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…
The central question of this series is a simple one. Is the U.S. Army transforming, or is it acquiring new equipment and calling that transformation? The two are not the same. A force can buy drones by the hundreds of thousands and still fight the way it did a decade…
By Robbin Laird The public account of Desert Forge 2026 describes a statewide training event built around a notional cyberattack, telecommunications outages, and an attack on a power-distribution station near Hawthorne. Those events were scenario injects. The exercise was designed to expose weaknesses and opportunities inside the formation: how leaders…
