Robbin Laird

The post-Cold War order is over. Not weakened, not under stress, not in need of reform. Over. But the more consequential claim is not that an order has ended — orders end all the time. The claim is that we have entered a new historical epoch, one that cannot be understood, let alone managed, by […]

The Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom gap is not a legacy Cold War concept kept alive by strategic nostalgia.

In the High North, geography is the primary adversary. This is a theater defined by “chaos management,” where the operational mobility problem is dictated by the punishing climate and vast, frozen reaches of the North Atlantic. Strategic nodes like Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands are separated by hundreds of nautical miles of open water, […]

NATO’s northern flank has been transformed in just a few years. The accession of Finland and Sweden has turned the Alliance’s northern geography into a continuous arc running from the Baltic Sea, across Scandinavia, to the Arctic Ocean, a Nordic land corridor that joins together problems once treated separately: Baltic reinforcement, the defense of northern […]

Colonel Kate Fleeger took the helm of PMA-261, the Naval Air Systems Command program office responsible for the Marine Corps’ heavy lift portfolio, in 2022. She arrived at a pivotal moment: the CH-53K King Stallion was moving out of its developmental phase and into full rate production, a transition that typically marks the point where a program office’s attention shifts from engineering risk to operational integration. Four years later, as she hands the program to Colonel Joshua Wort and moves to a new assignment at NAVAIR, Fleeger offered a retrospective on what those four years actually accomplished, and it was not the story most outside observers expected to hear.

This Wednesday, 15 July, 2026, Argentina faces England in the quarter-finals of the FIFA World Cup in the Atlanta Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia. Argentinian superstar, 39 year old Lionel Messi, will face 23 year English super-star, Jude Bellingham (and Harry Kane) on the football field. It will be a thrilling face off. But old rivalries are […]

I have never had a career. I want to say that plainly, at the start, because it is the truest thing I know about my own life, and because it took me the better part of four decades to be able to say i

The GIUK gap defines the North Atlantic’s central chokepoint. The Nordic land corridor defines the Alliance’s new northern arc from the Baltic to the Barents. But an architecture is only as strong as its seams. Canada and the Netherlands, two allies with very different postures, sit precisely at the points where those two theaters must […]

Japan’s Mogami-class frigate represents one of the more significant experiments in contemporary naval warfare: a major surface combatant conceived from the outset as a mothership for autonomous maritime systems. Rather than treating unmanned vehicles as bolt-on curiosities, the Mogami embeds them in its hull, combat system, and manning model. In doing so, Tokyo is building […]

My latest book is entitled Building the Impact Force: Marine Corps Transformation in an Age of Chaos. It brings together three distinct strands of research and thought that I have pursued over many years, weaving them into a single narrative about where the Marine Corps is headed and why that direction matters for the joint […]