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…
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,…
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…
