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…
By Robbin Laird When I first visited the Ocius build facility, it was tucked inside the University of New South Wales, an enthusiastic team of smart young engineers clustered around Robert Dane’s vision of what an uncrewed maritime surface vessel could become. There was genuine energy and real technical imagination,…
The transition from prototype to production is rarely as simple as it sounds in procurement documents. But for Anduril Australia, the journey with Ghost Shark — the large autonomous underwater vehicle now in steady-state production for the Royal Australian Navy — represents something far more consequential than a contract milestone.…
By Robbin Laird The recent Australia–Indonesia Defence Cooperation Agreement and the expansion of Exercise Keris Woomera have largely been framed as a bilateral story: two neighbours with a complicated history discovering that they now need each other to manage the shared archipelagic space between them. That framing is accurate as…
