International Law and Weapons Review

International law requires that, before any new weapon is developed, purchased or modified, the legality of its use must be determined. This book offers the first comprehensive and systemic analysis of the law mandating such assessments – Article 36 of the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. Underpinned by empirical research, the book explores the challenges the weapons review authorities are facing when examining emerging military technology, such as autonomous weapons systems and (autonomous) cyber capabilities. It argues that Article 36 is sufficiently broad to cover a wide range of military systems and offers States the necessary flexibility to adopt a process that best suits their organisational demands. While sending a clear signal that law should not simply follow technological developments, but rather steer them, the provision has its limits, however, which are shaped and defined by the interpretative decisions made by States.

PROBABILISTIC RISK ASSESSMENT FOR INTEGRATING SURVIVABILITY AND SAFETY MEASURES ON NAVAL SHIPS

Conflicts of today are characterized by both traditional and irregular tactics and by non-state actors making innovative use of modern technologies. These conditions set new demands on naval ships. The aim of this investigation is to describe how, based on probabilistic risk assessment, the concept of operation for a naval ship can be turned into safety scenarios to be used in the evaluation of risk. In this investigation, civilian state-of-the-art methods for probabilistic risk assessment are merged with the specific demands of naval ships. Relevant aspects of safety culture, codes, regulations and rules are analysed with respect to requirements on safety scenarios, and military operational research with respect to modelling military systems. The results show that the scenarios must have calculable probability and must be adapted to the vessel in question. Results from simulations show that modelling operational tasks is one way to support experts in the definition of safety scenarios.

The Four Petty Kingdoms of Upplǫnd: Equestrian Graves and the Political Integration of the Norwegian Highlands in Late Viking Age Norway

In continental and north-western Europe armed cavalry – aided by the introduction of the stirrup – was closely linked to the emergence of feudalism but was this also the case in Scandinavia? Were the resulting military specialists linked to the growing national kingdoms, or to local and regional power spheres ruled by petty kings? I will investigate this in the historical region of Upplǫnd – the last Norse area to be integrated into the Kingdom of Norway by Óláfr Haraldsson around AD 1020. Two thirds of Norway’s 51 known equestrian graves are located in this inland area and I will employ a novel way of investigating their relationship to local administrative units, such as þriðjungar (thirds), herǫð (hundreds), and not least fjórðungar (fourths), as well as travel routes and settlements. There is little that suggests that these graves were linked to an early national aristocracy, and its ruling Scandinavian dynasty – Ynglingene – as has been argued in previous research. Equestrian grave traditions survived longer in Upplǫnd than elsewhere in Scandinavia, which was not Christianised until the 11th century, and it is unlikely that the buried had served the uniting and converting King Óláfr. It is also difficult to establish links between historically known lendr menn (the most prominent retainers of the king) families, and such graves. However, a new revelation is that the farms where such graves were located, were situated along the boundaries between local fjórðungar, which were judicial districts, as well as subsidiaries of local military administration in the herǫð. This suggests that these locations had important warning and supervision roles in local military systems.

Sexual assault and fatal violence against women during the Irish War of Independence, 1919–1921: Kate Maher’s murder in context

At the height of the Irish War of Independence, 1919–1921, 45-year-old Kate Maher was brutally raped. She subsequently died of terrible wounds, almost certainly inflicted by drunken British soldiers. This article discusses her inadequately investigated case in the wider context of fatal violence against women and girls during years of major political instability. Ordinarily her violent death would have been subject to a coroner’s court inquiry and rigorous police investigation, but in 1920, civil inquests in much of Ireland were replaced by military courts of inquiry. With the exception of medical issues, where doctors adhered to their ethical responsibility to provide clear and concise evidence on injuries, wounds and cause of death, courts of inquiry were cursory affairs in which Crown forces effectively investigated and exonerated themselves. This article adopts a microhistory approach to Maher’s case to compare how civilian and military systems differed in their treatments of female fatalities. Despite the fact that the medical evidence unequivocally showed that the attack was of a very violent sexual nature, the two soldiers directly implicated were not charged with rape or any other sexual offence. In her case, and in those of other women who died violently while in the company of soldiers and policemen, prosecutions of the men involved resulted in acquittal by military court martial. This was so both for women portrayed as of immoral character and for others assumed to be ‘respectable’. It also reflects on the wider question of sexual violence during the Irish War of Independence, concluding that while females experienced a range of gender-determined threats and actions such as armed raids on their homes, the ‘bobbing’ of hair and other means of ‘shaming’, rape, accepted as the most serious act of sexual assault, was regarded by all combatants as beyond the pale.

Security and Military Relevancies of Digitisation, Globalisation and Cyberspace

The goal of this study is to explore security threats and challenges of digitisation. Digitisation as one of the key technological factors has a significant impact on the development of today’s modern world. Beyond general security circumstances, this impact touches upon economic, financial, social, technological, medical, educational, defence and military issues, as well all over the world.The argument of this study is that the modernisation of defence systems is an essential key to successfully responding to new security challenges in our digital explosion era. Therefore, it is a must that government organisations, including defence and military systems fundamentally upgrade their own technical, structural and operational capabilities and accept digitisation as the driving factor of future defence and military development.In light of the above, the study first examines digitisation as a global security challenge and then presents a comparative analysis of the relationship between hybrid warfare and cybersecurity. Finally, before drawing conclusions, it takes stock of the military policy relevance of the cybersecurity challenges relevant to Hungary.Overall, it can be stated that digitisation and digital transformation are present all over the world as a result of globalisation. Developed nations, including Hungary must be connected to digitisation and by digitisation to each other’s various systems and technologies. This system has to be integrated, but independent at the same time, as well as connected but separable in order to be able to be involved in the whole cyberspace and get the benefits of it or get separated from it to defend threats or direct attacks coming from the outside. The Hungarian Defence Forces has a key role in this very important process.

SOPRENE: Assessment of the Spanish Armada’s Predictive Maintenance Tool for Naval Assets

Predictive maintenance has lately proved to be a useful tool for optimizing costs, performance and systems availability. Furthermore, the greater and more complex the system, the higher the benefit but also the less applied: Architectural, computational and complexity limitations have historically ballasted the adoption of predictive maintenance on the biggest systems. This has been especially true in military systems where the security and criticality of the operations do not accept uncertainty. This paper describes the work conducted in addressing these challenges, aiming to evaluate its applicability in a real scenario: It presents a specific design and development for an actual big and diverse ecosystem of equipment, proposing an semi-unsupervised predictive maintenance system. In addition, it depicts the solution deployment, test and technological adoption of real-world military operative environments and validates the applicability.

A Brief Overview of Digital Military Systems Used in the Armies of NATO Member Countries

Today’s wars have undergone significant change. These changed military operations have changed the way armies are deployed, including the role and responsibilities of soldiers. New tools are needed to overcome the new challenges. 21st century soldiers need 2 1st century equipment to perform their duties. Aproject is present in several NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) member states army to develop individual equipment systems for dismounted soldiers equipped with modern military equipment, which are in the pilot phase, under introduction or authorised. I present these briefly in my publication.

A Nonlinear Fingerprint-Level Radar Simulation Modeling Method for Specific Emitter Identification

With the development of information technology for modern military confrontations, radar emitter fingerprint identification has become a hot and difficult topic in the field of electronic warfare, especially in the field of electronic reconnaissance. Owing to the confidentiality of military systems, most of the existing studies use simulation data for radar emitter fingerprint identification experiments and analysis. However, most of the existing modeling methods focus on the mechanism analysis of the nonlinear fingerprint characteristics of a single independent component. Its main disadvantage is that it can only represent the nonlinear fingerprint characteristics of some components in the radar emitter system but cannot fully reflect the nonlinear fingerprint characteristics of the whole radar emitter system. In this paper, a nonlinear fingerprint-level radar simulation modeling method is proposed. In contrast to the previous single component modeling method, the systematic nonlinear characteristic modeling method of this model can provide individual radar signal data under different modulation modes and working parameters, and provide experimental conditions for data support and theoretical analysis of radar emitter fingerprint identification.

Military Systems of Justice

Sociologists have largely ignored the study of military tribunals and justice systems. We offer a descriptive overview of military systems of justice intended for use by political and military sociologists, focusing on the case of the United States armed services. We contextualize the principal military systems of justice and provide extended discussions of how the American case connects through formal and informal channels to international legal structures. American military law and justice link three key legal realms: international law on conflict and security at the global level; the so called National Security Constitution at the national level; and the Uniform Code of Military Justice at the institutional level.