By Robbin Laird The Royal Australian Navy is crossing a dangerous bridge. On one side sits the force it has today, three Hobart-class air warfare destroyers, a diminishing number of Anzac-class frigates, and a support structure increasingly strained by the weight of strategic demand. On the other side sits the…
By Robbin Laird The Royal Australian Navy is entering a decade defined not simply by modernization, but by transition. The fleet is moving from an aging force structure built around Hobart-class destroyers and Anzac-class frigates toward a future force of Hunter-class frigates, new general-purpose frigates, upgraded destroyers, and eventually a…
By Robbin Laird Before a nation asks what threats it faces or what allies expect, it should ask a prior and more fundamental question — what are our genuine strategic advantages, and what force design maximizes them? That framing is right. It is also not new. The same foundational question…
By Robbin Laird In the spring of 2020, Murielle Delaporte and I completed our book, The Return of Direct Defense in Europe: Meeting the 21st Century Authoritarian Challenge. The book was built on years of field research across Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe, and on extensive interviews with German generals,…
By Stephen Kuper Defence Connect 8 May 2026 As the post-World War II rules-based order continues to erode and a more competitive multipolar world emerges, Australia can no longer afford to ask the same questions; we need to start asking radically different ones The end of the Cold War was…
By Robbin Laird A useful analytical distinction has been drawn by Paul Bracken between how alliances are understood in political science and how they function in game theory. In political science, alliances are negotiated documents — formal texts that commit states to one another across a range of contingencies. In…
By Robbin Laird Australia is unlikely to be the public face of Pax Silica, but it may prove to be one of its most consequential enabling powers. The emerging United States-led architecture suggests that the states best positioned to shape the next international order will not be limited to those…
In a recent piece I published on Defense.info, I argued that what changes most profoundly in a genuinely epochal transition is not the answers societies hold, but the questions they consider worth asking. The analyst who clings to the old question-space does not simply get wrong answers. He asks questions…
