By Robbin Laird The American debate about shipbuilding has hardened into a simple choice: build warships at home or buy them from allies abroad. That framing makes good politics. It is poor strategy. The more useful question is whether the industrial know-how of allied shipbuilders can be brought into American…
By Robbin Laird When I interviewed Ocius founder and CEO Robert Dane on September 30, I listed the “Fiji decision” as one of the next tests of the Bluebottle program, along with the San Diego exercise, the Baltic winter trials and the opening of the company’s new operations centre (Second…
The shipyards had their hull gap. The makers of cheap long-range weapons now appear to have an engine gap, and the evidence is stronger on the supply side than on any collapse in output. What the Geran line is actually made of Russia’s jet-powered Gerans are a lesson in how…
Are we so absorbed in managing disruption that we miss what is forming inside it? It is the right question for my book called Mastering Chaos, and it sharpens the book’s argument. A question worth taking seriously After reading my article, “The Forces of Change: Why the Post-Industrial Thinkers of…
Two announcements on either side of Euronaval 2026 show European navies trying to answer the same question in different ways: how to put more expendable or optionally crewed combat capability on the water quickly, and how to produce it at the rate a long fight would demand. In France, the…
By Robbin Laird Canberra is paying for autonomy by retiring platforms whose jobs it intends to spread across a network, and the two items the press picked up, the C-27J transport fleet and the Huon-class minehunters, show both the logic and the risk. Defence Minister Richard Marles says the government…
In October, the In Brief section on Second Line of Defense took on a broader job. It still covers defense news, but it now also follows trends and developments that shape the strategic environment even when they don’t look like defense stories at first glance. From October 18 through October…
By Kenneth Maxwell At about 9:45 on the morning of November 1, 1755, All Saints Day, the earth beneath Lisbon began to move. The churches were full. Many of the faithful were at mass when the vaults and walls came down on the congregations. “I could hardly take a step…
