By Robbin Laird In every sector today, leaders are discovering the same uncomfortable truth: they can no longer plan their way through genuine chaos. The familiar script, stabilize the crisis, restore normal, move on, no longer fits a world where disruption is constant, tightly coupled, and accelerating. Mastering Chaos is…
By Pierre Tran Paris – French and German ministers are due to meet this summer, providing a timely target for concluding a dispute over a European project for a new generation fighter, a senior German government official said May 29. “I hope that we will come to a conclusion this…
By Robbin Laird The history of warfare is inseparable from the history of weather. At Normandy in June 1944, Dwight Eisenhower held four stars and command of the largest amphibious operation in history and deferred to a meteorologist. The 24-hour delay that enabled D-Day was not the product of a…
By Robbin Laird The Royal Australian Navy is crossing a dangerous bridge. On one side sits the force it has today, three Hobart-class air warfare destroyers, a diminishing number of Anzac-class frigates, and a support structure increasingly strained by the weight of strategic demand. On the other side sits the…
By Robbin Laird The Royal Australian Navy is entering a decade defined not simply by modernization, but by transition. The fleet is moving from an aging force structure built around Hobart-class destroyers and Anzac-class frigates toward a future force of Hunter-class frigates, new general-purpose frigates, upgraded destroyers, and eventually a…
By Robbin Laird Before a nation asks what threats it faces or what allies expect, it should ask a prior and more fundamental question — what are our genuine strategic advantages, and what force design maximizes them? That framing is right. It is also not new. The same foundational question…
By Robbin Laird USS Lewis B. Puller (ESB-3) embodies a straightforward but strategically important proposition: if you want to keep the Strait of Hormuz open against the threat of mines, you put the mine-warfare force where the mines are likely to be laid. The expeditionary sea base brings aviation, unmanned…
By Robbin Laird The U.S. capture of Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1989 and of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela in 2026 frame a striking transformation in American military power. Both operations targeted a hostile ruler in the Western Hemisphere. Both aimed to reset a regional balance of power. Yet the…
