Emirati Parents’ Attitudes toward the Military and National Service in the United Arab Emirates

Compulsory national service for male citizens presents the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Armed Forces with an opportunity to recruit future military officers. Research showed that parental attitudes towards the military, manifested through their communication with youths, are likely to influence youths’ decision on a military career. Hence this study examined the attitudes of Emirati parents on the UAE military and national service; particularly parental perceptions of the military work environment; support of a military career for their children; and concerns about national service. Surveys, individual and focus group interviews were conducted with 59 Emirati parents. It found that most participants held the positive view that the military work environment helps attainment of professional goals but were uncertain about personal goals and workplace conditions. Also, more participants were supportive of a military career for sons than daughters. It also identified the basis for parental confidence about enlistment as patriotism and development of positive character traits but main concerns were the exposure to harsh training conditions and threat to life during enlistment. Recommendations were provided for better engagement by the UAE military with Emirati parents and the community.

Professional ethics and social responsibility: military work and peacebuilding

This paper investigates four questions related to ethical issues associated with the involvement of engineers and scientists in 'military work', including the influence of ethical values and beliefs, the role of gendered perspectives and moves beyond the purely technical. It fits strongly into a human (and planet)-centred systems perspective and extends my previous AI and Society papers on othering and narrative ethics, and ethics and social responsibility. It has two main contributions. The first involves an analysis of the literature through the application of different ethical theories and the application of gendered analysis to discussion of masculinities in engineering and the military. The second is a survey of scientists and engineers to investigate their opinions and experiences. The conclusions draw together the results of these two contributions to provide preliminary responses to the four questions and include a series of recommendations covering education and training, ethical approval of work not involving human participants or animals, the need for organisational support, approaches covering wider perspectives and the encouragement of individual ethical commitment.

SPIRITUALITY, ANCIENT TIMES AND PIONEER SKILL: PIONEER AWARENESS CREATION ON A FAMOUS RELIGIOUS SITE IN SRI LANKA

The pursuit of this paper1 is coordinated to talk about the "compelling" part of pioneer information in the desultory developments of one of the famous journey locales, Sri Pada in Sri Lanka. What I investigate here is the manner by which distinctive legitimate talks arise about Sri Pada from the diverse pilgrim skill, Portuguese 1505-1687 , Dutch 1687-1896 and British 1896-1948 . As we currently know, legitimate talk on the 'colonized' was to a great extent created through the specialists of the provincial governments, military work force, Christian preachers, philologists and chairmen. In such manner, Sri Pada was not outstanding. I'm mindful that these types of information creation change with changes in the acts of expansionism. In this regard, I examine what gets recognized and checked by pilgrim approved information as 'Adam's Peak'.

Professional mobility of the future officer: to the formulation of the development problem

In modern psychological and pedagogical studies, social and professional mobility is rarely correlated with the performance of military service duties. This circumstance is dictated by the ideas about the uniformity and legal «regulation» of military-service relations. The authors substantiate the need for the development of professional mobility, both on the vertical and on the horizontal layer, since the variety of duties performed by officers in the course of military work and the presence of various military positions to which he can be appointed, requires rapid adaptation to changing conditions of the social environment. The novelty of the research is that: the scientific results of the analysis of the structure of professional mobility of future officers are presented; the concept of «professional mobility of the future officer» is concretized based on the features of solving professional tasks by officers in the military; the conditions and means of developing the professional mobility of future officers are established and proposed.

A Retrospective Study of Demographic, Medical, and Psychological Predictors of Readiness in Service Members With Mild Traumatic Brain Injury

ABSTRACT Introduction Given the significant number of service members who have incurred mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) over the past two decades, this study was completed to determine the relative contribution of demographic, TBI-related, and psychological factors that predict the readiness of service members with primarily mild TBI. Methods and Materials This retrospective study included 141 service members who were evaluated at an outpatient military TBI rehabilitation clinic. Information regarding demographics, TBI-related variables, and psychological factors was collected and entered into hierarchical multinomial logistic regressions to predict military work status. Demographic predictor variables included age, race, gender, rank, service branch; TBI-specific variables including time since injury and neuropsychological variables (i.e., Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-IV (WAIS-IV) Full Scale Intelligence Quotient (FSIQ) and Processing Speed Indices; California Verbal Learning Test-IV total recall t-score); and psychiatric variables including concomitant psychiatric diagnoses and Personality Assessment Inventory indices. The outcome variable was the service member’s military work status (i.e., return to duty (RTD); Medical Evaluation Board-disabled (MEB); retired) at time of discharge from the TBI clinic. Results Statistical analyses indicated that the total model predicted 31% of the variance in work status, with demographics predicting 16% of the variance, concomitant psychiatric diagnoses and WAIS-IV FSIQ predicting an additional 12%, and subjective somatic/psychological distress (Personality Assessment Inventory indices) predicting an additional 3%. Regarding the primary groups of interest (i.e., RTD vs. MEB), stepwise regressions indicated that those who RTD have higher intelligence and report less physical/psychological distress than the disabled group. Conclusions In general, those service members who were able to RTD versus those who were classified as disabled (MEB) were of higher IQ and reported less somatic/psychological distress. Of note, traditional indices of TBI severity did not predict the ability of the sample to RTD. The results suggest the importance of treating psychological conditions and identifying possible indicators of resilience (e.g., higher intelligence) to increase the readiness of service members with mild TBI.

Д. Лувсаншарав — бывший монах и партийный деятель

Introduction. In the 20th century, Mongolia witnessed the emergence of a number of party activists and statesmen whose formally differing life paths and careers largely resulted in essentially similar repressions experienced. Those included a group of party executives with monastic backgrounds and good command of foreign languages. And it is D. Luvsansharav who had spent twenty years in Mӧrӧn Monastery that attracts special attention. It is unknown what (and whether at all) he had studied at the monastic college ― a largest one in the country ― but his party comrades (and himself) considered him to be an expert in the Lamaist question. On graduation from the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (1928–1929), he begins a political career, the pinnacle of which being his work at the Lamaist Commission that primarily aimed to eradicate reactionist Lamaist elements (i.e., the whole of Buddhist clergy as such), and his participation in the Plenipotentiary Commission (a so called ‘troika’) that put to death hundreds and even thousands of citizens, destroyed some precious items of material and traditional culture. Goals. The paper seeks to reveal the ex-monk’s impact in party arrangements, interpret certain personal motives to have underlain the transformation. Materials. The work analyzes materials stored at the Central Archive of the Federal Security Service and contained in Mongolia in Documents of the Comintern (vols. 1, 2), other scholarly sources. Results. The Mongolian Revolution of 1921 uncovered the lack of competent personnel which lead to a search of ‘individuals suitable for administrative, economic, and military work’ not only among commoners but also monks and nobility, resulting in that the recruited executives differed both in skills and worldviews. The context proved favorable enough to D. Luvsansharav who ― according to archival notes ― was quite an ambiguous and contradictive figure. His party comrades and official secretaries of the Eastern Executive Committee of the Communist International characterized him as a definitely ambitious but short-tempered, awkward, and irresolute person in a supporting role. However, the ex-cleric became a leading party activist, and such a dramatic change in his life and career may have stemmed from religious underachievement, dissatisfaction with the position he had held in the large Mongolian monastery, or some psychological aspects. Still, the harsh and severe period of national history could actually give rise to changes in his ideological views and mentality (when personal benefits and career opportunities were viewed by some as priorities).

Metodologie integrate per la conoscenza, la tutela e la rappresentazione dell’architettura militare storica. Sistemi costruttivi e percorsi voltati lungo i bastioni occidentali di Cagliari (Sardegna, Italia)

Integrated methodologies for the knowledge, representation and protection of historical military architecture. Construction systems and vaulted paths along the western bastions of Cagliari (Sardinia, Italy)The integrated method is been applied in the meet point between the curtain of Santa Chiara and the curtain of de Cardona, in a limited area of the ancient walls of Cagliari (Sardinia, Italy). The sector consists of a bastion called “curtain of Santa Chiara” designed in 1575 and realized in the period 1575-1578 by the military engineer Giorgio Paleari and the “curtain of de Cardona”, a military work commissioned by the Viceroy in the 1930s of the same century and interested by modification until the seventeenth century. The archive documents offer a lot of informations on the presence of gunboats and vaulted passages designed and built in this area during this period. This source –accompanied by an architectural survey of the existing military work and the knowledge of the construction techniques used at the time and indicated in the military treaties– may direct a subsequent investigation with geophysical methods. To this aim, a first graphic representation of the study area in the sixteenth century is proposed.

Positioning Selves in Narrative Accounts of Military Trauma

Linguistic and narrative strategies employed in two dyadic interviews of male veterans of the war in Afghanistan were analysed and compared. Each interviewee told chains of connected stories that positioned them in relation to catastrophic events and their effects. These incidents were framed as being linked to decisions that the teller had taken in perilous circumstances. Sequences of generic clauses in sections of orientation were used to manage knowledge asymmetries, to establish story world norms, to display professional, soldierly and veteran identities and to present danger, serious injury, and death as normative in the context of military work in a conflict zone. Resolutions to narratives involving death or injury resided not in specific narrative event clauses but in sections of evaluation that framed the outcome of a preceding story chain in terms of its personal, current significance to the speaker. Our exploration of contrasting accounts of similarly catastrophic events by two storytellers, one of whom was diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder, offers insights into ways in which trauma is represented that could be useful in psychotherapeutic contexts.