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…
For four decades, the Western defense establishment has pursued revolutions. The Revolution in Military Affairs promised to transform warfare through precision strike and information dominance. Network-centric warfare would lift the fog of war through seamless connectivity. Effects-based operations would allow strategic objectives to be achieved without traditional attrition. Each concept…
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.…
