Lev Tolstoy's remarks about the Karenin family and its tragic fate is a particularly appropriate analogy for the ethno-nationalist conflicts that have tom asunder Yugoslavia and to a greater-or-lesser degree threaten the rest of Central and Eastern Europe and the successor states of the former Soviet Union. Although throughout the Cold War, the abolition of the Warsaw Pact, and the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe such a danger of general war, with its horrendous nuclear consequences, has disappeared. Historians familiar with Yugoslavia's past have called attention to the fact that today's crises have much in common with earlier Balkan crises, stretching from the Congress of Vienna to the Cold War. As economic development proceeds life inevitably becomes more uniform, more standardized, but this sameness is nowhere less marked than in Yugoslavia. With fall of the Berlin Wall there has been accelerated change from bipolar to a multipolar world and an entirely new set of states has emerged.

This article details the development of Russia’s military strategy and how elements of that strategy may have been applied in Ukraine. It examines both traditional and contemporary elements of strategy, with a particular focus on the effect of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s competitive logic and the General Staff’s reliance on non-military methods of thought. With regard to the latter, General of the Army Valeriy Gerasimov, Chief of the Russian General Staff, noted that today, non-military measures in operations are used over military operations by a ratio of 4:1. Also examined is the concept of reflexive control, which may have been used as a propaganda method during the Ukraine intervention to exert an information-psychological influence on both Russia’s domestic and international audiences.

This article offers a straw man cyber curriculum designed to initiate discussion on how to educate cyber strategists in the US, stressing the recent advances in technology moving us to the next generation of wearables, drivables, flyables, and scannables. With everything becoming interconnected, there is a need to extend instruction from the instruments of national power associated with DIME (diplomatic, information, military, economic) to a more holistic paradigm when considering cyber issues. This requires developing cyber strategists based on new curriculum components to capitalize on comprehensive views and analytical thought instead of mnemonic devices. It calls on digital and national security experts to reconsider the underlying concepts that will serve as educational guides for cyber strategists as they progress into the next decade.

This article discusses new developments in Russia’s information and cyber warfare concepts. It updates information based on old paradigms and introduces several new developments that are influencing the current paradigm. It examines the potential shape of Russia’s cyber strategy and offers a prediction as to how they might ‘cyber cope’ in future conflict.

The August 2008 Russian-Georgia conflict was the first Russian full-scale use of force against a former member of the Soviet Union. This paper looks at the August conflict solely from the vantage point of the Russian press, in particular the views of military officers or military journalists. The findings offer insights into the information war conducted in the Russian press, the continued suspicion of Russia about US actions in the area, and the strengths and weaknesses of Russia's armed forces. Russia's rational for supporting South Ossetia, that “if Georgia can break away from the Soviet Union, why can't South Ossetia break away from Georgia?” indicates that this may not be the last development of its kind that Russia supports. The Crimea and Transdniester come immediately to mind.

New media allows previously passive consumers to tell and shape stories together. Yet most information is still disseminated in a top-down fashion, without taking advantage of the features enabled by new media. This paper presents five Alternate Reality Game (ARG) case studies which reveal common features and mechanisms used to attract and retain diverse players, to create task-focused communities and to solve problems collectively. Voluntary, collective problem solving is an intriguing phenomenon wherein disparate individuals work together asynchronously to solve problems together. ARGs also take advantage of the unique features of new media to craft stories that could not be told using other media.

The traditional task in information retrieval is to find documents from a large corpus that are relevant to a query. In this project, we address a related, but different task: answering tatistical questions about a corpus. The method is designed to address queries that cannot be answered in some simple statistical fashion. For example, in earlier work we analyzed textual medical records, asking the question: "What percentage of the patients are female?"[1] This question could not be answered easily because there was no gender field in the record format.

The ongoing conflict in Chechnya has enabled Russia's armed forces to become expert in insurgency tactics. Russian lessons learned include foreseeng and predicting chechen use of deception and ambush operations as well as improvised explosive devices. Russia's armed forces also had to learn Chechen movement and command and control procedures. These lessons learned are important and should be studied by US forces since Iraqi insurgent tactics bear a striking resemblance to many of these procedures.

Reflexive control is a subject that has been studied in the Soviet Union and Russia for nearly 40 years. The theory has both military and civilian uses. This article describes both the theory and practice of reflexive control, focusing on recent developments. The concept is close in meaning to the US concept of perception management.

A host of prominent military and civilian specialists critiqued the US led coalition war against Iraq. Their comments reflected a mixture of Cold War thinking on the one hand and a new place to update the Russian armed forces on the other. Those in the latter group demanded that Russian military reform linger no longer, and that lessons learned from what transpired in Iraq be incorporated into Russian threat assessments.

During the past five years China has developed an impressive telecommunications industry with the potential to become the world’s largest communications market. At the end of the year 2000, there were 22 million Internet users, while projections for the year 2005 estimate 130 million users. Optical fiber now joins the capitals of all of China’s provinces and its 1.3 billion people together, providing the integrating factor for such growth in users.

: This joint Russian-American research project, which analyzes the experience of US Russian cooperation in peace enforcement operations under IFOR in Bosnia-Herzegovina, is the first such research project conducted by representatives of military research organizations of the United States and the Russian Federation. The peace operation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, conducted by the IFOR multi-national forces under NATO leadership, is unique and can be assessed as a case study for the development of a model to resolve future armed conflicts. Taking into account the fact that there are no past or present analogues for the scale and significance of this operation, the experience of its preparation and conduct is broad and varied. The study and analysis of all aspects and elements of this operation have a broad significance for other peace operations. This makes the bilateral approach to evaluating the lessons learned and future prospects of such operations even more important. Let us hope that this is just the first such joint Russian-American project. By assessing the US-Russian experience in IFOR the Russian and American researchers have attempted to present the organization and conduct of IFOR through the eyes of those American and Russian officers who participated in the peace operation in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In a few short years these officers have gone from militarized confrontation in the heart of Europe to close cooperation in upholding the peace and security of Europe. Without that cooperation IFOR could not have succeeded, and this study would not have been possible. The publication of the results of this study should be of interest to a broad circle of military and civilian readers in the United States, Russia and many countries. These readers will find insights regarding the future conduct of peace operations and international security.

In cooperation with the American Physical Society, the Computer Research and Applications Group (CIC-3 -- see Section 13 for an acronym glossary) at Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed and deployed a journal archive system called, The Physical Review OnLine Archive (PROLA). It is intended to be a complete, full service on-line archive of the existing issues of the journal Physical Review from its inception to the advent of a full-service electronic version. The fundamental goals of PROLA are to provide screen-viewable and printable images of every article, full-text and fielded search capability, good browsing features, direct article retrieval tools, and hyperlinking to all references, errata, and comments. The research focus is on transitioning large volumes of paper journals to a modern electronic environment.

This paper describes a method for asking statistical questions about a large text corpus. We exemplify the method by addressing the question, "What percentage of Federal Register documents are real documents, of possible interest to a text researcher or analyst?" We estimate an answer to this question by evaluating 200 documents selected from a corpus of 45,820 Federal Register documents. Stratified sampling is used to reduce the sampling uncertainty of the estimate from over 3100 documents to fewer than 1000. The stratification is based on observed characteristics of real documents, while the sampling procedure incorporates a Bayesian version of Neyman allocation. A possible application of the method is to establish baseline statistics used to estimate recall rates for information retrieval systems.

: Finding similarities in the Russian and U.S. approaches to information operations (IO) is not a difficult task. Both countries specialists closely study electronic warfare and command and control systems of other countries, and both stress the importance of the use of computers and information management in the preparation and conduct of modern combat operations. This includes the use of information to conduct psychological operations (PSYOP). Upon closer examination, however, the Russian approach to the information warfare (IW) aspect of IO has several elements that makes it unique and different. There are three principal reasons for the distinct Russian method. First, there is the issue of overall context. The Russian state, economy, and society are in a transition period resulting in institutional and philosophical instability. Russian mass consciousness, according to many prominent scientists and government officials, is vulnerable to manipulation by slick marketing campaigns and to exploitation by promises of economic and social prosperity during this transition period. As a consequence the Russian specialists approach to information threats places strong emphasis on what it terms information-psychological processes as well as state laws to guarantee the information security of individuals and society. A second reason for a dissimilarity in emphasis is that traditional Russian military thinking developed differently than in the West due to geographical considerations, varied military threats, the economic realities imposed by a different ideological background, and the emphasis placed on the study of military affairs as a science. The Russian study of the impact of the use of information weapons on military art will differ in emphasis from the Western assessment due to this prism through which these operations are viewed and measured, a reflection of the military's traditional thought process.