scholarly journals PROSPECTS OF MODERN FORTIFICATION

Author(s):  
Serhii Mykhalchenko ◽  
Valerii Tovbych

The relevance of modern means of fortification and creation of new principles of spatial and urban planning solutions for special structures of defense, law enforcement and penitentiary systems, and border protection are investigated. It was researched that the presence of artificial intelligence, modern means of computer equipment and communications enables withdrawing human resources from the area of direct military clashes, and thus, the fortification will not have to protect a person on the battlefield anymore. Scientific and technological progress offers the latest firing systems with automatic target recognition and destruction. Thus, field fortification would enter the fundamentally new features that are not related to a person's protection from the means of destruction. Techniques for camouflage practicing, ensuring suddenness and the effectiveness of the use of defensive structures and devices would also become fundamentally new. The techniques for disguising, ensuring suddenness and the effectiveness of the use of defensive structures and devices will also become fundamentally new. As it was mentioned in the article, nowadays, terrible future that was described by numerous futurists and anti-utopians is here already. The global information networks, hybrid warfare, encroachments not on the burnt desert but on the thinking of the population of countries being subjected to aggression. It is precisely clear that the peace agreements reached as a result of the Second World War have been grossly trampled over by the imperial claims of the Russian Federation. Thus, there is an urgent need for scientific research that will provide the further development of the fortification as a complete field of the military engineering. The article points put that such investigations are likely to be carried out, but they are not advertised, as it should be in military affairs. The current state of affairs in Ukraine is really alarming. We are in a state of permanent armed conflict with an enemy who is stronger than us, practically protecting the world from the aggressive imperial encroachments of the Putin regime. It is a challenge for us: how to build defense, including fortifications. Meanwhile, there is only a loud embarrassment with so-called "Yatseniuk's wall".

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 87-96
Author(s):  
Elena Yu. Guskova

The article is devoted to the analysis of interethnic relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in the 1940s and 1960s. The article is based on materials from the archives of BiH, Croatia, Slovenia, Yugoslavia. The documents show the state of affairs in the Republic – both in the economy and in ideology. In one or another way, all of them reflect the level of tension in the interethnic relations. For the first time, the article presents the discussion on interethnic relations, on the new phenomenon in multinational Yugoslavia – the emergence of a new people in BiH under the name of “Muslim”. The term “Muslims” is used to define the ethnic identity of Bosniaks in the territory of BiH starting from the 1961 census.


Author(s):  
Douglas E. Delaney

How did British authorities manage to secure the commitment of large dominion and Indian armies that could plan, fight, shoot, communicate, and sustain themselves, in concert with the British Army and with each other, during the era of the two world wars? This is the primary line of inquiry for this study, which begs a couple of supporting questions. What did the British want from the dominion and Indian armies and how did they go about trying to get it? How successful were they in the end? Answering these questions requires a long-term perspective—one that begins with efforts to fix the armies of the British Empire in the aftermath of their desultory performance in South Africa (1899–1903) and follows through to the high point of imperial military cooperation during the Second World War. Based on multi-archival research conducted in six different countries on four continents, Douglas E. Delaney argues that the military compatibility of the British Empire armies was the product of a deliberate and enduring imperial army project, one that aimed at ‘Lego-piecing’ the armies of the empire, while, at the same time, accommodating the burgeoning autonomy of the dominions and even India. At its core, this book is really about how a military coalition worked.


Sociology ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (5) ◽  
pp. 898-914 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristian Frisk

The article challenges the thesis that western societies have moved towards a post-heroic mood in which military casualties are interpreted as nothing but a waste of life. Using content analysis and qualitative textual analysis of obituaries produced by the Royal Danish Army in memory of soldiers killed during the Second World War (1940–1945) and the military campaign in Afghanistan (2002–2014), the article shows that a ‘good’ military death is no longer conceived of as a patriotic sacrifice, but is instead legitimised by an appeal to the unique moral worth, humanitarian goals and high professionalism of the fallen. The article concludes that fatalities in international military engagement have invoked a sense of post-patriotic heroism instead of a post-heroic crisis, and argues that the social order of modern society has underpinned, rather than undermined, ideals of military self-sacrifice and heroism, contrary to the predominant assumption of the literature on post-heroic warfare.


Author(s):  
Anna D. Bertova ◽  

Prominent Japanese economist, specialist in colonial politics, a professor of Im­perial Tokyo University, Yanaihara Tadao (1893‒1961) was one of a few people who dared to oppose the aggressive policy of Japanese government before and during the Second World War. He developed his own view of patriotism and na­tionalism, regarding as a true patriot a person who wished for the moral develop­ment of his or her country and fought the injustice. In the years leading up to the war he stated the necessity of pacifism, calling every war evil in the ultimate, divine sense, developing at the same time the concept of the «just war» (gisen­ron), which can be considered good seen from the point of view of this, imper­fect life. Yanaihara’s theory of pacifism is, on one hand, the continuation of the one proposed by his spiritual teacher, the founder of the Non-Church movement, Uchimura Kanzo (1861‒1930); one the other hand, being a person of different historical period, directly witnessing the boundless spread of Japanese militarism and enormous hardships brought by the war, Yanaihara introduced a number of corrections to the idealistic theory of his teacher and proposed quite a specific explanation of the international situation and the state of affairs in Japan. Yanai­hara’s philosophical concepts influenced greatly both his contemporaries and successors of the pacifist ideas in postwar Japan, and contributed to the dis­cussion about interrelations of pacifism and patriotism, and also patriotism and religion.


The destruction of Japan’s empire in August 1945 under the military onslaught of the Allied Powers produced a powerful rupture in the histories of modern East Asia. Everywhere imperial ruins from Manchuria to Taiwan bore memoires of a great run of upheavals and wars which in turn produced revolutionary uprisings and civil wars from China to Korea. The end of global Second World War did not bring peace and stability to East Asia. Power did not simply change hands swiftly and smoothly. Rather the disintegration of Japan’s imperium inaugurated a era of unprecedented bloodletting, state destruction, state creation, and reinvention of international order. In the ruins of Japan’s New Order, legal anarchy, personal revenge, ethnic displacement, and nationalist resentments were the crucible for decades of violence. As the circuits of empire went into meltdown in 1945, questions over the continuity of state and law, ideologies and the troubled inheritance of the Japanese empire could no longer be suppressed. In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire takes a transnational lens to this period, concluding that we need to write the violence of empire’s end – and empire itself - back into the global history of East Asia’s Cold War.


Vulcan ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-63
Author(s):  
Petter J. Wulff

The military community is a secluded part of society and normally has to act on the conditions offered by its civilian surroundings. When heavy vehicles were developed for war, the civilian infrastructure presented a potential restriction to vehicular mobility. In Sweden, bridges were seen as a critical component of this infrastructure. It took two decades and the experiences of a second world war for the country to come to terms with this restriction. This article addresses the question as to why Swedish tanks suddenly became much heavier in the early 1940s. The country’s bridges play a key role in what happened, and the article explains how. It is a story about how a military decision came to be outdated long before it was upgraded.


2017 ◽  
pp. 297-332
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Ojcewicz

In order to illustrate the agency activity of Stalin’s intelligence service abroad in the 1940s I have selected a notorious case of the assassination of a prominent Soviet spy, Ignace Reiss, which took place on 4 September 1937 near Lausanne. I have set three main research objectives: 1. to verify the current state of knowledge on the assassination of Ignace Reiss; 2. to establish the possible involvement of Sergei Efron in the assassination; 3. to evaluate to what extent the fate of Sergei Efron in relation to the assassination of Ignace Reiss influenced the lives of his own family members (Marina Tsvetaeva, Ariadna Efron and Georgy Efron) and his immediate agency circle. As for today, there are strong grounds to state that Sergei Efron was not directly involved in Reiss’ killing – presumably, he did not shoot him. Following the unmasking of the espionage network in Paris led by Efron, his family and Efron himself were forced to abandon France in a hurry. Soon after that Efron and his relatives experienced Stalin’s repression of the Great Terror. Efron was executed by the NKVD, Marina Tsvetayeva committed suicide, Ariadna Efron was placed in prison for many years and Georgy Efron, 19 years old at the time died in Belarus in August 1944, merely two months after having fought at the front in the Second World War.


2021 ◽  
Vol 01 (05) ◽  
pp. 102-110
Author(s):  
R.R. Marchenkov ◽  

This article covers the internal features of the British officer corps before and during the Second World War. The author touches upon the issues of social composition and ways of recruiting officers. The article describes the dynamics of transformation processes in this category of the military segment in war.


Author(s):  
Alexander Sukhodolov ◽  
Tuvd Dorj ◽  
Yuriy Kuzmin ◽  
Mikhail Rachkov

For the first time in Russian historiography, the article draws attention to the connection of the War of Khalkhin Gol in 1939 and the conclusion of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939. For a long time, historical science considered these two major events in the history of the USSR and history of the world individually, without their historic relationship. The authors made an attempt to provide evidence of this relationship, showing the role that surrounding and defeating the Japanese army at Khalkhin Gol in August 1939 and signing in Moscow of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact played in the history of the world. The study analyzes the foreign policy of the USSR in Europe, the reasons for the failure in the conclusion of the Anglo-Franco-Soviet military union in 1939 and the circumstances of the Pact. It shows the interrelation between the defeat of the Japanese troops at Khalkhin Gol and the need for the Soviet-German treaty. The authors describe the historic consequences of the conclusion of the pact for the further development of the Japanese-German relations and the course of the Second World War. They also present the characteristics of the views of these historical events in the Russian historiography.


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