Sea State A Saudi Arabian frigate was attacked by Houthi rebels in waters west of Yemen on 30 January. Conflicting reports are floating around about the attack method—while the official Saudi Press Agency attributed it …
In a recent article for The Strategist, I showed how Russia’s economic woes are negatively affecting plans to modernise the country’s military. In order to be thrifty, Moscow has, for the most part, been investing …
Originally published 13 September 2016. ‘Anti-access/area denial’ (commonly known as A2AD) has become a hot topic in recent years. Many have detailed the threats that A2AD weapons systems pose to the US military, especially its …
Sea State The US Navy released its much-anticipated 2016 Force Structure Assessment (FSA) last week and the results are sure to please proponents of a large USN The FSA advocates a 355 ship navy, which …
While lengthy counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have provided our military with valuable operational experience, they haven’t necessarily prepared us for the next conflict. On the other hand, the Russo-Ukraine War provides some valuable …
Sea State One of the Su-33 Flanker-D aircraft onboard the Admiral Kuznetsov—Russia’s aircraft carrier in the Eastern Mediterranean—crashed last week. The accident was the second one in a month and occurred after one of the …
As a number of commentators have observed, the phone call between Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen and US president-elect Donald Trump has set a cat among the pigeons. It has breached a practice in place since 1979 …
The US government’s largest contracted military shipbuilder, Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII), recently opened an office in Canberra. It seems unlikely that HII would’ve done that without encouragement from the US government, via the US Navy. …
Sea State The British Ministry of Defence last week admitted that the Royal Navy’s fleet of frigates and destroyers would be losing their primary over-the-horizon anti-surface weapons due to cost-cutting measures. The Royal Navy will …
We’ve come full circle on nuclear disarmament. In the late 1950s, the Aldermaston Easter marches (from the British Atomic Weapons Establishment near Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square in London) urged British governments to ‘Ban the Bomb’. …
As Philippe Legrain pointed out in The Strategist last week, the election of Donald Trump as the next US president threatens to further undermine the liberal international order. Thus far, US military alliances in Asia …
Speculation regarding the implications of Donald Trump’s win for Asia has been, to be charitable, all over the map. Some argue that Trump’s victory is a win for China because he’ll seek to cut deals …