China's 2025 Military Parade is the first time in which China has publicly revealed a ballistic missile defence system capable of midcourse interception and challenges China's traditional opposition toward national missile defence systems. Using Chinese writings, we argue that China's ballistic missile defence systems are driven by the need to deter nuclear blackmail, protect leadership and essential point targets, and to support far seas protection concepts. This analysis traces China's ballistic missile defence ambitions to the creation of strategic early warning systems and demonstrates how increased nuclear and conventional ballistic missile threat perceptions have shaped China's ballistic missile defence posture.
The largest military contribution made by Germany to a United Nations mission to date was the deployment of more than 1,700 troops to the United Nations Operation in Somalia II. In prevailing historical narratives, the deployment is interpreted as being part of a long-term strategy by the German government to gradually familiarize the German public with military deployments abroad. However, new archival documents reveal that the German decision to deploy troops to Somalia was not guided by a coherent, government-driven grand strategy. Neither the provision of logistic support nor the final deployment area had been envisaged by the German decision-makers.
How do foreign states exercise control over armed groups? State support to non-state actors is never a risk-free strategy. The provision of support to armed groups abroad may backfire as proxies can divert resources, refuse to adhere to demands, or even turn against the state sponsor. To ensure compliance and mitigate the inherent risks involved in conflict delegation, we argue that states make use of 10 distinct control mechanisms when outsourcing violence to non-state armed groups: selection, programming, inducements, promises, threats, rewards, sanctions, checks and balances, reporting, and monitoring. In this article, we outline the logic underpinning each mechanism and illustrate how foreign state sponsors around the globe have employed them. In essence, we contend that state support to armed groups is much more formalized, structured, and regulated than what is assumed.
By 1991, the USSR, one of the two Cold War nuclear superpowers, ceased to exist. Yet the resulting post-Cold War era did not fully reflect these tectonic shifts. The collapse of a nuclear state did not lead to nuclear proliferation to its successor states. Russia emerged as USSR's only nuclear successor, preserved strategic parity with the United States, and took over Soviet international statuses under the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and in the UN Security Council. Why did such a major shift in geopolitical power result in such modest realignment in the international order? The article argues that part of the answer is in the existence of nuclear weapons and their continued preeminent role in the international system. Drawing on extensive archival research, the article looks at how the core institutions of the global nuclear order - the nuclear nonproliferation regime and the U.S.-Soviet arms control architecture - shaped the post-Cold War settlement in salient ways. The parameters of the global nuclear order, its terms, categories, and norms delineated the range of plausible and legitimate options, with which all Soviet nuclear inheritors had to contend and which also shaped U.S. policy response to the Soviet nuclear collapse.
Coercion is a key strategy for states seeking to enhance their security, and military assistance is increasingly highlighted by states as a tool of coercion. The literature on three-party coercion is, however, still underdeveloped. This article introduces the strategic logic of coercion by military assistance. It also highlights 'two-level coercion', where the coercer can use military assistance for both general and immediate coercion simultaneously. This has implications for how we understand the outcome of coercion as well as the role of ongoing conflicts for strategies of coercion.
Public intelligence disclosure has become an increasingly prevalent instrument of foreign policymaking, yet its effectiveness as a tool of coercion remains poorly understood. An analysis of Israel's campaign against German scientists' involvement in Egypt's missile program in the early 1960s demonstrates the risks and unpredictability of this practice: campaigns may underachieve intended objectives, trigger effects that exceed or diverge from initial aims, or backfire by imposing political or diplomatic costs on the disclosing state. The central implication is that intelligence-based public campaigns require not only operational risk assessments, but also ex ante consideration of broader political and strategic consequences.
The battlespace expanded inside the human mind, yet no one agrees what that means. This bibliometric analysis of 289 publications (1981-2025) exposes a paradox: exponential post-2020 growth masks conceptual fragmentation and a geographic asymmetry. Using PRISMA-aligned analysis, the study reveals Western and NATO dominance across technological, psychological, and doctrinal clusters - while Russian and Chinese conceptions remain systematically underrepresented. Interpreted through Clausewitzian and Schelling frameworks, the study argues that cognition constitutes a new grammar of strategy, shifting competition from infrastructure to interpretation. The analysis positions knowledge itself as strategic terrain, bridging empirical mapping and strategic theory.
This article assesses the institutional limits of multilateral defence coordination by comparing the Warsaw Pact with NATO and the EU across capability planning, industrial policy and regional investment. Treating the Warsaw Pact as an upper-bound case of enforced integration, it contrasts its coercive, hierarchical mechanisms with the consensus-based frameworks used in NATO and the EU. The analysis shows that although coercion can raise baseline cooperation, it cannot overcome enduring asymmetries of political economy, national preferences and geography that also constrain NATO and the EU. The article concludes that institutional design cannot offset divergent interests, economies and strategic geographies.
China's expanding long-range airpower has exposed a strategic bomber deficit in India's force structure. This article interrogates whether restoring a dedicated bomber arm would strengthen India's deterrence and power-projection posture. By mapping threat contingencies - from the Tibetan Plateau to maritime interdiction in the Indian Ocean - it analyzes the unique operational attributes of bombers against multirole fighters, ground-based missiles, and UCAVs. The study argues that a bomber's payload economy and signaling utility offer strategic advantages unmatched by other platforms. Consequently, it proposes a phased, hybrid acquisition model to bridge the capability gap without prohibitive opportunity costs.
The study of military effectiveness has profound implications for understanding state power, security dynamics, and international relations, yet analytical frameworks for assessing military capability often reflect epistemological assumptions that shape how non-Western forces are evaluated. This research examines how competing analytical traditions-neo-Orientalist culturalism and institutional instrumentalism-construct knowledge about Gulf military effectiveness. While military outcomes are objectively measurable, the interpretative frameworks through which scholars explain these outcomes and prescribe organizational arrangements remain epistemologically situated. Cultural determinist approaches systematically attribute Arab military underperformance to supposedly immutable cultural characteristics, exemplifying Said's critique of Orientalist knowledge production. Institutional approaches aligned with Cannadine's Ornamentalism offer superior analytical leverage by identifying how specific policy choices - coup-proofing, patronage networks, procurement decisions - shape military outcomes. However, even these analyses operate within Western-centric assumptions about what military institutions should optimize for and what constitutes rational organizational design. Evidence from recent Gulf military operations challenges culturalist narratives and reveals how alternative institutional arrangements may be systematically misinterpreted when evaluated through Western-derived frameworks. These findings demonstrate how embedded epistemic assumptions distort Western assessments of Gulf military forces, suggesting that effective military organization may legitimately diverge from Western templates while serving rational political functions within specific contexts.
This paper examines the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN) as an advanced practitioner of asymmetric naval warfare. The IRGCN employs layered offensive and defensive strategies using small fast-attack craft, swarm tactics, missiles, and coastal A2/AD systems to exploit the geography of the Strait of Hormuz. Emphasizing simplicity, cost-effectiveness, and adaptability, the IRGCN challenges superior conventional navies. Through deception, proxy forces such as the Houthis and Hezbollah, and expansion into the Red Sea and Eastern Mediterranean, Iran extends maritime influence and complicates Western naval responses despite its material inferiority.
This article examines contemporary Russian thinking on strategic stability and deterrence, focusing on the strategic culture shaping Russia debates and military strategy. Drawing on original Russian-language writing, including primary sources and military publications, it explores how Russian elites interpret the evolving international security environment, the role of nuclear and non-nuclear deterrence, and the implications of technological change. The analysis highlights the influence of strategic culture on evolving doctrinal development and operational planning, examining the structural and situational factors determining a shift towards ambiguity, risk-taking, and coercive signalling. The article concludes by assessing the implications for Western deterrence strategies.
This article delves into the attempt made in the early 1990s to activate the dormant Article 43 of the UN Charter, aiming to establish a standing military force at the disposal of the Security Council. Utilising recently declassified documents from US archives, the paper illustrates the US stance during this endeavour, revealing a paradoxical pattern: although seemingly supportive of the UN during the 1991 Gulf War, the US consistently opposed bolstering the organisation's military capacities. This resistance reflected a persistent aversion to embracing an international security framework, ultimately undermining the prospect of a more influential UN role in the post-Cold War era.
Covert cyber operations are central to state competition, yet scholars disagree whether they are intelligence contests or tools of strategic competition. I develop an Intelligence-Driven Strategic Competition (IDSC) framework that treats cyber conflict as an intelligence contest in which some campaigns are organized to generate cumulative, strategically meaningful costs. Through case analysis of multiple state-sponsored cyber campaigns, I show how intelligence practices fuse with strategic aims and why their cumulative impact varies. The framework bridges existing literatures, with important implications for deterrence, persistent engagement practices and cyber resilience.
