Special Report: The Requirement for Air Combat Mass and Depth in the Indo-Pacific

11/01/2026 — By Robbin Laird
For three decades, "generation" has been a word we attach to aircraft: fourth, fifth, now sixth. The label implies that the next step forward is a...
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From Leipzig to Abqaiq: Why Drone Defense Is Now a Whole-of-State Problem

10/31/2026 — By Pasquale Preziosa
U.S. gaps in drone defense, highlighted by retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, raise questions about the preparedness of other countries. From the protection of strategic infrastructure...
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Time Is Not an Independent Variable: Why the Navy Must Hold the UJTS Award Date

10/30/2026 — By Robbin Laird
Since Boeing withdrew the T-7A Red Hawk from the US Navy’s Undergraduate Jet Training System (UJTS) competition in June, critics have asked whether the service should...
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Key Developments
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Re-Thinking Strategy

How the Adversary Reads the Impact Force

10/29/2026
By Robbin Laird

In a recent Defense News opinion piece, Lyle Goldstein surveys Chinese-language assessments of Marine Corps posture…

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Re-Shaping Defense & Security

From Canberra to Tokyo: Undersea Power and the Nuclear Submarine

10/27/2026
By Robbin Laird

Within a single week in October 2026, two allied capitals made overlapping arguments about how a…

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Re-Thinking Strategy

Confident Enough to Disagree: What NATO 3.0 Can Learn from How the Cold War Ended

10/25/2026
By Robbin Laird

Near the end of his Ditchley Foundation Annual Lecture on September 16, 2026, NATO Secretary General…

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Re-Thinking Strategy

MUMS-14 and the Impact Force: Closing the Gap Steel Knight Exposed

10/24/2026
By Robbin Laird

On June 16, 2026, under a covered pavilion at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, the…

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Re-Thinking Strategy

Insourcing versus Integration: Toyota, BYD, and Two Roads to the Global Market

10/22/2026
By Robbin Laird

In a recent Defense.info piece, “BYD, Batteries, and the Architecture of Dependence,” I looked at BYD…

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Maritime Dynamics

From Truck to Toolkit: AUKUS Payloads and the Hull Gap Decade

10/20/2026
By Robbin Laird

Australia’s first public unveiling of the AUKUS Pillar II payloads for Ghost Shark, Speartooth and Bluebottle…

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Special Reports
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10/23/2026

The Requirement for Air Combat Mass and Depth in the Indo-Pacific

For three decades, "generation" has been a word we attach to aircraft: fourth, fifth, now sixth. The label...
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Book Review
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07/26/2026

Before the Pivot: John Blaxland’s The Australian Army from Whitlam to Howard and the Long Road to Today’s Force

John Blaxland's The Australian Army from Whitlam to Howard (Cambridge University Press, 2014) is, on its surface, a work of institutional history. It covers 35 years from Gough Whitlam's election in 1972 to John Howard's defeat in 2007 and catalogues...
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Featured Defense System
Maintainability

Robots On The Hull: Buying Readiness For The Pacific Fleet

11/01/2026
By Robbin Laird

The Navy’s deal with Gecko Robotics is a quiet revolution in fleet maintenance, signaling a shift from slow, analog ship inspections to a digital regime where robots and AI map the true health of hulls at machine speed. By putting hull‑climbing robots to work on 18 Pacific Fleet ships over the next nine months under a five‑year contract worth up to $71 million, Navy leaders are betting that better data—not just more money—will unlock their goal of 80 percent readiness by 2027. If Gecko’s claim of up to 50‑times‑faster inspections holds, the contract could become a template for how the service tackles its maintenance backlog and turns material condition from a chronic vulnerability into a managed variable in great‑power competition.​ What Diana Stancy usefully surfaces in her Breaking Defense report...

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