ABSTRACT 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.

ABSTRACT 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.

ABSTRACT 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.

ABSTRACT 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.

ABSTRACT Deterrence is effective only insofar as it is not excessive or misdirected and thus perceived as provocative. This article brings together insights from deterrence theory, studies of Russian strategic culture, lexicology, and historical examples revealing what the author terms Russian provocationism. Regarding great power status as a sacred value, leading chekists – the keepers of Russian strategic culture – have a propensity to see provocations everywhere. The author argues that Western deterrence of Russia must be culturally tailored and therefore take into account the Russian historically and culturally conditioned hypersensitivity to provocations, especially against its great power status.

ABSTRACT Do civilians defer to military preferences about U.S. cyber strategy? The civil-military relations literature has only cursorily addressed this question. This article aims to fill this gap. I argue that three factors affect the prospects of civilian deference: secrecy, the relative bureaucratic power of U.S. Cyber Command, and the influence of civilian industry. Taken together, these factors make civilians less likely to excessively defer to the military. I examine more than a decade of strategy, doctrine, and public discourse among U.S. civilian and military leaders about military cyber power, and find limited evidence of excessive civilian deference.

ABSTRACT Against the backdrop of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Sweden and Finland have become members of NATO, marking the most substantive transformation of the strategic landscape in Northern Europe since the end of the Cold War. Using newly declassified materials from NATO’s archives in Brussels, this article analyses the evolution of the alliance’s Cold War descriptions of Scandinavia to inform the ongoing debate on the region’s role in NATO’s present military strategy. It traces Scandinavia’s military-strategic position through three phases of the Cold War, highlighting the region’s multiple roles in the Alliance’s strategy for deterrence and warfighting against the Soviet Union. The analysis demonstrates how Scandinavia grew in significance as technological advancements altered the perception of depth and range on the battlefield. In particular, the advent of long-range missiles tied Scandinavia’s military fate with Continental Europe and, eventually, with the United States. The article concludes by examining what this historical legacy may imply for the future of NATO’s Northern region.

ABSTRACT Throughout the Cold War, both NATO policymakers and the general public expressed a fear of a surprise Soviet attack, shaping their military stance, funding, and procurements in Europe to counter this eventuality. However, the type of war the Soviet Armed Forces planned to wage with the West was of a vastly different character than often feared. The concept of undertaking a strategic surprise attack in Europe was completely alien to Soviet theory, which rather conceptualized war as an extended affair requiring an extended mobilization process in a war which would be fought with total, rather than limited, objectives.

ABSTRACT Why were US tactical nuclear weapons, 280 mm cannons and Honest John rockets, introduced into Korea in January 1958? The choice of these weapons could be attributed to Washington’s evolving nuclear weapons employment strategy, the Eisenhower administration’s budget-saving policy, the US Army’s transformation into a nuclear-capable force and exigencies in Korea. The timing of their deployment was influenced by two factors: first was the State-Defense differences on the merits of introducing these weapons and second, the disagreement between Washington and Seoul over the scope of ROK troop reduction.