By Robbin Laird No strategy to structurally constrain Iran’s military options is complete without the maritime dimension. For decades, Tehran has treated the Strait of Hormuz, the northern Gulf, the Bab al-Mandab, and the Red Sea as chronic pressure points, instruments of coercion against adversaries and leverage over the global…
By Robbin Laird If the first strategic challenge is to define the demilitarization objective and the coalition that enforces it, the second is to build the kill web that gives that coalition real deterrent teeth. Deterrence in the post-war Middle East cannot rest on declarations or episodic deployments. It requires…
By Robbin Laird The “Super B‑1B”: Hypersonics, Kill Webs, and the Revival of a Legacy Bomber In earlier work, I argued that hypersonic weapons would only become strategically meaningful when embedded in a wider kill‑web construct what my colleague Ed Timperlake described as the evolution of S‑cubed, where speed, stealth, and situational…
By Robbin Laird Hitchcock's classic movie, The Birds, offers four core lessons that map almost too neatly onto modern drone swarms. No front lines. In Bodega Bay, danger comes from the sky, not from a defined direction of advance. Likewise, drone swarms turn the battlespace into an enveloping condition rather than…
By Robbin Laird Trump’s Riyadh speech is seldom recalled for its strategic architecture. Most commentary at the time focused on the rhetorical framing of Islam. But strip away the atmospherics and the speech laid out a division of labor that has proven remarkably durable: Muslim-majority partners would take the lead…
By Robbin Laird China’s presence in Djibouti has usually been read through the familiar grammar of bases and bastions, a forward military foothold that extends PLA Navy reach toward the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. That reading is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Djibouti matters less as a…
By Robbin Laird What is the impact of the U.S.–Israeli war against Iran on Russia? With Washington forced to juggle a major confrontation in the Middle East while continuing to support Ukraine, it can appear as though Moscow has successfully shifted the strategic spotlight away from its own aggression in…
By Robert Czulda For Central and Eastern European states (particularly Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Poland) as well as Northern Europe (notably Finland), the primary and enduring threat remains. Russia, which, despite strategic setbacks, shows no intention of halting the war in Ukraine. The outbreak of conflict against Iran also affects…
