NATO 3.0 and the Long Road to a European Pillar
On September 16, 2026, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte delivered the Ditchley Foundation’s 62nd Annual Lecture…
Read More »Beyond Arms Sales: Building the Taiwan Mesh Fleet Where the Fight Will Be
Major Joseph Potter’s new essay for the Center for International Maritime Security, “Arming Taiwan: America First…
Read More »Blind, Burn and Blast: Lessons for Today’s Department of War
The fighting concept known as “blind ’em, burn ’em, blast ’em” was a practical assault technique…
Read More »Putin’s Choice: How The Global War in Ukraine Explains Sikorski’s Kaliningrad Gambit
On September 11, 2026, at the Yalta European Strategy conference in Kyiv, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław…
Read More »Influence Without Occupation: A Future U.S. Strategy for Iraq
On 30 September 2026, Ali Al-Zaidi, Iraq’s prime minister and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, marked…
Read More »Mastering Chaos: How the Marine Corps Is Reinventing Itself for an Age Without Sanctuaries
For two decades, the United States Marine Corps built its identity around a particular kind of…
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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...