase Critical Infrastructure Security,” https://www.nato.int/en/news-and-events/articles/news/2025/01/14/nato-launches-baltic-sentry-to-increase-critical-infrastructure-security

Defense News, “11 Baltic Cables Damaged in 15 Months, Pushing NATO to Boost Security,” https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2025/01/28/11-baltic-cables-damaged-in-15-months-pushing-nato-to-boost-security/

Atlantic Council, “From Cloud to Kill Zone: How Ukraine Rewired Naval Warfare,” https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/from-cloud-to-kill-zone-how-ukraine-rewired-naval-warfare/

Defense News, “Ukraine Is Launching Strike Drones From Everything, Including Black Sea Robo-Boats,” https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2026/07/01/ukraine-is-launching-strike-drones-from-everything-including-black-sea-robo-boats/

Coming in the first quarter of 2027: 

Available now:

CH-53K King Stallion Capabilities or Why it Should Have Been Called the CH-55

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
09/20/2026

The CH-53K King Stallion is an optimized, heavy-lift, sea-based, long range solution for the Marine Air Ground Task Force. 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing increases readiness, lethality, and forward presence through modernization by embracing the capabilities of the CH-53K.

02.23.2026

Video by Cpl. Mya Seymour 

2nd Marine Aircraft Wing

I identified the CH-53K early on as best described as a CH-55, for it so different from its predecessor.

What if it was called the CH-55? Transformation in the Vertical Heavy Lift Fleet

12/08/2020

By Robbin Laird

To the casual observer, the Super Stallion and the King Stallion look like the same aircraft.

One of the challenges in understanding how different the CH-53K is from the CH-53E is the numbering part.

If it were called CH-55 perhaps one would get the point that these are very different air platforms, with very different capabilities.

What they have in common, by deliberate design, is a similar logistical footprint, so that they could operate similarly off of amphibious ships or other ships in the fleet for that matter.

But the CH-53 is a mechanical aircraft, which most assuredly the CH-55 (aka as the CH-53K) is not.

In blunt terms, the CH-55 (aka as the CH-53K) is faster, carries more kit, can distribute its load to multiple locations without landing, is built as a digital aircraft from the ground up and can leverage its digitality for significant advancements in how it is maintained, how it operates in a task force, how it can be updated, and how it could work with unmanned systems or remotes.

These capabilities taken together create a very different lift platform than is the legacy CH-53E. In a strategic environment where force mobility is informing capabilities across the combat spectrum, it is hard to understate the value of a lift platform, notably one which can talk and operate digitally, in carving out new tactical capabilities with strategic impacts.

The lift side of the equation within a variety of environments can be stated succinctly. The King Stallion will lift 27,000 lbs. external payload, deliver it 110 nm to a high-hot zone, loiter, and return to the ship with fuel to spare.   What that means is JLTV’s (22,600-lb.), up-armored HMMWV, and other heavier tactical cargos go to shore by air, rather than by LCAC or other slower sea lift means.  For less severe ambient conditions or shorter distances than this primary mission, the 53K can carry up to 36,000 lbs.

With ever increasing lift requirements and advancing threats in the battlefield, there is no other vertical lift aircraft available that meets emerging heavy lift needs. There are a lot of platforms that can blow things up or kill people, but for heavy lift, the CH-53K is the only option.

For the Marines, this is a core enabling capability. The CH-53K is equipped with a triple external hook system, which will be a significant external operations enabler for the Marine Air Ground Task Force.  The single, dual and triple external cargo hook capability allows for the transfer of three independent external loads to three separate supported units in three separate landing zones in one single sortie without having to return to a ship or other logistical hub.

The external system can be rapidly reconfigured between dual point, single point loads, and triple hook configurations in order to best support the ground scheme of maneuver.

All three external hooks can be operated independently supporting true distributed operations. For example, three infantry companies widely dispersed across the battlefield can be rapidly resupplied with fuel, ammo, water or other supplies directly at their location—during the same sortie—eliminating the requirement for the helicopter to make multiple trips or for cargo from a helicopter to be transloaded to ground vehicles for redistribution—saving ground vehicle fuel and MAGTF exposure to ground threats.

The CH-53K’s triple external hook system is a new capability for the Marine Corps and an improvement in capability and efficiency over the legacy aircraft it replaces making it a game changer for providing heavy lift in support of combat, humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief operations, notably in a distributed operational space.

The CH-53K design integrates the latest technologies to meet the USMC requirement for triple the lift of the predecessor Super Stallion while still maintaining the size and footprint to remain compatible with today’s ships and strategic air transport platforms.

The aircraft is fully marinized for shipboard operations, including automatic blade fold and design robustness to meet new and extreme requirements for salt-fog and corrosion.  It is already certified for transport in C-5 (2 x 53Ks) and C-17 (1 x 53K) aircraft and also includes an integral aerial refueling probe for long range missions or self-deployment.

The work process is very different as well, because of support for palletization. This may sound like logistic geek language, but it is about speed to deliver to the force for its operating efficacy. Given that speed to operation is a key metric for supporting the strategic shift from the land wars to full spectrum crisis management, the CH-55 (aka as the CH-53K) is a key enabler for the new work flow essential to combat success.

The digital piece is a foundational element and why it is probably better thought of as a CH-55. This starts with the fly-by-wire flight controls. The CH-53K is the first and only heavy lift fly-by-wire helicopter.

The CH-53K’s fly-by-wire is a leap in technology from legacy mechanical flight control systems and keeps safety and survivability at the core of the Kilo’s design while providing a portal to an optionally piloted capability and autonomy.

The CH-53K’s fly-by-wire design drastically reduces pilot workload and minimizes exposure to threats or danger, particularly during complex missions or challenging aircraft maneuvers like low light level externals in a degraded visual environment allowing the pilot to manage and lead the mission vice focusing on physically controlling the aircraft.

The fly-by-wire design further complements safety and survivability through physically separated Flight Control Computers, separated cockpit controls with an Active Inceptor System, and load limiting control laws that will extend component lives. Other cargo Helicopters originated in the late 50s/early 60s, predating the emergence of Aircraft Survivability as an engineering discipline.

Not leaving anything to chance, the overall CH-53K survivability process includes an extensive, ongoing Live Fire Test Program, which started at a component level, and culminates with a full-up aircraft test with turning rotors.  The CH-53K is the only heavy lift helicopter designed from the ground up to survive in battle, reflecting a 21st century level of survivability.

In addition, the CH-53K was designed from the start in an all-digital environment, taking advantage of virtual reality tools to optimize both manufacture and support of the aircraft throughout its life cycle.  Fleet Marine personnel were engaged from the beginning of the design process to ensure the aircraft was designed for supportability and reduced O&S costs–from component access, support equipment, animated work instruction and electronic publications to the system integration with Sikorsky’s fleet management tools that were originally developed to support its commercial S-92 aircraft fleet.

The S-92 has demonstrated greater than 95% availability for a fleet of over 300 aircraft which now boast near 1.5 million flight hours, in harsh North Sea and other off shore Oil & Gas environments.  Use of data analytics (“big data”) has proven to save money in the commercial fleet and these same tools are already in place for the CH-53K and being proven on the CH-53E in the interim.

The CH-53K’s triple redundant fly-by-wire design improves maintainability significantly through fault Detection and isolation capability providing the ability to detect failures in actuators and other electrical and electromechanical components including hydraulic leak detection with fault isolation.

While the CH-53K is bigger and far more capable in many important ways, it’s also smaller in terms of its logistics footprint and provides a best O&S value over its entire lifetime. The CH-53K’s logistics footprint is 1/3 less by volume with a 5,000 cubic feet reduction and 1/4 less by weight with a 25, 000 reduction compared to the legacy CH-53E. That’s equivalent to the storage volume of a 2-car garage and the weight of a two up-armored HMMWVs. In the cargo world, that’s 2 standard shipping containers, which is space and available payload on a ship or less equipment to transport to an austere support base.

The design reduces the maintenance workload as well.  With no mechanical rigging requirement and fewer moving parts leading to fewer failures, the CH-53K provides a significant reduction in maintenance man hours, a 35% improvement in Mean Time to Repair, and ultimately increased readiness and availability to the warfighter.

Organizational-level maintenance peculiar support equipment for the CH‑53K is based on common and CH-53E support equipment in order to reduce the new peculiar support equipment required for the CH-53K. Only 150 items of peculiar support equipment were developed to support organizational-level maintenance, which is 146 less pieces of support equipment or a 52% footprint reduction compared to the CH-53E. Additionally the CH-53K support equipment was designed to reduce and optimize equipment weight and life cycle cost while material selection and coating changes from legacy aircraft to eliminate use of hazardous materials and provide better environmental protection from corrosion.

The T408-GE-400 engine brings more capability to the CH-53K through 57% more horsepower with a smaller logistics footprint compared to the T64 it replaces in the same size package but with 63% fewer parts. The T408 supports engine on aircraft maintenance and was designed to maximize two levels of maintenance—Organizational to Depot—with all on-wing engine maintenance being performed using the common tools in flight line toolbox further reducing the logistics footprint and maintenance man hours while increasing availability and readiness of the CH-53K.

The CH-53K sets the standard and is the 1st and only true 21st Century Heavy Lift Helicopter.

To be more specific, the current heavy / upper medium lift cargo helicopters that the CH-53K replaces—legacy Chinook, CH-53 A/D/G Sea Stallion, CH-53E Super Stallion and their engines—were literally designed in the mid-20th century.

In the more than half century that has elapsed between the design of these legacy aircraft and the first flight of the CH-53K in 2015, there have been significant advancements in helicopter design and manufacturing.

The CH-53K is superior to its predecessors, not by engineering miracles, but by over a half century of steady engineering and technology progress that was designed and incorporated into the CH-53K from the ground up.

The King Stallion is a totally new helicopter that leapfrogs the CH-53E design to improve operational capability, interoperability, reliability, maintainability, survivability, and cost of ownership.

Finally, the CH-53K is nearing completion of testing and well into production.  The program remains on target for a 2021 IOC and 2023 deployment that meets the USMC’s operational needs.  The King Stallion is the only aircraft that meets the heavy lift requirements for the USMC, supports the Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) concept, and provides that safety, survivability, supportability and growth capability to meet the service’s needs for the many decades to come….

 

Fixing the Machine: Rear Admiral McCoy on Rebuilding Naval Aviation’s Training Pipeline

Posted on | by Robbin Laird

By Robbin Laird

I published an overview piece, “Street to Fleet: How CNATRA Is Working Naval Aviation Training,“ ahead of this interview deliberately. That article was built entirely from public sources: CNATRA’s own releases, Proceedings essays going back to 2002, the “Warrior Ethos” letter to incoming students, DVIDS features on the FITU/HITU instructor pipeline. The point of publishing it first was to show what the record looks like from the outside, before I sat down August 14, 2026 with Rear Admiral Max “Pepper” McCoy, the Chief of Naval Air Training, to hear what it looks like from the inside.

The two pictures coincide, but they are not the same picture. The public record describes the modernization effort: new airframes, mixed-reality trainers, a contract-operated rotary track that could significantly reduce training time. What McCoy described to me is the prioritization shift and necessary triage to stabilize operations and incorporate modernization into the training pipeline. Under his watch, McCoy is finding ways to remodel aviation training, without the luxury of choosing one task before the other.

McCoy and I have a history that predates this conversation. We worked together going back to the F-35 community’s stand-up, and again when he commanded Carrier Strike Group Four. That history matters here because it shapes the kind of conversation this was: not a briefing, but an Admiral thinking out loud with someone who has spent three decades watching militaries try to modernize, about what it actually takes to fix a system from the inside while the requirement to change what comes after it keeps growing.

Breaking the Self-Feeding Cycle

McCoy’s own description of what he is running is blunt: a conveyor belt in a factory. The test of whether it is working is whether it flows smoothly, without pools forming anywhere along the line. Any stagnation, anywhere in the system, is diagnostic. It tells you the machine is not working.

The diagnosis he offered me traces back more than a decade. CNATRA underproduced against Fleet requirements for the better part of ten years, driven in large part by problems with the T-45 in the strike pipeline. Accessions were not adjusted to match, so students kept entering a machine that could not process them at the rate they arrived, and the backlog that resulted is the “pre-NIFE pool” that shows up in the public accounts of this period. In 2022, a production shift strategy was implemented that drove production up to reportedly 105 percent of the requirement by 2024 across every type-model-series, pushing students through to the fleet replacement squadrons in volume.

But the fix at one stage of the pipeline exposed the constraint at the next one. The FRSs are now the ones underproducing, which means a new log-jam is forming just before the point where a winged aviator becomes useful to the Fleet. Because students arrive late to their first Fleet tour, and because career milestones do not move to accommodate that delay, the Navy is not getting a full production tour out of its junior officers before it has to pull them for disassociated sea tours or to fill gaps created by under manning elsewhere in the Fleet. The junior officers who would otherwise be back in the training pipeline as instructors, generating the next cohort, are the ones being diverted. The system, in McCoy’s words, feeds on itself.

This is the reason McCoy frames his goal not as a production percentage but as time-to-train against entitlement. If he can compress the interval between commissioning and Fleet arrival down to what a student is actually entitled to under the syllabus, first-tour JOs complete their sea tours on schedule, roll into full length production tours prior to disassociated sea tours, and the self-feeding cycle that has been starving the training pipeline of its own workforce starts to reverse itself.

The Three-Legged Stool

McCoy’s own framework for the constraint is a production stool with three legs: airplanes, instructors, and students. Right now, he told me, none of the three legs are where they need to be. There are not enough airplanes. There are not enough instructors. And there are, paradoxically, too many students in the pipeline at once, not because CNATRA is over-accessing but because time-to-train has stretched out so far that students are sitting in pools rather than flowing through.

He is the single accountable flag officer for Street to Fleet across the Naval Aviation Enterprise, but his authority is not uniform across the pipeline. NIFE and the schools command sit under the Naval Education and Training Command, not under CNATRA directly, though McCoy works closely with that command to align the underlying math. Everything inside CNATRA itself, he owns. Once a winged aviator reaches the fleet replacement squadron, they belong to a Type Wing commander answering to a Type Commander. McCoy’s job, as he described it to me, is to take the strategic view across the whole enterprise, identify where the system is efficient and where it is not, and decide which levers to pull and in what order to get back to entitlement fastest.

On the airplane side, CNATRA runs entirely on contracted logistics support rather than Sailors and Marines turning wrenches, so a large share of McCoy’s own time goes into aircraft readiness, what the command calls getting to “North Star,” the number of ready-for-training aircraft needed to execute the daily flight schedule or surge production if required, while managing aircraft service life.

The instructor leg is where the shortage is most acute, and where the workaround has required the most improvisation. McCoy’s active-duty instructor cadre is built from first sea tour rollers, supplemented by permanent flight instructors who have gone off the normal command track to stay in production full time. Beneath that sits a reserve component split between selected reservists and full-time TARs, Marine Corps instructors supplied through the Marine Corps Training Command, and, in some cases, Coast Guard personnel. Layered on top of that structure is a tool McCoy is using more heavily than in the past: what the command calls “SERGRADs,” selectively retained graduate wingers, high performers held in a limited capacity instructor role while they wait for an FRS seat to open. McCoy currently has 15 Marine SERGRADs flying jet training at Kingsville and Meridian, which frees his more experienced instructors to fly the advanced phases, air-to-surface and air-to-air, that SERGRADs are not yet qualified to lead. And then there are the contract instructor pilots, former Navy and Marine Corps jet aviators who McCoy is now looking to expand into the primary phase of training.

What ties all of this together is a deliberate reallocation strategy rather than a single fix: pull the levers available inside CNATRA so that instructor manning at the FRSs, where CNATRA has less flexibility, can be prioritized. CNATRA has more variety in where it can source instructors from; the FRSs need first-tour rollers with specific type-model-series experience, a much narrower pool.

Standards Instead of a Number

The part of the conversation that McCoy came back to more than any other was standards, and it is here that his framing departs most clearly from the production-percentage logic of the previous decade.

McCoy’s response is to institute faster triggers to attrition, so struggling students reach a review board sooner and leadership makes the call earlier rather than later. Attrition in advanced training will still happen, he told me, but at meaningfully lower rates than in the past, because the students reaching that stage will already have cleared a higher bar.

McCoy is candid that he came into this job as, in his words, a TOPGUN graduate, NAWDC commander, and CSG-4 commander with a laser focus on upholding training standardization. The way he described his obligation to students is a reciprocal contract. He owes them, first, the best training environment he can provide with the resources available, and second, clarity about what is expected of them. What they owe him in return is not perfection but full effort every day: showing up ready, learning in the debrief, correcting deficiencies, and making new mistakes rather than repeating old ones. McCoy stated that he is always looking to take a firm, fair, and consistent approach. And he was explicit about why the standard matters as much as it does: the expectations placed on a winged aviator escalate sharply and quickly the moment they reach the Fleet, and the training pipeline’s job is to condition students for that jump before it happens, not after.

He offered a detail that captures how far this commitment goes in practice. When asked how CNATRA is producing at 105 percent of requirement without enough airplanes or instructors, his answer is that the instructor cadre is flying seven days a week. He called being a CNATRA instructor one of the hardest jobs in naval aviation: training the least experienced aviators in the Navy, transmitting culture as much as stick-and-rudder skills, with no finish line and no offseason.

McCoy described his own method, one he said he has applied at every command he has held, as reverse engineering: starting from what a first-tour junior officer in a given type-model-series actually needs to be capable of doing in the Fleet, and working backward through the FRS, then advanced, then primary, so that each stage builds the specific habits and skill sets the next stage requires, rather than each stage optimizing in isolation.

Live Virtual Constructive as Constant Learning, Not a Substitute for Flight Hours

We spent time on Live Virtual Constructive training. McCoy described LVC as complementary to flight time rather than a replacement for it: using ground-based systems to build habits and get students to a “right training, right cost” starting point, so that when they climb into an aircraft they achieve first-pass yield rather than needing to re-fly events they were not ready for. He was careful to distinguish this from an add-on. His view is that LVC only delivers its real value when it is woven into the curriculum, not treated as a separate module bolted onto an otherwise unchanged syllabus.

That distinction matters because of what McCoy called the age of urgency: a security environment with no clean line between crisis and peacetime, where a training system built on the assumption that there will be time to catch up later is no longer viable. What the Fleet needs, in his words, is a dynamic training system, not a custodial one. He was explicit that fixing CNATRA’s current production shortfall is a necessary precondition, not a substitute, for that shift; you cannot build a dynamic, threat-responsive training architecture on top of a pipeline that is still struggling to produce enough aviators to fill Fleet seats.

A Culture the Navy Will Not Outsource

McCoy was equally direct about where he draws a line. He does not want to outsource large parts of the training enterprise more than necessary. Naval aviation, in his framing, is not a normal air force: flying from ships, operating inside a carrier strike group, and supporting amphibious groups all impose requirements that a generic training model does not capture, and he sees it as his job to protect that distinctiveness even as he pulls in outside capacity to solve near-term shortfalls.

The Contract Operated Primary Training-Rotary program is his clearest example of how he squares that circle. Students who go through COPT-R are supervised by an active-duty O-5 who verifies compliance, and CNATRA sends personnel through at elevated frequency to ensure that students see people in Navy and Marine Corps flight suits who can reinforce the cultural content the syllabus alone will not carry. He was clear this is a deliberate, bounded use of outside capacity to relieve pressure on active-duty instructor manning and T-6B readiness, not a step toward wholesale outsourcing.

McCoy flagged something he sees coming that has not yet shown up in the public accounts of Street to Fleet: aviators returning from recent deployments as genuine combat veterans, who will move into CNATRA’s instructor cadre in the near term. McCoy was unambiguous about the value of that shift. There is no substitute, he told me, for a student naval aviator sitting across a briefing table from someone who has employed weapons in combat. That is the mechanism, in his account, by which a training command that is currently focused on fixing its own production math starts to become the kind of open, operationally-current learning system that keeps pace with a threat environment that will not wait for a five-year modernization plan to catch up.

Mr. Fixit

What came through across the conversation was less a modernization narrative than a description of triage performed with an eye already on what comes after it. McCoy was candid that a system in crisis makes innovation challenging because so much of the available time and energy goes into simply making the machine run. However, CNATRA continues to innovate in parallel on initiatives to deliver production efficiencies, uphold standardization, and improve training quality. His stated ambition is to hand his successor a pipeline with the right number of airplanes, the right number of instructors, and time-to-train at entitlement, so that the next Chief of Naval Air Training can accelerate training modernization with a fully operational production line.

CNATRA is not yet the dynamic, threat-responsive training architecture that the kill web environment McCoy’s own aviators will eventually operate in demands. What McCoy described to me is the harder and less visible work of building the foundation that architecture will eventually stand on, without compromising the standard that determines whether the aviators coming off that foundation are ready for the Fleet waiting for them.

Note: This is complete version of the interview.

A condensed version was published earlier on Breaking Defense on September 4, 2026.