By Robbin Laird The Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminar of 23 April 2026 brought together practitioners, analysts, industry leaders and allies to confront a deceptively simple question: what does it actually mean to exploit Australia’s strategic advantage, not in a decade, but now? “Fight Tonight” was not a slogan but…
In April 2026, the European Union and the United States launched a new critical minerals partnership through a memorandum of understanding and an accompanying Action Plan, aimed at reducing dependence on concentrated supply chains, especially those tied to China, and at coordinating policy across the full minerals value chain. The…
Dateline: Canberra, Australia By Robbin Laird The Australian Government released its 2026 National Defence Strategy (NDS) and the accompanying 2026 Integrated Investment Program (IIP) in mid-April 2026, just days before the Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminar in Canberra. Together these documents represent the most ambitious defence planning exercise Australia has…
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 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…
