By Robbin Laird I first visited 2nd MAW in 2007, at the beginning of the Osprey era. There I saw a small number of the aircraft on the tarmac and met with pilots and maintainers at the beginning of a long period of disruptive change, a period of change which…
By Peter Jennings Australia has a brilliant opportunity to shape US President-elect Joe Biden’s strategy for the Indo-Pacific in a way that will secure a major increase in American military power in the region. This will be a test of the Morrison government’s agility to move quickly to secure an…
By Kenneth Maxwell A decade after the Spanish Conquistadores toppled the Inca Empire (1532-34), an indigenous Andean prospector, Diego Gualpa, in 1545, stumbled onto the richest silver deposit in the world on a high mountain of 4,800 meters (15,750 feet) in the eastern cordillera of the Bolivian Andes. Here in…
By Pierre Tran Paris – Five options for the architecture of a planned Future Combat Air System were handed over in September to the authorities, marking a major step toward definition and development of an ambitious European project, Bruno Fichefeux, head of FCAS at Airbus Defence & Space, said Dec.…
By Robbin Laird With the strategic shift from the land wars to full spectrum crisis management, the sea services face the challenge of prioritizing maneuver warfare at sea. But it is impossible to execute maneuver warfare at sea if you have no fuel, or go Winchester with regard to weapons.…
By Robbin Laird To the casual observer, the Super Stallion and the King Stallion look like the same aircraft. One of the challenges in understanding how different the CH-53K is from the CH-53E is the numbering part. If it were called CH-55 perhaps one would get the point that these…
By Robbin Laird I am in the throes of finishing up my book on the evolution of Australian defence strategy over the past several years, from 2014 until now. With the announcement of the new government defence strategy by Prime Minister Morrison on July 1, 2020, it seemed a good…
The Department of Defence and the Australian Space Agency are supporting the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agencys (JAXAs) Hayabusa2 mission to return the first ever sub-surface asteroid samples to Earth from the asteroid Ryugu. The Hayabusa2 sample return capsule landed in the Woomera Prohibited Area (WPA) on 6 December 2020. Hayabusa2…
