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…
Read More »From Hosting to Co-Invention: The USMC and the Australian Army in Evolution
The contemporary relationship between the United States Marine Corps and the Australian Army has quietly outgrown…
Read More »Strategic Military Lessons from Ukraine and Israel
War is evolving from a competition between armed forces into a competition between complex national systems.…
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Retired U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Matthew Isler has written a serious and well-grounded assessment of where integrated air and missile defense stands today and where it must go. Published in War on the Rocks on May 14, 2026, his piece, "The New Era of Air and Missile Defense", deserves close reading by anyone thinking through the future of distributed, networked warfare. More than that, it deserves to be placed in a broader analytical context, because what Isler describes as a structural failure of current defensive architecture is precisely what the kill web concept anticipated, and what recent combat, above all, Operation Epic Fury and the subsequent regional defense against Iranian retaliation, has now validated at operational scale. Isler's core argument is that modern air and missile defense...