The Narrow Sea: Why a Taiwan Invasion Fleet’s Real Vulnerability Is Logistics, Not the Landing
Every discussion of a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) assault on Taiwan eventually arrives at the beach,…
Read More »Realism in an Age of Uncertainty: Power, Adaptation, and Strategic Freedom of Action
Realism has returned to the center of strategic debate. The war in Ukraine, U.S.-China competition, the…
Read More »The Infrastructure of AI Is a Weapon Now. The Policy Isn’t Ready.
In March 2026, Iranian drones struck Amazon-owned data centers in the United Arab Emirates and a…
Read More »The Informal Empire and Its Hard Edge: Extending the Argument to China’s Military Reach
For the past several years, Western policymakers have comforted themselves with a story: that economic interdependence…
Read More »AI Is a National Security Problem And So Is the Trust It Runs On
Most alarms about artificial intelligence and national security come from think tanks, academics, or opinion writers…
Read More »Wolves Without a Navy: How Ukraine’s USV Wolfpacks Are Strangling Russia’s Crimean Lifeline
On the night of July 6 into the early hours of July 7, 2026, Ukrainian drone…
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The U.S. Air Force carries a large inventory of transports, tankers, and support aircraft that were never built with today's networked, sensor-fused Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) architecture in mind. The conventional fix, deep structural and avionics modification, airframe by airframe, is slow and expensive at precisely the moment the threat environment is outrunning the acquisition cycle. Obsidian Shield, a new offering from Newport News-based Integrity Defense Solutions, Inc. (IDS), is pitched as a way to close that gap now rather than waiting on a full recapitalization program that may take years to materialize. The Design Logic: Open, Modular, Bolt-On IDS describes Obsidian Shield as resting on a "truly modular, open-systems approach" paired with an "affordable, scalable production path." The intent is an architecture that can be...