Showing results by author "Robbin Laird" in All Categories

In an era when the “rules‑based international order” has been overtaken by events, democracies are operating in what Robbin Laird calls the Age of Chaos—a contested transition between global systems whose end state is still genuinely open. This concise, field‑grounded primer maps how a multipolar authoritarian architecture, kill web warfare, and political fracture are reshaping power, deterrence, and war for the twenty‑first century. Drawing on four decades of research and front‑line engagement with commanders, planners, and policymakers from Cold War Europe to the ...

Lessons from the Drone Wars: Maritime Autonomous Systems and Maritime Operations traces how the eruption of large-scale drone warfare from Ukraine to the Black Sea has exposed the bankruptcy of twentieth-century, platform‑centric thinking and forced a fundamental reimagining of how modern militaries fight, especially at sea. Rather than celebrating drones as a standalone revolution, the book argues that they are catalysts that reveal a deeper shift toward distributed kill webs, human–machine teaming, and economics driven by cost‑exchange ratios and adaptation speed rather than by unit...

Forget everything you thought you knew about the Ukraine conflict. This isn't just another regional war. It's the defining contest that is literally forging our 21st century reality. The Global War in Ukraine: 2021-2025 reveals how Vladimir Putin's catastrophic miscalculation didn't just fail to achieve its objectives. It accidentally triggered the most dramatic global realignment since the Cold War. What began as Russia's attempt to crush a neighboring democracy has instead awakened a sleeping giant, reshaping everything from military strategy to global economics. At the heart of this ...

This is the untold story of the V-22 Osprey—the aircraft that revolutionized military aviation despite facing the most vicious political and media assault in Pentagon history. From boardrooms to battlefields, from Capitol Hill hearings to the dusty landing zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, this gripping account reveals how a radical flying machine survived attempts to kill it and became a backbone of American military operations worldwide. The critics were relentless. Politicians called it wasteful. Journalists declared it unsafe. Even some military leaders wanted it scrapped. But the ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The publication provides an overview of the USMC will use the Joint Strike Fighter or F-35B and is using the Osprey as part of its operations. This is one of the first books which addresses how the USMC will use the Joint Strike Fighter and the Osprey to transform their operations. The publication provides an overview of how aviation for the United States Marine Corps (USMC) shapes their entire capabilities and directs how they operate. USMC Aviation allows the USMC to be “three dimensional warriors” in fighting the “three block war.” Not only does aviation provide for 360-degree ...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

The Global War in Ukraine: An Essay on the Changing World Order is not a book about a single front or a single war. It is a forensic examination of how one conflict has become the decisive crucible for a new international order. Ukraine is not a peripheral battlefield; it is “the furnace in which the international order is being reforged,” where alliance choices, industrial bets, and software updates collide with geography, memory, and nuclear shadow. Robbin Laird traces how unresolved tensions from the 1990s, misread signals, and strategic amnesia set the stage for what one foreword ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

In this book, the noted historian, Dr. Kenneth Maxwell, provides an overview of Brazilian developments over the past decade. As the world has changed dramatically, Brazil’s role is changing as well. These essays have been written over the past decade and provide insights into Brazil’s domestic politics, the role of its military, its changing foreign policy role, and the significant conflicts of the past decade. These essays were written at the time of the events described, so it is a view of Brazil in “real time” so to speak. It is more like an intellectual photo album, than a movie...

This report focuses on MAWTS-1 in 2023. In 2023, I interviewed the CO of MAWTS-1, Col Eric Purcell, in April and then visited the command in November after the second WTI of the year. This provided a chance to discuss how MAWTS-1 had progressed in working enhanced force mobility for the USMC within the broader joint force, a key emphasis of the force design effort. The challenge is that while the Marines are working FARPs and other means to enhance force mobility, the joint force is in the throes of significant change, whether it be the U.S. Navy working distributed maritime operations or ...