Beyond the Battlefield: War as a Phase, Not an Endpoint
A still-common view of war treats it as a parenthesis: first comes competition among states, then…
Read More »Fighting with the Fleet You Have and Building Availability into the Autonomous Systems Age
In 2017, I sat down with then Chief of the Australian Navy, Vice Admiral Tim Barrett,…
Read More »Weak Signals, Hard Decisions: What the Columbia Mishap Teaches the Sea Services About Risk
The Navy and Marine Corps do not lack risk management (RM) processes. Risk, issue and opportunity…
Read More »The “Air Littoral” Does Not Solve the Low-Altitude Problem
Robbin Laird’s recent article, “The Air Littoral Is a Maritime Problem Too,” attempts to move the…
Read More »The Grid is the Kill Web: Rethinking Power Wars as a Mesh Force Problem
Morgan Bazilian and Jahara Matisek have done the defense community a service with their CIMSEC piece,…
Read More »The Air Littoral Is a Maritime Problem Too: What the Kill Web Fleet Can Teach the Airpower Debate
Two pieces published within eight days of each other in late July 2026 stake out what…
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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...