Wednesday 11 February 2026 The United Kingdom’s Dragonfire programme is often presented as a sudden leap into the future, a clean alternative to the increasingly expensive arithmetic of missile defence. In reality it is the latest point on a long, uneven curve of directed energy weapons development—an effort stretching from cold war laboratories to today’s drone-saturated battlefields. Dragonfire matters not merely because it may burn holes in small aerial targets, but becaus

Wednesday 11 February 2026 Recent remarks by the Swedish prime minister concerning closer cooperation within NATO on nuclear matters have reopened a debate that Sweden once considered firmly settled. For much of the Cold War Sweden maintained a posture of armed neutrality, combining strong conventional defences with an explicit rejection of nuclear weapons on her soil. Accession to NATO has altered the strategic framework within which Swedish security policy is formulated, ev

Wednesday 11 February 2026 The revelation that the United Kingdom granted export licences for specialised machinery to an Armenian intermediary, amidst credible concerns that the equipment could be diverted into Russia’s military supply chain, is not merely an embarrassment for British export control. It is a demonstration of how sanctions regimes, however carefully drafted, are beaten in practice—by routing goods through states that are not themselves sanctioned, by using co

Wednesday 11 February 2026 Operation Midnight Hammer, the American strike package against Iranian nuclear sites on 21–22 June 2025, was presented to the public in the familiar language of airpower—stealth bombers, bunker-busting munitions, cruise missiles and the theatre choreography of decoys and suppression. Yet the most consequential detail may be the one that was least described: that the strike package was explicitly “supported” by US Cyber Command and that, according to

Wednesday 11 February 2026 The winter of 2025–26 has again laid bare the vulnerability of Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure to sustained Russian attack. As temperatures have fallen in a particularly cold winter season, Russian strikes against electricity generation, transmission nodes and district heating systems have intensified. This follows a now familiar pattern of attempting to ising cold, darkness and civilian discomfort as a strategic weapon. What has been more quietly

Tuesday 10 February 2026 The war in Ukraine is often compared, sometimes lazily, with the wars of the Balkans in the 1990s. The analogy is tempting. Both involve the violent unravelling of imperial legacies, both are fought on Europe’s periphery yet shape the continent’s moral centre, and both have produced a familiar vocabulary of ethnic cleansing, frozen conflicts, peace conferences and weary diplomats insisting that there is ‘no military solution’. For Ukraine the Balkans