By Robbin Laird The Royal Australian Navy has stood up its Maritime Autonomous Systems Unit, MASU. This is not a reorganisation of boxes on an org chart. It is a strategic decision about how Australia intends to fight at sea in the coming decade, and what kind of contribution it…
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…
By Robbin Laird When Franklin Roosevelt invoked the phrase ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ in December 1940, he was describing a specific industrial mobilizationL American factories redirected toward supplying a world under siege. The phrase has echoed through successive generations as shorthand for the proposition that democratic nations, marshaling their combined industrial…
For three decades, the dominant narrative of Western economies has been one of deindustrialization, offshoring, and financialization. Manufacturing moved to Asia. Software and services became the prestige sectors. “College for all” became the default cultural script, and anyone who questioned it was accused of writing off an entire generation. The…
By Robbin Laird European primes can evolve into kill web ecosystem orchestrators but only if they move faster than their current political, financial, and organizational wiring allows, and Ukraine’s war laboratory window will not stay open indefinitely. The strategic question is deceptively simple: Can Europe’s defense primes make the transition…
I arrived at the Pentagon on the morning of September 11th, 2001, expecting a routine meeting on post-Soviet nuclear security issues. Within hours, the world had changed. So had the trajectory of American defense analysis. For those of us who felt the building rock that morning, September 11th is not…
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 world’s navies are crossing a strategic fault line in which traditional assumptions about capital ships, carrier battle groups, and exquisite platforms no longer hold. The emerging era of uncrewed, networked, and AI-enabled systems is creating a new maritime order in which the force that adapts fastest,…
