Showing results by author "Robbin Laird" in All Categories

Remembering the Flying Fortress: When Heroes Fell from the Sky Noirmoutier Island, France, 2013. Seventy years after a B-17 Flying Fortress crashed into Nazi-occupied territory, French villagers gathered to honor the American airmen who never made it home. This is more than a story about an airplane. It's about courage measured in aluminum and blood, about young Americans who climbed into flying fortresses knowing the odds, and about French civilians who risked everything to help fallen airmen under the Nazi boot. The crash was just the beginning. When that B-17 went down over France in ...

This book addresses the coming of maritime autonomous systems to the U.S. Navy and allied fleets. They are obviously coming as well to adversarial forces as well. It is clear that maritime autonomous systems will become a key part of the modernization of the United States (U.S.) and allied security and combat forces. They will also become part of the adversarial forces and will need to be countered as well. Even though maritime autonomous systems are already here and ready to be deployed. there are the vested interests of maintaining a legacy approach to maritime operations and the thinking...

The Malmgren Strategy: Chess Mastery Applied to Global Power In an era where economics, diplomacy, and military power collide at lightning speed, few minds can synthesize the chaos into coherent strategy. Dr. Malmgren is one of those rare thinkers—a strategic chess grandmaster operating on the global board where nations, corporations, and ideologies battle for advantage. The Presidential Whisperer Ambassador Malmgren didn't just advise presidents—he helped architect the modern global trading system that shapes how power flows between nations. His counsel reached into the highest levels ...

Listen to Lead is a leadership book about empathy as an operational capability. not a soft extra. It shows how disciplined listening changes decisions, teams, and outcomes in complex, fragmented organizations. Instead of offering slogans, it gives leaders concrete daily practices for conflict resolution, cross-cultural leadership, and communication under pressure. Drawing on real-world work with defense, government, and industry, it reframes listening as hard cognitive work that can be trained, measured, and built into your culture. If you lead in high-stakes environments where information ...

While critics obsessed over cost overruns and early setbacks, something extraordinary was happening on battlefields from Iraq to the Pacific. The Marines weren't just flying a new aircraft—they were pioneering an entirely new way of war. This is the story of that transformation. Since 2007, the Osprey has rewritten the rules of military aviation. It transformed the Marine Corps from a traditional amphibious force into a rapid-deployment global strike capability. It gave Air Force Special Operations unprecedented reach and flexibility. Now it's revolutionizing Navy logistics and promising ...

Ukraine's devastating assault on Russia's Black Sea Fleet didn't come from submarines or destroyers—it came from swarms of autonomous maritime drones that cost a fraction of traditional warships yet delivered crippling blows to a nuclear superpower's navy. This isn't just another conflict headline. It's the opening chapter of a maritime revolution that's rewriting the rules of naval warfare. For centuries, naval supremacy meant building bigger, more powerful capital ships. The logic was simple: concentrate overwhelming firepower in fortress-like vessels that could dominate vast stretches ...

Training for military forces is in the throes of significant change. The threats are dynamic; there is always the reactive enemy; and technology fosters new ways to operate. Concepts of operations are evolving, most notably as U.S. and allied forces are focusing on force distribution to deal with the higher end threats authoritarian adversaries are fielding. Dr. Robbin Laird and Ed Timperlake have visited the major training centers in the United States and several abroad as the state of the art of training is dynamically developing as well. In this book, they highlight their visits to a ...

"Defense XXIV" is a valuable resource for defense professionals, policymakers, and students of international security. Its strength lies in providing ground-level insights from military leaders and defense experts rather than purely theoretical analysis. The book makes a compelling case that Western democracies face a strategic inflection point requiring new thinking about force structure, alliance cooperation, and technological innovation. By capturing multiple perspectives on these challenges, it offers readers a nuanced understanding of how defense establishments are adapting to a more ...

The Shadow Empire: How Authoritarians Built a Parallel World Order While America was fighting the war on terror, China and Russia were building something far more dangerous: an alternative to the entire Western system. The "rules-based international order" is crumbling. Not from external attack, but from internal rot and external alternatives. While Western leaders still speak as if American dominance is eternal, authoritarian powers have quietly constructed a shadow empire—complete with parallel financial systems, trade networks, and political alliances that make Western sanctions ...

The comfortable certainties of the post-Cold War era are over. The time for gradual preparation has passed. Welcome to the age of "Fight Tonight." Based on the September 2025 seminar by the Sir Richard Williams Foundation, this urgent analysis reveals how Australia and its allies must fundamentally reimagine military readiness for an era where conflicts may be decided before the first shot is fired. The book reveals how modern military effectiveness requires shifting from managing discrete crises to thriving within permanent complexity. Ukrainian forces demonstrate this through real-time ...

Everything you thought you knew about training fighter pilots may be obsolete. This isn't about faster jets or better missiles but it's about the cognitive transformation required when modern aircraft become "carefree to fly" but impossible to fight effectively without mastering information from dozens of sensors, coordinating with distributed forces you may never see, and making strategic decisions in seconds. The stakes are existential. The most sophisticated fifth-generation fighter provides zero advantage if its pilot cannot exploit its capabilities. In modern air combat, pilot quality ...

In this book, Dr. Laird provides an update on the ADF or the Australian Defence Force from the perspective of changes introduced in 2023 and embodied in the 2024 Defence Investment Plan. The core of the book is built around the Sir Richard Williams Foundation April 2024 seminar on multi-domain operations in support of an Australian maritime strategy. This book is the second in the series on Australian Defence and Deterrence the first having been published in 2023. Laird is a research fellow with the Sir Richard Williams Foundation and has been writing their bi-annual seminar reports since ...

When Kenneth Maxwell—the world's foremost historian of Portuguese democracy—stood before audiences in São Paulo, Lisbon, and Harvard in 2024, he wasn't just delivering academic lectures. He was connecting the threads of a revolutionary story that spans centuries and continents, linking the 1974 Portuguese Revolution to the great urban reconstructions that reshaped Europe. This is history with global reach and contemporary urgency. From the ashes of Lisbon's devastating 1755 earthquake to the democratic revolution that toppled Europe's longest-lasting dictatorship in 1974, Maxwell ...

Discover the dramatic transformation at the heart of 21st-century military aviation in "2nd Marine Air Wing: Transitioning the Fight Tonight Force." This compelling and deeply researched volume unlocks the story of how America’s Second Marine Aircraft Wing (2nd MAW) underwent a remarkable evolution between 2007 and 2025, becoming a digitally driven, combat-ready force able to respond to crises the world over, at a moment’s notice. From the very first landing of the MV-22 Osprey on a British warship, the 2nd MAW showcased its vision for seamless allied interoperability, a vision that ...

The Wynne Doctrine: Innovation, Leadership, and the Fight for America's Military Future This book chronicles the visionary leadership of Michael W. Wynne, the 21st Secretary of the Air Force, whose prescient warnings and bold innovations were dismissed—only to become America's most urgent military priorities two decades later. At the heart of Wynne's philosophy lies a simple but powerful doctrine: "If you are ever involved in a fair fight, it is the result of poor planning." This principle drove his relentless pursuit of military superiority through breakthrough technologies and strategic...

Public Speaking for Professionals: Second Edition is the updated lead volume in my three-part Personal Professional Development Insights series, and it is designed to be your entry ramp into a broader journey of speaking, listening, and leading in turbulent times. In this new edition, I show how public speaking is not a performance add-on, but a core professional discipline for thinking clearly, earning trust, and shaping decisions in what I call the “anarchy of the moment” a world of fragmented audiences, collapsing attention spans, and constant disruption. Drawing on four decades of ...

In Australia and Indo-Pacific Defence: Anchoring a Way Ahead, author and editor of over thirty books, Robin Laird, brings to bear his expertise on defence and security affairs to make sense of contemporary Australian international security and defence policy. This is his third book focused on Australian defence. It reveals the sharp mind of a person very well connected in Australian defence policy, academic and military practitioner circles. Laird has expertly sought to engage with and understand perspectives of Australian defence and security experts, many of whom are associated with the ...

This is a revised version of the book first published in 2023 and includes updates from 2024 and 2025, including with regard to Israel operations with the aircraft. It is a book about the coming of the F-35. It tells the story of those in the military who worked to introduce the aircraft into the combat force. Visits throughout the world accompanied the standing up the aircraft and this book tells the story of those visits and the work of the warriors who made the F-35 global enterprise possible. As LtGen George Trautman, USMC (Ret), Former USMC Deputy Commandant for Aviation, writes in the...

Italy's Airpower Renaissance: From Mediterranean Partner to Global Force Multiplier Italy isn't just participating in the F-35 revolution—it's leading it. This book reveals how a nation once seen as a junior NATO partner has transformed itself into a cornerstone of 21st-century airpower, wielding influence far beyond its borders through strategic vision and technological mastery. The Cameri Miracle At the heart of Italy's transformation lies the Cameri facility—not just a production line, but a strategic nerve center that makes Italy indispensable to European and allied defense. While ...

This is the fourth annual publication we have published at Second Line of Defense and Defense Information. Each of the four publications highlight themes from essays we have published during that year. We are living in a time of compressed history, and our essays in each volume captures the history emerging in that year. We focus on defense issues, so we have highlighted some of the key developments affecting the evolution of defense and security challenges facing the United States and its key allies in that year, as well as innovations and developments in selected military technologies and...