By Robbin Laird This week I had dinner with Brig. Gen. Randy Lau, the Land Component Commander of the Nevada Army National Guard and his Sgt Major. We talked about leadership, warfighting, and how to prepare people and organizations for a world that doesn’t follow the plan. Afterward, Lau summed…
By Robbin Laird When I spoke with Robert Dane, founder and CEO of Ocius, on September 30, the Bluebottle program had moved past the “will it work” phase. It is now in the harder phase of deciding how navies and border agencies should build a force around a system that…
By Robbin Laird Britain’s Maritime and Coastguard Agency has just told shipowners something that would have sounded alarmist a decade ago: satellite navigation can no longer be taken for granted in some of the world’s busiest shipping regions. In a new Marine Guidance Note, MGN 719, the MCA warns that…
Vladimir Putin has spent much of the past decade insisting that Ukraine has no independent claim to nationhood, that it is, in his formulation, an artificial construct carved out of “historical Russia.” It is worth remembering that this is not a new argument. It is Stalin’s argument, updated for a…
By Robbin Laird On August 31, on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek, Narendra Modi told Vladimir Putin, “We must move away from endless war towards an end to the war.” He described a peaceful resolution of all issues as the call of humanity and said…
By Robbin Laird Two stories crossed my desk within weeks of each other in September, both about the U.S. Navy’s anti-submarine warfare enterprise, and neither one mentions the other. But read together, they describe the same institutional problem being solved from opposite ends of the sensor-to-shooter chain: the platforms that…
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…
By Robbin Laird At the end of August, on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit, Narendra Modi did something leaders seldom do in front of cameras: he pressed Vladimir Putin to end his war. Despite the organization’s name, the summit was held in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Modi told…
