This comprehensive Research Handbook examines the key drivers of the arms trade, mapping the main trends in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. It also explores the principal defence markets internationally, including the US, China, India, Russia and the UK in greater detail.
The Military Revolution and Revolutions in Military Affairs updates two central debates in military history--the one surrounding the concept of military revolution, and the one on military affairs--whilst advancing original research in both fields. Only a handful of publications consider the military revolution and the RMA in tandem. This book breaks new ground conceptually and appeals to an exceptionally large and diverse readership. Comparative revisionist studies of the military revolution and RMA better enable us to comprehend the historical continuum and reveal the new RMA for what it is. And for what it is shortly to become. This book presents original contributions within the "epicentre" of the military revolution debate, the 1500s, with an emphasis on gunpowder revolution (offensively and defensively). The connections with the Revolution in Military Affairs are then made explicit by scholars, a practitioner, and an analyst, with an emphasis on airborne lethal autonomous weapons systems. This is a chronologically broad and unique methodological approach to a historical debate that begs for clarification as we enter an era where killer robots will almost certainly take from humans their monopoly on violence.
Which ancient army boasted the largest fortifications, and how did the competitive build-up of military capabilities shape world history? Few realise that imperial Rome had a serious competitor in Late Antiquity. Late Roman legionary bases, normally no larger than 5ha, were dwarfed by Sasanian fortresses, often covering 40ha, sometimes even 125-175ha. The latter did not necessarily house permanent garrisons but sheltered large armies temporarily – perhaps numbering 10-50,000 men each. Even Roman camps and fortresses of the Early and High Empire did not reach the dimensions of their later Persian counterparts. The longest fort-lined wall of the late antique world was also Persian. Persia built up, between the fourth and sixth centuries AD, the most massive military infrastructure of any ancient or medieval Near Eastern empire – if not the ancient and medieval world. Much of the known defensive network was directed against Persia’s powerful neighbours in the north rather than the west. This may reflect differences in archaeological visibility more than troop numbers. Urban garrisons in the Romano-Persian frontier zone are much harder to identify than vast geometric compounds in marginal northern lands. Recent excavations in Iran have enabled us to precision-date two of the largest fortresses of Southwest Asia, both larger than any in the Roman world. Excavations in a Gorgan Wall fort have shed much new light on frontier life, and we have unearthed a massive bridge nearby. A sonar survey has traced the terminal of the Tammisheh Wall, now submerged under the waters of the Caspian Sea. Further work has focused on a vast city and settlements in the hinterland. Persia’s Imperial Power, our previous project, had already shed much light on the Great Wall of Gorgan, but it was our recent fieldwork that has thrown the sheer magnitude of Sasanian military infrastructure into sharp relief.
This two-volume book provides a comprehensive analysis of the lawfulness of the use of nuclear weapons, based on existing international law, established facts as to nuclear weapons and their effects, and nuclear weapons policies and plans of the United States. Based on detailed analysis of the facts and law, Professor Moxley shows that the United States’ arguments that uses of nuclear weapons, including low-yield nuclear weapons, could be lawful do not withstand analysis. Moxley opens by examining established rules of international law governing the use of nuclear weapons, first analyzing this body of law based on the United States’ own statements of the matter and then extending the analysis to include requirements of international law that the United States overlooks in its assessment of the lawfulness of potential nuclear weapons uses. He then develops in detail the known facts as to nuclear weapons and their consequences and U.S. policies and plans concerning such matters. He describes the risks of deterrence and the existential nature of the effects of nuclear war on human life and civilization. He proceeds to pull it all together, applying the law to the facts and demonstrating that known nuclear weapons effects cannot comply with such legal requirements as those of distinction, proportionality, necessity, precaution, the corollary requirement of controllability, and the law of reprisal. Moxley shows that, when the United States goes to apply international law to potential nuclear weapons uses, it distorts the law as it has itself articulated it, overlooks law in such areas as causation, risk analysis, mens rea, and per se rules, and disregards known risks as to nuclear weapons effects, including radioactive fallout, nuclear winter, electromagnetic pulses, and potential escalation. He then shows that the policy of deterrence is unlawful because the use of such weapons would be unlawful. Moxley urges that the United States and other nuclear weapons States take heed of the requirements of international law as to nuclear weapons threat and use. He argues that law can be a positive force in society’s addressing existential risks posed by nuclear weapons and the policy of nuclear deterrence.
This volume offers an innovative and counter-intuitive study of how and why artificial intelligence-infused weapon systems will affect the strategic stability between nuclear-armed states. Johnson demystifies the hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of nuclear weapons and, more broadly, future warfare. The book highlights the potential, multifaceted intersections of this and other disruptive technology – robotics and autonomy, cyber, drone swarming, big data analytics, and quantum communications – with nuclear stability. Anticipating and preparing for the consequences of the AI-empowered weapon systems are fast becoming a critical task for national security and statecraft. Johnson considers the impact of these trends on deterrence, military escalation, and strategic stability between nuclear-armed states – especially China and the United States. The book draws on a wealth of political and cognitive science, strategic studies, and technical analysis to shed light on the coalescence of developments in AI and other disruptive emerging technologies. Artificial intelligence and the future of warfare sketches a clear picture of the potential impact of AI on the digitized battlefield and broadens our understanding of critical questions for international affairs. AI will profoundly change how wars are fought, and how decision-makers think about nuclear deterrence, escalation management, and strategic stability – but not for the reasons you might think.
Evolution and the Human-Animal Drive to Conflict examines how fundamental, universal animal drives, such as dominance/prevalence, survival, kinship, and "profit" (greed, advantage, whether of material or social nature), provide the basis for the evolutionary trap that promotes the unstable, conflictive, dominant-prone individual and group human behaviours. Examining this behavioural tension, this book argues that while these innate features set up behaviours that lean towards aggression influenced by social inequalities, the means implemented to defuse them resort to emotional and intellectual strategies that sponsor fanaticism and often reproduce the very same behaviours they intend to defuse. In addressing these concerns, the book argues that we should enhance our resources to promote solidarity, accept cultural differences, deter expansionist and uncontrolled profit drives, and achieve collective access towards knowledge and progress in living conditions. This entails promoting the redistribution of resources and creative labour access and avoiding policies that generate a fragmented world with collective and individual development disparities that invite and encourage dominance behaviours. This resource redistribution asserts that it is necessary to reformulate the global set of human priorities towards increased access to better living conditions, cognitive enhancement, a more amiable interaction with the ecosystem and non-aggressive cultural differences, promote universal access to knowledge, and enhance creativity and cultural convivence. These behavioural changes entail partial derangement of our ancestral animal drives camouflaged under different cultural profiles until the species succeeds in replacing the dominance of basic animal drives with prosocial, collective ones. Though it entails a formidable task of confronting financial, military, and religious powers and cultural inertias – human history is also a challenging, continuous experience in these domains – for the sake of our own self-identity and self-evaluation, we should reject any suggestion of not continuing embracing slowly constructing collective utopias channelled towards improving individual and collective freedom and creativeness. This book will interest academics and students in social, cognitive, and evolutionary psychology, the neurosciences, palaeoanthropology, philosophy, and anthropology.
This open access volume surveys the state of the field to examine whether a fifth wave of deterrence theory is emerging. Bringing together insights from world-leading experts from three continents, the volume identifies the most pressing strategic challenges, frames theoretical concepts, and describes new strategies. The use and utility of deterrence in today’s strategic environment is a topic of paramount concern to scholars, strategists and policymakers. Ours is a period of considerable strategic turbulence, which in recent years has featured a renewed emphasis on nuclear weapons used in defence postures across different theatres; a dramatic growth in the scale of military cyber capabilities and the frequency with which these are used; and rapid technological progress including the proliferation of long-range strike and unmanned systems. These military-strategic developments occur in a polarized international system, where cooperation between leading powers on arms control regimes is breaking down, states widely make use of hybrid conflict strategies, and the number of internationalized intrastate proxy conflicts has quintupled over the past two decades. Contemporary conflict actors exploit a wider gamut of coercive instruments, which they apply across a wider range of domains. The prevalence of multi-domain coercion across but also beyond traditional dimensions of armed conflict raises an important question: what does effective deterrence look like in the 21st century? Answering that question requires a re-appraisal of key theoretical concepts and dominant strategies of Western and non-Western actors in order to assess how they hold up in today’s world. Air Commodore Professor Dr. Frans Osinga is the Chair of the War Studies Department of the Netherlands Defence Academy and the Special Chair in War Studies at the University Leiden. Dr. Tim Sweijs is the Director of Research at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies and a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Military Sciences of the Netherlands Defence Academy in Breda.
This handbook provides a comprehensive survey of the development and importance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), its role in international relations and its influence on history. The volume examines the Alliance’s evolution in breadth, depth and context by analysing and explaining why and how NATO has endured and remained relevant since its creation. To present an inclusive study of the Alliance’s activities and milestone events and to offer a glimpse of future challenges, the book’s 29 chapters fall into six thematic sections that act as frameworks and allow the exploration of specific topics that pertain to the evolution of NATO: Part I: History of NATO, 1949–2024 Part II: Key Enduring Themes, 1949–2024 Part III: Military Operations, 1995–2024 Part IV: National Perspectives, 1949–2024 Part V: Regional Perspectives, 1949–2024 Part VI: Future Prospects, 2024– This handbook will be of much interest to students and researchers of NATO, strategic studies, defence studies and International Relations, as well as for staff and fellows at security- and defence-oriented think tanks and government officials, military personnel and other practitioners in the areas of foreign affairs and defence.
Appendix, Budget of the U.S. Government, FY 2019 presents detailed information on individual programs and appropriation accounts that constitutes the budget.