By Robbin Laird In August 2025, the U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Division Newport, issued a sole-source solicitation for three C2 Robotics “Speartooth” Large Uncrewed Underwater Vessels, 11-metre variant. The justification was blunt: Speartooth was the only autonomous underwater vehicle that met Navy design, size, and mission requirements for long-range,…
By Robbin Laird Australia’s Maritime Autonomous Systems Unit, the MASU, stands at an inflection point. The period of experimentation and prototype evaluation that has defined the past several years of Australian engagement with unmanned maritime systems must now give way to something harder to achieve and more consequential: operational delivery.…
By Robbin Laird The world’s navies are crossing a strategic fault line in which traditional assumptions about capital ships, carrier battle groups, and exquisite platforms no longer hold. The emerging era of uncrewed, networked, and AI-enabled systems is creating a new maritime order in which the force that adapts fastest,…
Japan’s role in the hypersonic enterprise is no longer peripheral or symbolic; it is becoming one of the central test cases for how offensive hypersonic strike, hypersonic defense, and alliance politics can be woven together into a coherent Indo‑Pacific deterrence posture. The way Tokyo is moving—from “missile‑defense client” to co‑producer…
By Robbin Laird The war in Ukraine represents the first full-scale laboratory for kill web operations in modern warfare, where the rapid adaptation of drone systems and tactical innovation proceeds not in isolation, but anchored by a sophisticated ISR grid provided by diverse democratic allies. This coalition ISR ecosystem, spanning…
By Robbin Laird The kill web concept, which Ed Timperlake and I have been developing and writing about for more than a decade, is fundamentally about replacing the linear kill chain with a distributed, interactive combat architecture. Rather than sequencing effects through a fixed hierarchy of platforms, the kill web…
History rarely offers the same strategic irony twice. In 1805, a small detachment of U.S. Marines marched out of Alexandria across the North African desert to put steel on the “shores of Tripoli,” breaking the grip of Barbary pirates who believed they could hold American commerce and citizens hostage at…
By Robbin Laird The destruction of the IRIS Shahid Bagheri by U.S. Central Command strikes removed from the Iranian order of battle one of the most conceptually significant vessels in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy’s inventory. The ship was not a blue-water combatant in the conventional sense. It carried…
