On the morning of 28 January 1986, ice hung from the launch tower at Cape Canaveral. Engineers knew the temperature was unusually low, colder than anything the Space Shuttle programme had experienced before. They also knew that parts of the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters behaved unpredictably in the cold.
When the President of the United States says America “needs” Greenland for defence, he’s not making a real estate pitch. He’s signalling that Arctic access is now a strategic entitlement question, not a diplomatic one. A day after the Venezuela operation, Trump pivoted back to Greenland. Denmark’s
Security
The United States just abducted a head of state, and the weapon that made it possible wasn’t a carrier group, it was a tariff schedule. Over the weekend, the Trump administration launched a military operation inside Venezuela, captured Nicolás Maduro, and transferred him to New York to face charges.
America’s 2025 National Security Strategy A British view from the alliance front line When the United States publishes a fresh National Security Strategy, Europeans tend to check the headlines, confirm that the transatlantic link still looks solid, and move on with their day. This one is different. The 2025
Nuclear
The United Kingdom has maintained a continuous at-sea deterrent (CASD) since 1969, code-named Operation Relentless, meaning at least one nuclear-armed submarine is always on patrol, hidden in the world's oceans.
Space
On a clear night, a speck of paint from a decommissioned satellite can still be hurtling towards the next generation of Earth-orbiting technology at more than 10 kilometres per second. With over 11,000 active satellites currently circling Earth and more than 1.2 million pieces of space debris larger
Thought Leader
The sky has changed, but our security playbooks have not. Satellites now underpin navigation, finance, logistics, media, and military operations. They are no longer rare, government-only assets. They are cloud-connected, software-defined, and commercially operated at scale. Yet much of cybersecurity still treats space as exotic and separate, a future problem
The first sign was not a missile launch, but a picture. At 06:42 Taipei time, a high‑resolution satellite image surfaced on a public imagery feed: a line of grey hulls pushing east from the Chinese coast, wakes cutting clean V‑shapes through the strait. Amateur analysts on X
Nuclear
Once, nuclear war haunted films, protests, and public imagination. Today, the fear has faded—but the threat hasn’t. This piece explores how we lost our nuclear anxiety, why that might be dangerous, and what we stand to forget if we stop paying attention.
Swarm Book
Orbits of Power: From Sputnik to Starlink © Jay Allen 2025 “It wasn’t the beep that scared them. It was the orbit.” On 4 October 1957, a polished metal sphere the size of a beach ball lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It weighed just 83 kilograms and
Swarm Book
The Sky is Full © Jay Allen 2025 Above Ukraine, the Future Arrived Early In the opening days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the war appeared to follow a familiar script. Tanks breached borders. Missiles rained on cities. Airstrikes lit the skies over Kyiv. Yet high
Musings
On June 20th, 2025, the European Commission quietly released a draft regulation that is one of the most geopolitically consequential documents of the year. Titled the EU Space Act, it mandates new cybersecurity, resilience, and environmental standards for all space systems operating within the Union. On the surface, it appears