Memories from the Future: The Historical Experience of the First World War and the Civil War in Soviet Propaganda of the 1920s and 1930s

The article deals with the historical experience of the First World War and the Russian Civil War as it was brought up in Soviet propaganda of the 1920s and 1930s; topic is thus the employment of a useful past in the production of ideas about future wars. The present research is based on a corpus of normative texts related to the assessment of the First World War and the Civil War in the late 1920s and 1930s (including periodicals, political writings, materials of the Communist Party) as well as archival documents about campaigns dedicated to the anniversaries of the First World War and the Civil War. Despite their proclaimed policy of peace, Soviet leaders spoke of a major future war as inevitable, and tried to anticipate its nature through comparison with conflicts of the recent past. In the Soviet information space of the 1920s and 1930s, the Great War was presented primarily from a socio-political perspective. Assessing the First World War as imperialist, Soviet propaganda emphasized that the future conflict would inevitably start as a counter-revolutionary war against the USSR. The Civil War became the main source of heroic military discourse, and was presented as a national war against external enemies. The future war was thereby imagined on the model of the foreign interventions of 1918-1920. The author analyzes this approach with the example of the Soviet campaign dedicated to the twentieth anniversary of the defense of Petrograd from Yudenich's troops in 1919.

Visions of Future Warfare in Russian Military Publications

The article discusses visions of future warfare articulated in recent Russian military publications. There seems to be agreement among Russian scholars that future war will be triggered by Western attempts to promote Western political and economic interests while holding back Russia's resurgence as a global power. The future war with the West is viewed as inevitable in one form or another, whether it is subversion and local wars or large-scale conventional war. While the danger of conventional war has declined, according to several scholars, the West is understood to have a wide range of non-kinetic means at its disposal that threaten Russia. In order to withstand future dangers, Russia has to be able to meet a large number of kinetic and non-kinetic threats at home and abroad.

A Comparative Study of War Crimes Prosecutions by Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia

This paper contrasts the diverging war crimes prosecution efforts of Serbia and of Bosnia and Herzegovina with the aim of determining which factors played a role in the radically different outcomes, and to what extent. It will measure three elements: the effect of international incentives, structural judicial challenges, and ethnic composition, in order to establish which element played the most prominent role in the strikingly lower effectiveness and efficiency of war crimes prosecutions by Serbia in comparison to Bosnia and Herzegovina. The findings suggest that ethnic composition has the strongest influence over the degree to which war crimes prosecutions are pursued, and that this can consequently determine the effectiveness of international incentives. These findings will allow for a better understanding of the success of past post-conflict criminal prosecutions. This enhanced understanding will in turn inform future war crimes prosecutions and help shape measures that could be taken to mitigate the destructive effects of the most prominent spoiling components.

CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURES AS STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES IN HYBRID WARFARE

The current and future war is of hybrid nature, in which military actions are complementary to actions of economical, political, ideological and diplomatic nature. In this communication, I refer to the domains in which we encounter critical infrastructures and I demonstrate that these critical infrastructures are objectives of strategic importance for both the defender and the attacker.

Israeli-US leader ties will be functional but fraught

Significance This also comes as indirect US nuclear talks with Iran resume in Vienna, despite concerted Israeli opposition. US President Joe Biden is in effect withdrawing the unconditional backing his predecessor Donald Trump gave Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Impacts The Gaza ceasefire will be fragile, with a significant chance of renewed hostilities in the short-to-medium term. The appointment of a new Mossad chief, David Barnea, may lower the profile of but will not materially change Israeli-US intelligence ties. The United States will further increase financial support to both Gaza and the West Bank. In a more serious possible future war against Hezbollah, Washington might not back a major Israeli military incursion into Lebanon.

Future War and the Defence of Europe

Set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 crisis, Future War and the Defence of Europe considers in the round how peace can be maintained on a continent that has suffered two cataclysmic conflicts since 1914. COVID-19 and the trend-accelerating impact of such pandemics is first considered. The book then weaves history, strategy, policy, and technology into a compelling analytical narrative that sets the scale of the challenge Europeans and their allies will face if Europe’s peace is to be upheld in a transformative century. The book challenges foundational assumptions about how Europe’s defence is organized, the role of a fast-changing transatlantic relationship, NATO, the European Union, and their constituent nation-states. At the heart of the book is a radical vision of a technology-enabling future European defence built around a new kind of Atlantic alliance, an innovative strategic public–private partnership, and the future hyper-electronic European force it must spawn. Europeans should be under no illusion: unless they do far more for their own defence, and very differently, all that Europeans now take for granted could be lost in the maze of hybrid war, cyber war, and hyperwar they must face.

Could NATO (still) defend Europe?

NATO has been ‘adapting’ for a decade and has made significant progress in meeting the coming challenges to Europe defence. However, power is relative and the nature of future war across the multi-domains of air, sea, land, cyber, space, information, and knowledge, allied to the accelerating speed of war, also reveals profound Allied weaknesses. Whilst the Americans are increasingly overstretched trying to cover the expanding space and technology of warfare, Europeans are decidedly under-stretched, unable, or unwilling to meet the demands of defence, too often seeing defence as a budget to be raided for domestic political concerns. Ultimately, NATO is in the business of deterrence, for if it fails defence seems unlikely, short of a rapid descent into all-out nuclear war. Europeans must thus understand that NATO is essentially a European institution, and it can only fulfil its mission as a defensive Alliance if they give the Alliance the means and tools to maintain a minimum but credible conventional force and nuclear force deterrent.

Introduction

The Introduction establishes the challenge the book addresses: how to defend Europe in the post-COVID-19 world in which all the assumptions about power, strategy, alliance, technology, and what constitutes military capability are changing fast. The chapter postulates that Europe is at another hinge of history and that the possibility of another major European war can no longer be excluded. The chapter considers the state of the literature and the debate and structure of the book, before laying out the scope of the challenge Europe’s future war, future defence must confront if peace is to be maintained through credible deterrence and defence. It also establishes the central theme of the book: European defence will require a dual-track approach of constant dialogue between allies and adversaries and a minimum level of relevant military capability and capacity to ensure credible deterrence.