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…
Brazil was supposed to be one of the cleaner chapters in the story of China’s global industrial rise. BYD, the Shenzhen-based electric vehicle giant that has become a symbol of Beijing’s technological ambitions, was not arriving as a resource extractor or a commodity trader. It was coming as a manufacturer—bringing…
When a former NATO secretary general warns that Britain is “underprepared, underinsured, under attack” and “not safe,” it is more than a routine shot in the Westminster blame game. Lord George Robertson’s recent intervention goes to the heart of the United Kingdom’s war‑fighting credibility in an era of state‑on‑state confrontation.…
By Robin Laird Begin with a simple arithmetic problem. A kamikaze drone costs roughly $5,000 to manufacture. A Patriot interceptor missile costs $4 million. An adversary launching a swarm of 200 cheap propeller-driven drones, each priced at $20,000, presents a defender using Patriot interceptors with a bill of $800 million…
For three decades, the dominant narrative of Western economies has been one of deindustrialization, offshoring, and financialization. Manufacturing moved to Asia. Software and services became the prestige sectors. “College for all” became the default cultural script, and anyone who questioned it was accused of writing off an entire generation. The…
By Robbin Laird European primes can evolve into kill web ecosystem orchestrators but only if they move faster than their current political, financial, and organizational wiring allows, and Ukraine’s war laboratory window will not stay open indefinitely. The strategic question is deceptively simple: Can Europe’s defense primes make the transition…
By Kenneth Maxwell When I wrote in April 2012 of ‘a tale of two competitions,’ I was describing a Brazil suspended between options, still debating the merits of the Dassault Rafale, the Boeing F-18 Super Hornet, and the Saab Gripen NG while simultaneously wrestling with the politics of Embraer’s Super…
By Robbin Laird The United States was not born as a centralized nation-state. It was improvised as a federation, then repeatedly re-engineered in crisis. From the loose league of the Articles of Confederation to the stronger architecture of the 1787 Constitution, from the Union victory in the Civil War to…
