By Robbin Laird A September 2026of digital storytelling from The Conversation, built by researchers at the University of Sydney and the National University of Singapore’s Centre of Maritime Studies, traced the life of a single tanker called New Konk. Built in Japan in 1991 as an unremarkable cargo vessel, it…
On my way back from Australia, I had a chance to reflect on years of writing and wrote this piece as a consequence. Over the years I have worked through nearly every format available to someone who thinks about defense and strategy for a living. I have given lectures and…
By Robbin Laird At a winging ceremony held for the U.S. Navy’s newest naval aviators, Rear Admiral Max McCoy, the 39th Chief of Naval Air Training (CNATRA), delivered a speech that did more than mark a rite of passage. It laid down, in plain and forceful terms, what it means…
By Robbin Laird It is no accident that I am writing this essay early in the morning in Canberra, Australia. There is no government which uses the term “rules based order” more than the Australian one does. For most of the postwar period, the phrase “rules-based order” carried a single,…
Preview: Sir Richard Williams Foundation Seminar, 1 October 2026, National Gallery of Australia By Robbin Laird On 1 October, the Sir Richard Williams Foundation returns to the question that has quietly reshaped Australian airpower debate over the past two years: not whether the Royal Australian Air Force can support the…
By Robbin Laird There are dates that carry weight beyond the events that fall on them, and September 11 is one of them. For anyone born in the last sixty years, the date needs no elaboration: it means the destruction of the Twin Towers, the wounding of the Pentagon, the…
The first installment in this series on General Pasquale Preziosa’s foreword to The Unfinished Pillar takes up the argument that gives the book its title and its sharpest edge. The unfinished character of the European pillar, Preziosa argues, was never primarily an institutional story. It is a story about the…
By Robbin Laird There are books whose relevance to the moment of publication is a matter of good timing, and there are books whose relevance was built in from the start because the argument they’re built on never stopped being tested. The Unfinished Pillar belongs to the second category. The…
