Robbin Laird
- Founder and Defense Analyst, SLD Info, Freelance
- Writer, Founder and Defense Analyst, Second Line of Defense
Washington, D.C.
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Articles by Robbin Laird
Adaptation Is Built, Not Briefed: A Conversation with the Nevada Guard’s Land Component Commander
By Robbin Laird This week I had dinner with Brig. Gen. Randy Lau, the Land Component Commander of the Nevada Army National Guard and his Sgt Major. We talked about leadership, warfighting, and how to prepare people and organizations for a world that doesn’t follow the plan. Afterward, Lau summed up the evening in a line better than anything I could have written: “Adaptation is built, not briefed.” It’s worth taking seriously, because it describes how he is running his command.
The Bluebottle Program in the Hull Gap: Robert Dane on Service, Learning, and the Capital Ship
By Robbin Laird When I spoke with Robert Dane, founder and CEO of Ocius, on September 30, the Bluebottle program had moved past the “will it work” phase. It is now in the harder phase of deciding how navies and border agencies should build a force around a system that works. Dane does not use my vocabulary. He never mentions the hull gap or the re-imagining of capital ships.
When the Signal Lies: GPS Interference and the Next Phase of Maritime Domain Awareness
By Robbin Laird Britain’s Maritime and Coastguard Agency has just told shipowners something that would have sounded alarmist a decade ago: satellite navigation can no longer be taken for granted in some of the world’s busiest shipping regions.
Stalin, Putin, and Ukraine: Two Faces of the Same Imperial Logic
Vladimir Putin has spent much of the past decade insisting that Ukraine has no independent claim to nationhood, that it is, in his formulation, an artificial construct carved out of “historical Russia.” It is worth remembering that this is not a new argument. It is Stalin’s argument, updated for a different century and pursued by different means. What connects the two men is not merely that both ruled from the Kremlin and both fought wars touching Ukraine.
The Hedger’s Fortnight: India, Russia and the Global War in Ukraine
By Robbin Laird On August 31, on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek, Narendra Modi told Vladimir Putin, “We must move away from endless war towards an end to the war.” He described a peaceful resolution of all issues as the call of humanity and said that this is India’s message. Eleven days later Modi was hosting Putin in New Delhi. It was the first time since 2022 that Putin had traveled abroad to attend a BRICS summit.
Two ASW Modernization Stories, One Kill Web Logic: The Osprey Sonobuoy Test and Lockheed Martin’s SensorMax
By Robbin Laird Two stories crossed my desk within weeks of each other in September, both about the U.S. Navy’s anti-submarine warfare enterprise, and neither one mentions the other.
Strategy as a Wager on the Future
The first installment in this series on General Pasquale Preziosa’s foreword to The Unfinished Pillar takes up the argument that gives the book its title — and its sharpest edge. The unfinished character of the European pillar, Preziosa argues, was never primarily an institutional story. It is a story about the growing distance between political structure and strategic capacity.
Canada’s Middle-Power Readiness: Energy, Defence, and State Capacity in an Age of Multipolar Authoritarianism
By Robbin Laird Oct 9, 2026. Canada can credibly become a more consequential middle power, but not merely by declaring one. The Carney government has moved faster than recent governments on defence spending and EU cooperation; however, Canada still lacks the export infrastructure, industrial capacity, military readiness, and execution machinery required to turn ‘optionality’ into durable power.
Hedging Down What Modi’s Words at Bishkek Tell Us About India, Russia and a Shrinking Reach
By Robbin Laird At the end of August, on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit, Narendra Modi did something leaders seldom do in front of cameras: he pressed Vladimir Putin to end his war. Despite the organization’s name, the summit was held in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Modi told Putin, “We must move away from endless war towards an end to the war.” He also invoked Mahatma Gandhi and the Buddha, yet still called Putin a friend and posed for photographs with him.
Expanding Operational Reach in the Indo‑Pacific: Multi-Service, Long-Range Vertical Lift as an Operational Imperative
By Jim Jenkins In The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan, the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) lays out the results of extensive wargaming of a Taiwan scenario, revealing several serious friction points for U.S. success in the conflict.
The Unpopular Necessity: Why Poland is Wrestling with the Ghost of Conscription
By Robert Czulda In Polish public debate, a range of controversial topics continuously divides society. Yet one issue stands out as not only contentious but profoundly unpopular: the return of compulsory military service, colloquially known as “zetka” (zasadniczna służba wojskowa). Driven by the precarious security situation along Poland’s eastern border, the ongoing war in Ukraine, and Russia’s persistently aggressive posture, the topic regularly resurfaces.
Russia’s Ambition and Its Limits: Where Negotiation Can Begin
By Pasquale Preziosa Understanding what future Russia desires requires a preliminary distinction between the country, its ruling class, and the political system that governs it: three closely linked realities whose interests and perspectives do not always coincide. The Kremlin’s decisions bind the Russian state, but they do not necessarily express all the aspirations of its society, nor do they allow us to consider the country’s future behavior as already determined.
The Shadow Fleet Problem: Why Tracking North Korea’s Dark Ships Is a Maritime Domain Awareness Challenge, Not Just a Sanctions Problem
By Robbin Laird A September 2026of digital storytelling from The Conversation, built by researchers at the University of Sydney and the National University of Singapore’s Centre of Maritime Studies, traced the life of a single tanker called New Konk.
Why I Still Write Analytical Books
On my way back from Australia, I had a chance to reflect on years of writing and wrote this piece as a consequence. Over the years I have worked through nearly every format available to someone who thinks about defense and strategy for a living. I have given lectures and briefings, sat for interviews, written more articles than I can count, and published a number of books. From the outside these look like variations on a single activity: explaining what I think. They are not.
Wings of Gold: Chief of Naval Air Training’s Charge to a New Generation of Naval Aviators
By Robbin Laird At a winging ceremony held for the U.S. Navy’s newest naval aviators, Rear Admiral Max McCoy, the 39th Chief of Naval Air Training (CNATRA), delivered a speech that did more than mark a rite of passage. It laid down, in plain and forceful terms, what it means to inherit the culture of naval aviation at a moment when the fleet is being asked to do more, with greater complexity, against a more serious set of threats than it has faced in a generation.
Unbundling the Rules-Based Order: Function, Institution, and the New Contest Over Global Rules
By Robbin Laird It is no accident that I am writing this essay early in the morning in Canberra, Australia. There is no government which uses the term “rules based order” more than the Australian one does.
The Requirement for Air Combat Mass and Depth in the Indo-Pacific
Preview: Sir Richard Williams Foundation Seminar, 1 October 2026, National Gallery of Australia On 1 October, the Sir Richard Williams Foundation returns to the question that has quietly reshaped Australian airpower debate over the past two years: not whether the Royal Australian Air Force can support the Integrated Force, but whether it can generate the scale, endurance, and reach to fight and keep fighting in a contested Indo-Pacific.
Two September Elevenths, Four Hundred and Thirty-Six Years Apart
By Robbin Laird There are dates that carry weight beyond the events that fall on them, and September 11 is one of them. For anyone born in the last sixty years, the date needs no elaboration: it means the destruction of the Twin Towers, the wounding of the Pentagon, the field in Shanksville, and the opening morning of what became a two-decade war.
Adaptation Is Not the Same as Preparedness
The first installment in this series on General Pasquale Preziosa’s foreword to The Unfinished Pillar takes up the argument that gives the book its title and its sharpest edge. The unfinished character of the European pillar, Preziosa argues, was never primarily an institutional story. It is a story about the growing distance between political structure and strategic capacity.
The Unfinished Pillar: Why a 1991 Argument Still Matters
By Robbin Laird There are books whose relevance to the moment of publication is a matter of good timing, and there are books whose relevance was built in from the start because the argument they’re built on never stopped being tested. The Unfinished Pillar belongs to the second category. The book’s core material dates to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the strategic architecture that had structured Europe for four decades was dissolving in real time.
Australia and Brazil: Gold and Primitive Rebels
Our newly published book, The Australian, Brazilian, and Chinese Dynamic: An Inquiry into the Evolving Global Order, argues that Australia and Brazil are authentic Global South actors, commodity-exporting democracies shaped over centuries by colonial extraction and structural dependence, a category entirely different from authoritarian powers such as China Russia which merely invoke “Global South” solidarity as a strategic instrument.
The Club Goes Inside the Wire: What Moving Valdai from Sochi Says About Putin’s Russia
By Robbin Laird When the Valdai Discussion Club opens its twenty-third annual meeting on September 28, it will not be on the Black Sea coast. Invitations initially named Sochi, but organizers told participants in late August that the meeting was moving to the Moscow region, and two sources told the Financial Times that Russia’s Federal Protective Service insisted on the change.
The Transformation of Maritime Domain Awareness: Why the Old Model No Longer Works
Maritime domain awareness, the ability to know what is happening at sea and to understand what it means, has been redefined over the past three decades. The concept itself has not changed much on paper: the International Maritime Organization still defines it as the effective understanding of anything associated with the maritime domain that could affect the security, safety, economy, or environment of a state or region.
Negotiating a Greenland Deal: The Role of the Allies
By Robbin Laird Sep 20, 2026. It is early days, and anyone writing about this agreement should say so plainly. The signed text has not been made public, the parliaments in Copenhagen and Nuuk have yet to weigh in, and the dynamics now unfolding will take months, perhaps years, to become clear. Caution is warranted about what this deal is and what it will become.
CH-53K King Stallion Capabilities or Why it Should Have Been Called the CH-55
The CH-53K King Stallion is an optimized, heavy-lift, sea-based, long range solution for the Marine Air Ground Task Force. 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing increases readiness, lethality, and forward presence through modernization by embracing the capabilities of the CH-53K. 02.23.2026 Video by Cpl. Mya Seymour 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing I identified the CH-53K early on as best described as a CH-55, for it so different from its predecessor.
CH-53K King Stallion Capabilities
Skip to content The CH-53K King Stallion is an optimized, heavy-lift, sea-based, long range solution for the Marine Air Ground Task Force. 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing increases readiness, lethality, and forward presence through modernization by embracing the capabilities of the CH-53K. 02.23.2026 Video by Cpl. Mya Seymour 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing I identified the CH-53K early on as best described as a CH-55, for it so different from its predecessor.
Fixing the Machine: Rear Admiral McCoy on Rebuilding Naval Aviation’s Training Pipeline
By Robbin Laird I published an overview piece, “Street to Fleet: How CNATRA Is Working Naval Aviation Training,“ ahead of this interview deliberately. That article was built entirely from public sources: CNATRA’s own releases, Proceedings essays going back to 2002, the “Warrior Ethos” letter to incoming students, DVIDS features on the FITU/HITU instructor pipeline.
AI Agents Need Rules of Engagement Before They Get Credentials
By Gleb Tsipursky Defense organizations already understand that authority should track mission, role, and risk. An intelligence analyst, a weapons officer, a contractor, and a system administrator do not receive the same access simply because each can perform useful work. Artificial intelligence agents need the same discipline before they become routine participants in national-security operations.
The Village That Roared: The Principality of Piddington
By Kenneth Maxwell Piddington is a small village and civil parish in Oxfordshire. Its population is 358. The British government proposed to house 1,250 male asylum seekers at a disused Ministry of Defence base nearby. The village voted yesterday (15 September 2026) in a referendum, with 89% participation, to leave the United Kingdom. The vote was 285 to leave and 26 to stay, with one spoiled ballot. Subsequently, the “Principality of Piddington” was established.
Mastering Chaos: A Leadership Framework for Homeland Defense
Remarks to the Nevada National Guard Pre-Command Course, September 15, 2026 By Robbin F. Laird On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was sitting in the waiting area outside the Secretary of Defense’s office at the Pentagon, watching a small television, when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. As a New Yorker, my reaction was immediate — this was no accident.
Long Range Persistence Fires the USMC Way
U.S. Marines with Fire Support Battalion, 10th Marine Regiment, and Marine Air Support Squadron 1, Marine Air Control Group 28, operate a command and control node to integrate with a U.S. Marine operated Australian StrikeMaster Coastal Defense System and a Norwegian Maneuver Air Defense system on Jan Mayen, Norway, Aug. 29 to Sept. 3, 2026.
Bringing Broken Aircraft Home: Inside the 2026 Advanced CDDAR Course at Volk Field
By Robbin Laird A photograph taken on July 14, 2026 at Volk Field Combat Readiness Training Center in Camp Douglas, Wisconsin, shows a U.S. Marine Corps CH-53K King Stallion helicopter hoisting a recovered F-15 Eagle into the air.
The Department of the Navy’s Science and Technology Board: Building on 250 Years of Naval Innovation
By George Galdorisi In September 1776 an enormous British armada lay anchored in New York Harbor. A month earlier, British forces under General William Howe had defeated the Continental Army and gained control of New York City and Long Island. Now this fleet of 400 ships, including 10 ships-of-the-line, 20 frigates, 170 transports and numerous other ships under the command of General Howe’s brother, Admiral Richard Howe, remained ready to continue the attacks on Washington’s Continental Army.
Fixing the machine: Inside the Navy’s race to rebuild its aviator pipeline
This is the latest in a series of semi-regular columns by Robbin Laird, where he will tackle current defense issues through the lens of more than 45 years of defense expertise in both the US and abroad. The goal of these columns: to look back at how questions and perspectives of the past should inform decisions being made today. Rear Adm.
Refueling the Mesh: What a Robotic Connector Off Virginia Tells Us About the Autonomous Fleet’s Missing Link
By Robbin Laird In August 2026, off Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story, Virginia, a Navy-industry team quietly solved a problem that has constrained every discussion of unmanned maritime systems I have written about for the past several years: how do you keep an autonomous vessel on station without a person ever touching it?
Putting the Artisan’s Brain in a Box: Lockheed Martin’s SensorMax and Driving Innovation for the “Fight Tonight” Navy
By Robbin Laird For four decades, the U.S. Navy trained a generation of acoustic sensor operators who could look at a waterfall display and, from pattern and instinct built over a career, call a submarine contact with a confidence no algorithm could match. That generation is retiring, not by choice, but by the calendar. And with it goes a body of tacit knowledge that no requirements document ever fully captured.
Designed In, Not Bolted On: Barrett’s Third Lesson for the Autonomous Systems Age
By Robbin Laird When I sat down with then Chief of the Australian Navy, Vice Admiral Tim Barrett, in 2017, one of the quieter points he made has aged into one of the more prescient ones. Amid the launch of the largest Royal Australian Navy recapitalization since the Second World War, Barrett was already pushing his service away from a habit that has plagued navies for decades: designing a warship for the threat of the day and then rebuilding it, ship by ship, every time the threat changes.
From AIS to Intelligence Authority: Windward and the Challenge of Maritime Domain Awareness in an Age of Chaos
By Robbin Laird When I spoke recently with Ami Daniel, the CEO and co-founder of Windward, I came away convinced that his company has been building toward something that most of the defense and intelligence establishment has been too slow to grasp: that in an era when no single navy can police the world’s oceans, the only viable path to maritime security is shared, scalable, commercially accessible intelligence.
MUMS-14 and the Impact Force: Closing the Gap Steel Knight Exposed
By Robbin Laird On June 16, 2026, under a covered pavilion at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, the Marine Corps activated Marine Unmanned Maintenance Squadron 14 — MUMS-14 — as a subordinate command of Marine Aircraft Group 14, 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing. Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey F. Carben took command; Sergeant Major Tavaris J. Douglas became its senior enlisted leader; Colonel Benjamin W. Grant, MAG-14’s commanding officer, presided.
Rethinking Australia’s alliance debate: Disengagement is not a strategy
Opinion: There is a fashionable argument circulating in Canberra’s strategic policy circles that goes roughly like this: the United States, under its current administration, has become an unreliable, erratic partner; its rhetoric towards allies has been careless at best and insulting at worst and Australia should therefore begin quietly disentangling itself from Washington, hedging towards a looser, more diversified set of partnerships while it waits for American politics to right itself.
The Return of Harry and Meghan: The Continuing Saga
By Robbin Laird In the United States, the news cycle belongs almost entirely to Donald Trump. In the Mother Country, it belongs, once again, to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. After six years in Montecito, Harry and Meghan are heading back to Britain, settling this fall in the Cotswolds rather than in any royal residence.
Exports, Alliances, and Ukraine: The Politics Behind France’s Arms Sales
Paris – France won €21.2 billion ($24.7 billion) of export orders for weapons in 2025, helped by India’s contract for 26 Rafale fighter jets and related armaments, the annual report of the armed forces ministry to parliament said. That 2025 value fell slightly from foreign arms orders of €21.6 billion in the previous year.
The USMC as an Impact Force: From Crisis Management to Chaos Management
The post-Cold War period shaped a Marine Corps optimized for the wrong war. Built around a “crisis management” paradigm — one that assumed sanctuary, permissive logistics, and a knowable adversary, the Corps found itself increasingly cast as a maritime bus service for land-centric CENTCOM operations. The threat environment has since moved on, and so has the Marine Corps. What is unfolding now, accelerated by Force Design 2030 and its 2025 update, is something more fundamental than a reorganization.
Building the Impact Force: Marine Corps Transformation in an Age of Chaos
Building the Impact Force contends that the United States Marine Corps is in the midst of a decisive shift from a traditional, crisis‑response organization toward an “impact force” designed to generate disproportionate effects for the joint and allied team under conditions of persistent chaos.
South Korea as a Middle Power: Shaping a Global Arms Strategy
By Robbin Laird South Korea has spent the past four years converting itself from a net importer of weapons into one of the ten largest arms exporters on Earth, and it has done so with a speed that has unsettled established Western suppliers and delighted frontline states looking for equipment now rather than in five years. But the more interesting story is not simply that Seoul sells tanks and howitzers well.
MUMS-14 and the Long Arc of 2nd MAW: Closing a Gap First Identified Twelve Years Ago
By Robbin Laird A light rain fell over the parade field at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point on the morning of June 16, 2026, but it did nothing to slow the proceedings.
What the Camera Reveals: Reading WTI 2-26 Through Its Photographic Record
By Robbin Laird The official photographic record of Weapons and Tactics Instructor Course 2-26, running from March through late April 2026 at MCAS Yuma and across a range of training sites in the American Southwest, is more than a set of public affairs images. Examined systematically, it constitutes a documentary argument about how the Marine Corps is preparing its future aviation instructors to fight. The images were taken by Sgt. DeMontae Stovall, Cpl. Seferino Gamez, Lance Cpl.
The Informal Empire: Two Middle Powers, One Test
By Robbin Laird and Ken Maxwell For the past several years, Western policymakers have comforted themselves with a story: that economic interdependence with China would eventually civilize the relationship, that trade would do the work diplomacy could not, and that rising Chinese power would express itself the way past rising powers did, through fleets, flags, and borders redrawn by force.
A Tale of Two Middle Powers
Our new book on Australia, Brazil and China analyzes the shifting global order through a comparative study of Australia and Brazil, two democratic middle powers navigating an increasingly assertive China. We argue that Beijing has constructed an “architecture of dependence” by leveraging trade, infrastructure, and processing monopolies to exert structural influence over partner nations.
The KC-130J at WTI 2-26: Sustaining the Distributed Force
By Robbin Laird The photos accompanying this article were taken at Pinal County Airpark near Marana, Arizona on April 4, 2026, during the Weapons and Tactics Instructor (WTI) course 2-26, hosted by Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One (MAWTS-1). They tell a story worth examining carefully not just as a training vignette, but as a window into how the Marine Corps is shaping the KC-130J Hercules as a multi-mission enabler for the distributed force.
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