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…
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…
By Robbin Laird For most of its history, U.S. Central Command has been an Army officer’s domain. Since its founding in 1983, CENTCOM has been led predominantly by Army and Marine generals whose careers were shaped by the grinding land campaigns of Iraq and Afghanistan. The combatant command that oversaw…
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 together constitute a sustained analytical argument about the transformation of the international system. Individually, each book addresses a…
By Robbin Laird A recent article by Stephen Kuper entitled, “Japan accelerates dual-use technology cooperation and development: Opportunities for allied nation industrial cooperation,” provided a thoughtful opportunity to revisst my early argument shaped in a discussion with David Beaumont on my concept of embedded logistics. This article draws on both…
