For four decades, the Western defense establishment has pursued revolutions. The Revolution in Military Affairs promised to transform warfare through precision strike and information dominance. Network-centric warfare would lift the fog of war through seamless connectivity. Effects-based operations would allow strategic objectives to be achieved without traditional attrition. Each concept…
Brazil was supposed to be one of the cleaner chapters in the story of China’s global industrial rise. BYD, the Shenzhen-based electric vehicle giant that has become a symbol of Beijing’s technological ambitions, was not arriving as a resource extractor or a commodity trader. It was coming as a manufacturer—bringing…
By Robbin Laird A useful analytical distinction has been drawn by Paul Bracken between how alliances are understood in political science and how they function in game theory. In political science, alliances are negotiated documents — formal texts that commit states to one another across a range of contingencies. In…
By Robbin Laird Australia is unlikely to be the public face of Pax Silica, but it may prove to be one of its most consequential enabling powers. The emerging United States-led architecture suggests that the states best positioned to shape the next international order will not be limited to those…
In a recent piece I published on Defense.info, I argued that what changes most profoundly in a genuinely epochal transition is not the answers societies hold, but the questions they consider worth asking. The analyst who clings to the old question-space does not simply get wrong answers. He asks questions…
By Robbin Laird Something has changed in Japanese strategic culture, and the world has been slow to notice. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s first female prime minister, holder of a commanding two-thirds supermajority in the Diet, and a politician who came of age studying American power in Washington, is executing…
By Robbin Laird In August 2025, the U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Division Newport, issued a sole-source solicitation for three C2 Robotics “Speartooth” Large Uncrewed Underwater Vessels, 11-metre variant. The justification was blunt: Speartooth was the only autonomous underwater vehicle that met Navy design, size, and mission requirements for long-range,…
By Robbin Laird Australia’s Maritime Autonomous Systems Unit, the MASU, stands at an inflection point. The period of experimentation and prototype evaluation that has defined the past several years of Australian engagement with unmanned maritime systems must now give way to something harder to achieve and more consequential: operational delivery.…
