By Robbin Laird In August 2025, the U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Division Newport, issued a sole-source solicitation for three C2 Robotics “Speartooth” Large Uncrewed Underwater Vessels, 11-metre variant. The justification was blunt: Speartooth was the only autonomous underwater vehicle that met Navy design, size, and mission requirements for long-range,…
By Robbin Laird Australia’s Maritime Autonomous Systems Unit, the MASU, stands at an inflection point. The period of experimentation and prototype evaluation that has defined the past several years of Australian engagement with unmanned maritime systems must now give way to something harder to achieve and more consequential: operational delivery.…
By: Alexandra Brooks On May 13, 2025, President Donald Trump stood before Saudi ministers, Gulf investors, and technology executives at the King Abdulaziz International Conference Center in Riyadh and delivered what may be remembered as one of the defining foreign policy speeches of the decade. The event was written off…
When a former NATO secretary general warns that Britain is “underprepared, underinsured, under attack” and “not safe,” it is more than a routine shot in the Westminster blame game. Lord George Robertson’s recent intervention goes to the heart of the United Kingdom’s war‑fighting credibility in an era of state‑on‑state confrontation.…
By Robin Laird Begin with a simple arithmetic problem. A kamikaze drone costs roughly $5,000 to manufacture. A Patriot interceptor missile costs $4 million. An adversary launching a swarm of 200 cheap propeller-driven drones, each priced at $20,000, presents a defender using Patriot interceptors with a bill of $800 million…
The Trump administration has moved aggressively to build out America’s strategic and economic partnership with the Philippines. At the center of this effort are two interlocking frameworks: the Luzon Economic Corridor and the Pax Silica initiative. Together, they represent a serious attempt to rewire critical technology supply chains, repositioning the…
By Robbin Laird The Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminar of 23 April 2026 brought together practitioners, analysts, industry leaders and allies to confront a deceptively simple question: what does it actually mean to exploit Australia’s strategic advantage, not in a decade, but now? “Fight Tonight” was not a slogan but…
In April 2026, the European Union and the United States launched a new critical minerals partnership through a memorandum of understanding and an accompanying Action Plan, aimed at reducing dependence on concentrated supply chains, especially those tied to China, and at coordinating policy across the full minerals value chain. The…
