By Robbin Laird Marcus Jones, writing for CIMSEC on October 2, has made a case that deserves a wider audience than the shipbuilding specialists who will read it first. His argument is that Korean shipbuilding will matter to American naval power only if American institutions change how they buy, schedule,…
By Pierre Tran PARIS – France has scrambled to limit the damage after its chief of the defense staff told parliamentarians Oct. 8 that partner Germany has pulled out of a landmark project to build a new heavy tank and uncrewed vehicles, known as the main ground combat system (MGCS).…
By Robbin Laird Having been a long-term observer of Franco-German defense industrial cooperation, the thing I know for sure is that it is never static and is often subject to political maneuvering, industrial dialogue, distrusts and conflict. The new stage of that co-operation continues in that tradition. In the same…
Second Line of Defense has always been about the long view: interviews with the people who build and run forces, analyses of how militaries are changing, and books that pull those threads together. But strategic change does not only show up in the big set pieces. It shows up in…
By Robbin Laird The commander of the 101st Airborne Division has just set out the operational problem for the next generation of Army air assault. He did it in plain language, and he did not claim that a single platform will solve it. In a recent Task & Purpose interview,…
The last installment closed on a specific claim: that if strategy is a wager continuously remade as conditions shift, then the question of where strategic weight sits within an alliance can’t be treated as fixed either. This installment picks up exactly that thread — the geography of European defense, and…
By Robbin Laird A recent essay in the Center for International Maritime Security, Hervé Auffret’s “What Naval Power Cannot Buy,” makes an argument that should unsettle anyone still planning maritime strategy around hull counts and missile inventories. Ships, he writes, can deter a competitor, compel a rival, and escort a…
By Robbin Laird Mike Wynne, the 21st Secretary of the Air Force, died this past weekend. He was my boss, my colleague and my friend, and he was one of the very few people I have known who understood how to lead, and how to drive real military transformation. “If…
