Defensive Alliance Research Articles

Coalition Building, Cooperation, and Intelligence: The Case of Greece and Israel

Throughout history, building coalitions of sovereign states has been a delicate enterprise involving compromise based on common interests. In developing politico-economic and defense alliances, in ...

Power changes, alliance credibility, and extended deterrence

A primary motivation for forming military alliances is to deter adversaries. However, some alliances are more effective at deterrence than others. Deterrence theory suggests that an alliance may fail to deter if the commitment is not considered credible by adversaries. Building on alliance reliability research, we contend that alliances whose members have experienced significant changes in power since formation are vulnerable to violation. Moreover, we argue that these changes are observable to adversaries, making them more likely to target the alliance. We test this argument using a sample of countries with membership in defensive alliances between 1816 and 2000. Our results indicate that states whose allies have experienced significant changes in power are more likely to be the target of militarized disputes than states whose allies have not experienced significant changes in power. These findings connect alliance reliability research to deterrence theory, illustrating the need to take into account changes over time in understanding the deterrence potential of military alliances. Our findings also suggest that future research should take these processes into account in studying dispute escalation and intra-alliance relations.

On the defensive alliances in graph

‎Let $ G = (V,E) $ be a graph‎. ‎We say that $ S subseteq V $ is a defensive alliance if for every $ u in S $‎, ‎the number of neighbors $ u $ has in $ S $ plus one (counting $ u $) is at least as large as the number of neighbors it has outside $ S $‎. ‎Then‎, ‎for every vertex $ u $ in a defensive alliance $ S $‎, ‎any attack on a single vertex by the neighbors of $ u $ in $ V-S $ can be thwarted by the neighbors of $ u $ in $ S $ and $ u $ itself‎. ‎In this paper‎, ‎we study alliances that are containing a given vertex $ u $ and study their mathematical properties‎.

International reputation and alliance portfolios: How unreliability affects the structure and composition of alliance treaties

Why do states ever form military alliances with unreliable partners? States sign offensive and defensive military alliances to increase their fighting capabilities in the event of war and as a signal to deter potential aggressors from initiating a crisis. Yet, signing an alliance with an unreliable partner is at odds with both of these rationales. This should be particularly concerning for peace scholars and policymakers, since the uncertainty generated by unreliable partners may increase system-wide conflict. This article provides an answer to this puzzle by arguing that states continue to form alliances with unreliable partners because they can adopt rational portfolio-diversification strategies. Drawing on well-developed models from portfolio theory, we present evidence that states design their overall alliance portfolios to minimize the risks posed by allies with a reputation for being unreliable. Specifically, we show that unreliable allies are more likely to be pooled into multilateral alliances that dilute risk rather than bilateral alliances, and that states allied with unreliable partners form a greater number of alliances to hedge against the added risk of default. Together, our results demonstrate why unreliable partners may not lead to increased conflict initiation, while also providing a novel explanation for previously unexplained variation in the structure of alliance portfolios. The article contributes to the literatures on international reputation and the rational design of international institutions by demonstrating how international reputation matters in subtle and often overlooked ways.

Republic of Moldova in the Context of Regional Security Challenges in Eastern Europe

This article analyzes the most current security issues for the Republic of Moldova that are part of the regional security context of Eastern Europe –the region that can be considered the epicenter of international tensions through which the„geopolitical line of fracture”passes. The geographical position of the Republic of Moldova makes this state particularly sensitive to any negative trends in theregion. Growing of international tensions creates security threats and complicates economic development. From a historical point of view, Moldova has repeatedly fallen victim by the confrontation of the great powers. Therefore, the Republic of Moldova has a vital interest in preventing a new conflict in Eastern Europe.
 This article is based on a number of assumptions made by changes in the European security environment, such as the „shift of weight” to the East, strategic uncertainty, increasing the role of non-state actors, the situation in eastern Ukraine, etc.
 Based on these assumptions, this article makes an attempt to outline the potential role of the Republic of Moldova in the Eastern European security system, taking into account the desideratum for integration of the republic into the European Union. Other relevant factors will be taken into account for shaping the role of the Republic of Moldova in the European security system, namely: the security deficit; the impact of NATO and EU security policy; the rebirth of the project to create a regional defense alliance, etc. This article will largely take into account the military aspects of security.
 Keywords: Republic of Moldova, national security, Eastern Europe, NATO, Intermarium, defence, threats, risks, challenges

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN COMMAND, MANAGEMENT, AND COMMUNICATIONS. TO CONTINUE IN DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS OR TO REMAIN IN SAME FIELD

Management and Command253 are two different words and terms, but military structures use them as synonyms. Military commanders’ authorities are almost equal in meaning to civilian managers’ privileges and power. Comparison between military command and the civilian management system structure, organization, and way of work shows almost full identity and overlapping. The highest in scale and size military systems are national ministries of defense and multinational military alliances and coalitions. Military systems at this level combine military command structures with civilian political leadership and support elements. Therefore, they incorporate both military command and civilian management organizations without any complications, because their nature originated from same source and have similar framework and content. Management of organizations requires communication in order to plan, coordinate, lead, control, and conduct all routine or extraordinary activities. Immediate long-distance communications originated from telegraphy, which was firstly applied in 19th century. Later, long-distance communications included telephony, aerial transmitting, satellite, and last but not least internet data exchange. They allowed immediate exchange of letters, voice and images, bringing to new capabilities of the managers. Their sophisticated technical base brought to new area of the military command and civilian management structures. These area covered technical and operational parts of communications, and created engineer sub-field of science, that has become one of the most popular educations, worldwide. Communications were excluded from the military command and moved to separate field, named Computers and Communications. A historic overview and analysis of the command and management structures and requirements shows their relationships, common origin, and mission. They have significant differences: management and control are based on humanities, natural and social sciences, while communications are mainly based on engineering and technology. These differences do not create enough conditions for defragmentation of communications from the management structures. They exist together in symbiosis and management structures need communications in order to exist and multiply their effectiveness and efficiency. Future defragmentation between military command and communications will bring risks of worse coordination, need for more human resources, and worse end states. These risks are extremely negative for nations and should be avoided by wide appliance of the education and science among nowadays and future leaders, managers, and commanders.

Entropy Inflection and Invisible Low-Energy States: Defensive Alliance Example.

Lower temperature leads to a higher probability of visiting low-energy states. This intuitive belief underlies most physics-inspired strategies for addressing hard optimization problems. For instance, the popular simulated annealing (SA) dynamics is expected to approach a ground state if the temperature is lowered appropriately. Here, we demonstrate that this belief is not always justified. Specifically, we employ the cavity method to analyze the minimum strong defensive alliance problem and discover a bifurcation in the solution space, induced by an inflection point in the entropy-energy profile. While easily accessible configurations are associated with the lower-free-energy branch, the low-energy configurations are associated with the higher-free-energy branch within the same temperature range. There is a discontinuous phase transition between the high-energy configurations and the ground states, which generally cannot be followed by SA. We introduce an energy-clamping strategy to obtain superior solutions by following the higher-free-energy branch, overcoming the limitations of SA.

Defensive alliances in graphs of bounded treewidth

The Defensive Alliance problem has been studied extensively during the last fifteen years, but the question whether it is FPT when parameterized by treewidth has still remained open. We show that this problem is W[1]-hard. This puts it among the few problems that are FPT when parameterized by solution size but not when parameterized by treewidth (unless FPT=W[1]).

Global edge alliances in graphs

In the paper we introduce and study a new problem of finding a minimum global edge alliance in a graph which is related to the global defensive alliance (Haynes et al., 2013; Hedetniemi, 2004) and the global defensive set (Lewoń et al., 2016). We proved the NP-completeness of the global edge alliance problem for subcubic graphs and we constructed polynomial time algorithms for trees. We found the exact values of the size of the minimum global edge alliance for certain classes: paths, cycles, wheels, complete k-partite graphs and complete k-ary trees. Moreover, we proved some lower bounds for arbitrary graphs.

An Interview with Maria Vello: Chief Executive Officer of the Cyber Defence Alliance (CDA)

Maria Vello, CISSP, an international cybersecurity expert, is Chief Executive Officer of the Cyber Defence Alliance (CDA) located in London. The organization is a cyber-defense and anti-fraud group...

US-Japan Defense Alliance in the Production of Next-generation Fighter-jets in Japan

US-Japan Defense Alliance in the Production of Next-generation Fighter-jets in Japan

W poszukiwaniu sojuszników. Polskie próby zbliżenia z państwami Europy Środkowej i Północnej (1921−1939)

Located between Germany and the Soviet Union in the interwar period, Poland concluded defensive alliances with France and Romania in 1921. Simultaneously, Warsaw tried to create room for cooperation with other, smaller states in central and northern Europe. In the first case, close cooperation with the so-called Little Entente, formed by Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia, was successfully blocked by Prague, which regarded its interests as different from the Polish ones.  Rapprochement between Poland, the Baltic States and Finland, though initiated in the early 1920s, was doomed to failure because of the disagreement between Poland and Lithuania over the Vilnius region. Furthermore, Józef Beck’s idea of creating a bloc of neutral states situated between Germany and the Soviet Union was turned down by the Scandinavians, who wanted to avoid a possible war.

China-Pakistan relations: a historical analysis

The relationship between China and Pakistan has been marked by ‘durability’. This is despite differing political systems and cultures, the significant changes both countries have undergone and shifting geopolitical and economic interests. Most studies approach China–Pakistan relations with a geostrategic outlook focused on India. However, Ghulam Ali explains that the ‘Indo-Pakistan rivalry remains constant, but the nature of China's relationship with India has transformed from what it was in the early 1960s’ as it now includes extensive economic ties and trade (p. 3). Given this shift, geopolitics alone does not fully account for China and Pakistan's expanding cooperation in diverse areas, such as defence and trade. Ali describes how the Sino-Pakistan relationship developed, partly out of antagonism towards India, but also for shared benefits in defence, economics, nuclear matters and broader diplomatic alliances. The first half of the book examines the period between the end of the Second World War and the end of the Cold War. During the ‘formative’ years from 1950 to 1962, there were limited relations due to a lack of enthusiasm for expanding the partnership and the countries' membership in opposing security alliances, with Pakistan supporting the United States. Following the lowest point in relations in 1959, Ali argues that ‘three sets of bilateral relationships were restructured, pushing Pakistan and China closer’, meaning changes in ‘Sino-Indian, Sino-Soviet, and US-Pakistan ties’ (p. 33). After the Sino-Indian War of 1962, the China–Pakistan relationship was strengthened, with China using Pakistan to widen its diplomatic connections, block Indian ambitions in the region and counter Soviet and US influence. Pakistan, in turn, obtained trade, loans, support for Kashmir and a possible substitute for relations with the United States. Ali explains the role Pakistan played in China establishing diplomatic ties with Iran and the United States, as well as China's support for Pakistan during its wars with India in 1965 and 1971. Highlighting the maturing of the relationship towards the end of the 1970s, Ali states that ‘its continuity was not affected by the far-reaching changes of leadership in the two countries which serves as a testament to its deep roots’ (p. 88).

Aspects of upper defensive alliances

A defensive alliance in a graph G=(V,E) is a set of vertices S satisfying the condition that every vertex v∈S has at least as many neighbors (including itself) in S than it has in V∖S. We also consider strong defensive alliances where the vertex itself is not considered in the inequality. We consider two notions of minimality in this paper, local and global minimality and we are interested in minimal (strong) defensive alliances of maximum size. We also look at connected versions of these alliances. We show that these problems are NP-hard.

Defence planning and alliances: Portugal in the early years of the Cold War (1945–59)

Abstract This article looks at how Portuguese defence planning was executed in the years 1945–59, and seeks to assess to what extent this same planning was subject to constraints derived from the alliances established by the Portuguese government. During this period, Portugal was faced with internal and external issues of difficult resolution. Internationally, its interests and its obligations were focused on the Atlantic powers, the ones who had the necessary means and organization to counter the Soviet threat. At home, the Portuguese authorities considered that Portugal was first of all part of the Iberian peninsula and, as such, made common cause for its military defence with its turbulent and, at that time, less respectable Spanish neighbour.

Evolutionary stability of antibiotic protection in a defensive symbiosis

The increasing resistance of human pathogens severely limits the efficacy of antibiotics in medicine, yet many animals, including solitary beewolf wasps, successfully engage in defensive alliances with antibiotic-producing bacteria for millions of years. Here, we report on the in situ production of 49 derivatives belonging to three antibiotic compound classes (45 piericidin derivatives, 3 streptochlorin derivatives, and nigericin) by the symbionts of 25 beewolf host species and subspecies, spanning 68 million years of evolution. Despite a high degree of qualitative stability in the antibiotic mixture, we found consistent quantitative differences between species and across geographic localities, presumably reflecting adaptations to combat local pathogen communities. Antimicrobial bioassays with the three main components and in silico predictions based on the structure and specificity in polyketide synthase domains of the piericidin biosynthesis gene cluster yield insights into the mechanistic basis and ecoevolutionary implications of producing a complex mixture of antimicrobial compounds in a natural setting.

At Opposite Poles: Canada’s and Norway’s approaches to security in the Arctic

Canada and Norway are similar in many ways. They share a strong commitment to international law and humanitarian issues, consistently rank amongst the most developed countries in the world, and have aligned themselves with the United States on security matters. They are also two of the five Arctic coastal states that have most actively engaged in northern issues over the last decade. Yet, on the issue of security in the Arctic, their interests have historically differed. This difference came to the fore during the governments of Stephen Harper (2006–2015) and Jens Stoltenberg (2005–2013). This article compares the divergent approaches to security and national defence in Canada and Norway under the Harper and Stoltenberg governments. It asks what role traditional military concerns in the circumpolar region had for the two countries during the period, and how threat perceptions in Ottawa and Oslo shaped their respective Arctic policies. We argue that, to understand the contrasting approaches to Arctic security, two factors are key: (1) the inherent difference in the two countries’ approach to, and utilisation of, NATO as a defence alliance; and (2) a clear difference in the role the Arctic holds for security considerations in the two countries given their disparate geographic locations. Ultimately, we make the case that to understand the different approaches adopted by Canada and Norway during the period examined, the Arctic needs to be understood not as one uniform region, but instead as a series of sub-regions where the dominant security variable – Russia – is present to a greater or lesser degree.

The Great War and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia the legacy of an enduring conflict

The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, officially named Yugoslavia after 1929, came into being on the ruins of the Habsburg Empire in 1918 after the immense war efforts and sacrifices endured by Serbia. The experience of anti-Habsburg struggle both before and after 1914 and the memory of some of the most difficult moments in the Great War left a deep imprint on the minds of policy-makers in Belgrade. As they believed that many dangers faced in the war were likely to be revived in the future, the impact of these experiences was instrumental to their post-war foreign policy and military planning. This paper looks at the specific ways in which the legacy of the Great War affected and shaped the (planned) responses of the Yugoslav government to certain crises and challenges posed to Yugoslavia and the newly-established order in the region. These concern the reaction to the two attempts of Habsburg restoration in Hungary in 1921, the importance of the Greek port of Salonica (Thessaloniki) for Yugoslavia?s strategic and defence requirements, and military planning within the framework of the Little Entente (the defensive alliance between Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Romania) in the early 1930s. In addition, it is ar?gued here that the legacy of Serbo-Croat differences during the war relating to the manner of their unification was apparent in the political struggle between Serbs and Croats during the two decades of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia?s existence.

Countries as Agents in a Global-Scale Computational Model

Our agent-based model examines the ramifications of formal defense agreements between countries. Our model builds on previous work and creates an empirically based version of a tribute model in which actors within existing real-world networks demand tribute from one another. If the threatened actor does not pay the tribute, the aggressing actor will engage in a decision to start a war. Tribute and war payments are based on a measure of the country's wealth. We utilize the Correlates of War dataset to provide us with worldwide historical defense alliance information. Using these networks as our initial conditions, we run the model forward from four prominent historical years and simulate the interactions that take place as well as the changes in overall wealth. Agents in the model employ a cost benefit analysis in their decision of whether or not to go to war. This model provides results that are in qualitative agreement with historical emergent macro outcomes seen over time.

A QUARTER CENTURY OF NATO-RUSSIA RELATIONS

: After the end of the Cold War, in the new international context, two important actors emerged on the international scene, namely NATO and the Russian Federation. The cooperation between them was a necessity to ensure and strengthen a climate of security and peace in Europe and all over the world. In the new challenges of the security environment, NATO was turned from a purely defensive military alliance for Europe into a political and military alliance that can act wherever needed around the globe. The Russian Federation, the successor of the former USSR and inheritor of its military arsenal, has initiated a transition process towards democracy and market economy. Russia has acted permanently to establish a special relationship with the Alliance, different from that with the other Central and Eastern European countries. The relations NATO-Russia followed a continuous development from 1991 to 2008, with periods of crisis, but hopes of establishing a productive partnership. Then, they went into decline, and in April 2014 they were suspended. The Alliance and Russia have different views on European and global security issues. After 25 years of NATO-Russia relations, this paper aims to point out the main aspects of the stages from 1991 until now and analyze the reasons why the collaboration is not yet productive and cooperative, as shown by recent events.