My new article, The Missile the Laser–Microwave Duo Were Meant to Save, has now been published in The Forge.

The piece examines a problem that sits at the intersection of procurement, threat assessment, and cross-domain design logic. It asks a simple but important question: if Australia is investing heavily in directed-energy defences to protect missile magazines, are those systems being tested against the most relevant emerging threat classes?

I approach that question not as a weapons engineer, but as an architectural scientist. My work has long involved understanding how systems behave under heat, stress, constraint, and environmental load. In this case, that same way of thinking led me to look at directed-energy defence from an unusual angle: not just how such systems perform under ideal assumptions, but how an adaptive adversary might design around them.

The article is intended as a contribution to the public defence conversation, especially at a moment when major procurement choices are being specified now and may shape capability for years to come. My argument is not that directed-energy systems have no role, but that they should be tested rigorously against realistic, low-cost, cross-domain threat architectures before acquisition logic hardens around outdated assumptions.

You can read the article here:

The Missile the Laser–Microwave Duo Were Meant to Save

I’m grateful to The Forge for publishing the piece, and I hope it is useful to those working in defence policy, procurement, and sovereign capability.