By Gleb Tsipursky Defense organizations already understand that authority should track mission, role, and risk. An intelligence analyst, a weapons officer, a contractor, and a system administrator do not receive the same access simply because each can perform useful work. Artificial intelligence agents need the same discipline before they become…
By Kenneth Maxwell Piddington is a small village and civil parish in Oxfordshire. Its population is 358. The British government proposed to house 1,250 male asylum seekers at a disused Ministry of Defence base nearby. The village voted yesterday (15 September 2026) in a referendum, with 89% participation, to leave…
Remarks to the Nevada National Guard Pre-Command Course, September 15, 2026 By Robbin F. Laird On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was sitting in the waiting area outside the Secretary of Defense’s office at the Pentagon, watching a small television, when the first plane hit the World Trade…
By Robbin Laird A photograph taken on July 14, 2026 at Volk Field Combat Readiness Training Center in Camp Douglas, Wisconsin, shows a U.S. Marine Corps CH-53K King Stallion helicopter hoisting a recovered F-15 Eagle into the air. The image, credited to Paul Gorman of the Wisconsin National Guard Public…
By George Galdorisi In September 1776 an enormous British armada lay anchored in New York Harbor. A month earlier, British forces under General William Howe had defeated the Continental Army and gained control of New York City and Long Island. Now this fleet of 400 ships, including 10 ships-of-the-line, 20…
By Robbin Laird In August 2026, off Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story, Virginia, a Navy-industry team quietly solved a problem that has constrained every discussion of unmanned maritime systems I have written about for the past several years: how do you keep an autonomous vessel on station without a…
By Robbin Laird For four decades, the U.S. Navy trained a generation of acoustic sensor operators who could look at a waterfall display and, from pattern and instinct built over a career, call a submarine contact with a confidence no algorithm could match. That generation is retiring, not by choice,…
By Robbin Laird When I sat down with then Chief of the Australian Navy, Vice Admiral Tim Barrett, in 2017, one of the quieter points he made has aged into one of the more prescient ones. Amid the launch of the largest Royal Australian Navy recapitalization since the Second World…
