Trojan Footprint 21: Working the Black Sea Region Challenges

05/09/2021
Trojan Footprint is the premier Special Operations Forces exercise in Europe. While the exercise is focused on improving the ability to SOF to counter myriad threats, it also increases integration with conventional forces and enhances interoperability with our NATO allies and European partners. Most importantly, however, Trojan Footprint builds upon…

The Latest Norwegian Building Block for European Direct Defense

04/19/2021
The build out of the re-established Second Fleet and the standup of Allied Joint Forces Command combined with the key efforts of the Nordic allies is a reshaping North Atlantic defense. In our book on The Return of Direct Defense in Europe, we focused upon the key role which key…

The Strategic Shift and the Role of Airpower: A Discussion with Ben Lambeth

04/10/2021
By Robbin Laird I have been focused for several years on what I see as a clear and dramatic shift from how civilians and the military have looked at the land wars in the Middle East to now dealing with adversaries who have built forces for contested operations across the…

French Indo-Pac Strategy: A Balancing Act

03/11/2021
By Murielle Delaporte ‘’Initiated and adopted by several nations in the past years, the concept of an Indo-Pacific theater does not mean the same for each one of them. For France, which is the very first European nation to have replaced the traditional Asia-Pacific concept with a more assertive Indo-Pacific…

Climate Change Versus Defense: The Swedish Case

03/04/2021
Although the militaries of the industrial West certainly are interested in and in some cases actively pursuing new forms of energy sources to operate their forces, clearly defense needs to operate with fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. But a EURACTIV story highlights a warning from the Swedish military that…

Reshaping Nordic Defense Capability to Meet the Russian Challenge

02/08/2021
By Robbin Laird In our recently released book entitled The Return of Direct Defense: Meeting the 21st Century Authoritarian Challenge, we highlighted that the focus of European defense was emerging as nations with defense capabilities oriented to operate integrated operations as “coalitions of the willing.” There is no single defense…