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…
By Kenneth Maxwell In a week when President Donald J. Trump visits President Xi Jinping in Beijing, the war between Iran and the U.S. (and Israel) is in a precarious truce with the Strait of Hormuz remaining closed to the vessels that keep many of the world’s economies running, while…
By Robbin Laird In the spring of 2020, Murielle Delaporte and I completed our book, The Return of Direct Defense in Europe: Meeting the 21st Century Authoritarian Challenge. The book was built on years of field research across Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe, and on extensive interviews with German generals,…
By Stephen Kuper Defence Connect 8 May 2026 As the post-World War II rules-based order continues to erode and a more competitive multipolar world emerges, Australia can no longer afford to ask the same questions; we need to start asking radically different ones The end of the Cold War was…
