The emergence of Ukraine’s Flamingo cruise missile is about more than a new long‑range strike weapon; it is a signal of how the missile industrial base itself is being re‑engineered under wartime pressure. What makes Flamingo strategically important is not simply its range or payload, but the way a drone‑native…
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,…
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…
My previous article, “From Post-Cold War Settlement to Contested Global Order”, brought together the arguments of two books, my recently published books on the global war in Ukraine along with my forthcoming book with Kenneth Maxwel examining the Australian, Brazilian, and Chinese dynamic within the broader framework of Global China…
By Robbin Laird Iran’s military modernization is no longer primarily a story of indigenous ingenuity and sanctions evasion. It is a story of a deepening trilateral alignment in which China supplies the industrial, navigational, and chemical backbone; Russia contributes combat-tested operational doctrine and high-end sensor architecture; and Iran manufactures, deploys,…
By Robbin Laird The campaign against Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure did not emerge from a vacuum. It was the culmination of a strategic trajectory that, if one had been paying close enough attention, was legible for decades. I have been paying that attention through fieldwork, through analytical commissions, and…
By Robbin Laird The war with Iran has forced a clarity that years of diplomatic hedging obscured. So long as Tehran retains a robust power-projection toolkit and structural leverage over the Strait of Hormuz, it can hold the region and global energy markets at risk, regardless of the outcome of…
By Robbin Laird The week Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi arrived in Washington, the news cycle was fixated elsewhere. Missile trails over the Gulf, images from the Iran war, and oil price charts spiking on every financial screen dominated the coverage. Yet in that same window, the Japanese leader walked into…
