By Stephen Kuper Defence Connect 8 May 2026 As the post-World War II rules-based order continues to erode and a more competitive multipolar world emerges, Australia can no longer afford to ask the same questions; we need to start asking radically different ones The end of the Cold War was…
By Robbin Laird The V-22 Osprey’s nacelle improvement program represents far more than a maintenance initiative for an aging tiltrotor aircraft. It serves as a revealing case study in how military forces must reconceive readiness itself as they transition from episodic crisis management to persistent chaos management. The challenge of…
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…
