By Robbin Laird The cultural image of the fighter pilot is etched in our minds: a maverick aviator, wrestling a difficult machine through the sky, defined by raw "stick-and-rudder" skill. We picture an ace relying on instinct and reflexes to outmaneuver an opponent in a classic dogfight. For decades, this romantic image wasn't far from the truth, and our training pipelines were built to produce exactly that kind of pilot. That world is gone. Today's…

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, not the one that spends the most, will prevail.​ For roughly a century, naval planning has followed a straightforward logic: ever more complex, expensive platforms…