By Robbin Laird The destruction of the IRIS Shahid Bagheri by U.S. Central Command strikes removed from the Iranian order of battle one of the most conceptually significant vessels in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy's inventory. The ship was not a blue-water combatant in the conventional sense. It carried…
By Kenneth Maxwell A crisis at the Strait of Hormuz was always coming. The Wall Street Journal reported on March 10, 2026 that Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline and the UAE's smaller Habshan-Fujairah pipeline are now among the most critical pieces of infrastructure in the world economy, the only overland arteries…
By Robert Czulda For Central and Eastern European states (particularly Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Poland) as well as Northern Europe (notably Finland), the primary and enduring threat remains. Russia, which, despite strategic setbacks, shows no intention of halting the war in Ukraine. The outbreak of conflict against Iran also affects…
By Robbin Laird For most of its history, U.S. Central Command has been an Army officer's domain. Since its founding in 1983, CENTCOM has been led predominantly by Army and Marine generals whose careers were shaped by the grinding land campaigns of Iraq and Afghanistan. The combatant command that oversaw…
By Pierre Tran Paris - The executive chairman of Dassault Aviation, Eric Trappier, called March 4 on Airbus to accept management leadership of the French industrial partner on a new European fighter jet, otherwise the project would die from lack of corporate support. “If Airbus maintains the probability of not…
My recently published books on the global war in Ukraine along with my forthcoming book with Kenneth Maxwel examining the Australian, Brazilian, and Chinese dynamic within the broader framework of Global China together constitute a sustained analytical argument about the transformation of the international system. Individually, each book addresses a…
By Robbin Laird A recent article by Stephen Kuper entitled, "Japan accelerates dual-use technology cooperation and development: Opportunities for allied nation industrial cooperation," provided a thoughtful opportunity to revisst my early argument shaped in a discussion with David Beaumont on my concept of embedded logistics. This article draws on both…
By Robbin Laird Over the course of 2026, I am completing a series of interconnected books that examine what I believe represents a fundamental inflection point in modern history. These works are not independent scholarly exercises but rather pieces of a larger analytical puzzle, each contributing to our understanding…
