Future Defense Research Articles

Organizing for future war and warfare: Complexity as ‘folk theory’ in NATO policy

Geopolitical and societal changes are increasingly narrated using the concept of complexity. In a range of policy contexts, from climate to finance and peacekeeping to defence and security, complexity is often prominent. This article explores the contemporary expressions of complexity in defence and security scholarship and policy. To understand the expressions of complexity, we view it as a ‘folk theory’ – what others have called a category of practice. We illustrate how this folk theory has gained prominence in NATO policy regarding the organizing of future war and warfare as one example of a policy context in which expressions of complexity are produced and promoted. Specifically, we examine NATO’s future warfighting concept – multi-domain operations – and explore how the concept offers a way and a new language to make sense of an uncertain future and make it governable from the present. We discuss some consequences of a ‘folk theory’ becoming the explanation rather than one of many explanations of the future defence and security landscape. As a representative of folk theory, complexity offers a strong performative master narrative for a variety of orientations, yet one whose practical relevance for the organization of security can be questioned.

Immune Response to Respiratory Viral Infections.

The respiratory system is constantly exposed to viral infections that are responsible for mild to severe diseases. In this narrative review, we focalized the attention on respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), influenza virus, and severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections, responsible for high morbidity and mortality in the last decades. We reviewed the human innate and adaptive immune responses in the airways following infection, focusing on a particular population: newborns and pregnant women. The recent Coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has highlighted how our interest in viral pathologies must not decrease. Furthermore, we must increase our knowledge of infection mechanisms to improve our future defense strategies.

An access to innovation program to enhance the technological capabilities of the armed forces

As part of “Strong, Secure, Engaged: Canada’s Defence Policy” (Department of National Defence (2017) Strong, Secure, Engaged) released in 2017, the Canadian Department of National Defence (DND) announced the creation and implementation of an access to innovation program to be called the “Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security (IDEaS)” Program. The IDEaS Program was introduced to support, increase, and sustain science and technology (S&T) community capacity external to DND that can generate new ideas and formulate solutions to Canada’s current and future defence and security innovation challenges. This paper will explore the design of this new business model through the delivery of the first proof of concept to have gone through the whole IDEaS cycle, in order to showcase the validity of this concept and processes. It also demonstrates that IDEaS has allowed a closer relationship with innovators and firms that had never worked with the defence industry, as well as the identification of novel solutions to a host ofproblems/challenges facing defence and security.

Strategic Defence Analysis and Setting the Future Defence Strategy: A Comparison of the Czech Republic and Norway

The article brings a comparison of the approaches to the strategic defence analysis (SDA) and developing future Defence Concepts (DFDC) of the Czech Republic and Norway. The countries are in a different geopolitical situation, NOR being a country with borders that are part of the outer border of the Alliance, the Czech Republic being a country surrounded by three member countries of the Alliance and one PfP country. On the basis of the comparison of the two approaches, the authors identified differences and common points of the two. Based on the findings, the discussion provides inspiration for possible enhancements in the approach of the Czech Republic to SDA to ensure the future defence of the country. All that in context of current Security developments in Europe, that have an impact on how NATO member countries might deal with Article 3 and Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.

The Economic Benefits of North Warning System Modernization

ABSTRACT This study examines the economic impacts of the North Warning System (NWS) modernization. It begins by first providing a summary of the creation and evolution of the North American Aerospace and Defense Command (NORAD) and the NWS with a specific intention of setting the stage for the discussion on subsequent areas. Understanding how NORAD and the NWS developed to where it is today is important to understand the choices available to the Canadian government moving forward. Next, the current security environment in Canada’s North will be reviewed. The impact of climate change and global warming, new technology, and new threats changes the strategic environment in the North and Canada needs to revisit how it approaches these challenges. Based on this review of the security environment, the literature on socioeconomic studies, electoral districts and defence spending in the North can be presented along with the empirical data that exists from past studies. The study looks at five scenarios taking a rough order of magnitude look at possible economic benefits to Canada’s three northern territories and Labrador based on the requirement for modernizing the NWS, a critical issue for the future defence of Canada and North America.

The British Royals in Australia

The British Royals in Australia

An Analysis of the Determinants of Government-Funded Defense Companies using a Decision Tree

This study attempted to analyze the factors that influence the participation of beneficiary companies in the government’s defense industry promotion support project. To this end, experimental data were analyzed by constructing a prediction model consisting of highly important variables in beneficiary company decisions among various company information using the decision tree model, one of the data mining techniques. In addition, various rules were derived to determine the beneficiary companies of the government’s support project using the analysis results expressed as decision trees. Three policy measures were presented based on the important rules that repeatedly appear in different predictive models to increase the effect of the government’s industrial development. Using the analysis methods presented in this study and the determinants of the beneficiary companies of the government support project will help create a sustainable future defense industry growth environment.

Light Attack: A Physical World Real-Time Attack Against Object Classifiers

It is well known that deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial examples. In the digital world, most of the existing work makes classifiers or detectors fail by adding perturbations that are imperceptible to humans. In the physical world, existing work mostly invalidates classifiers or detectors by adding large unrealistic perturbations. In this paper, we attack the target classifiers from a new perspective of light attack. First, we define three lighting modes (Line, Point, Area), then we control the wavelength, intensity and position of light to accomplish adversarial attack, and finally we conduct ablation experiments and compare our method with existing mainstream methods. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed method is effective in both digital and physical worlds, and in darker environments, our attack method is much better than existing ones. Light attack enriches the current family of the adversarial attack while paving the way for future defense against light attacks as well as the study of light attack laws in nature.

Conventional and Hybrid Actions in the Russia's Invasion of Ukraine

The paper aims to analytically present the existing data and information regarding notable aspects of the ongoing war in Ukraine, notably through lessons identified in the political-military field, both conventionally and hybrid. The article hypothesis starts from the consideration that even the war is not over, there are some lessons identified that should be considered for the future security of Europe and the international environment. The author uses the analytical method of research to explain the cause-effect relationship between the war itself and its future influence for the European security and world order, going down to European nations living at the edge of this conflict. It will also theoretically test those implications to determine whether they fit the specified hypothesis. The conflict itself has deepened the international consequences of almost two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. It magnified the disastrous security situation not only in Europe, but all around the world, by creating additional energy (gas) and food (cereal) crises. Therefore, the Russian – Ukrainian War has significantly modified regional and international security environment and there are tendencies to challenge the current World order. What happened in Ukraine in the past year has and will continue to have direct implications for the European and Euro-Atlantic security, going down to European nations living at the edge of this conflict. Therefore, this paper is significant for advising the political-military decision-makers on better understanding the modern operational environment and addapting future defence capabilities to face 21st Century Warfare. <b></b>

6G 이동통신 연구개발 동향분석 및 발전방안 연구 -미래 국방사업 적용방안-

6G 이동통신 연구개발 동향분석 및 발전방안 연구 -미래 국방사업 적용방안-

Analysis of future defense policy priorities with AHP

Future defense systems cannot maintain the large-scale military force they currently have owing to population decline. Accordingly, the paradigm of military force construction and operation must change from being quantity-to quality-oriented. These changes render the effects of existing defense policies ineffective and highlight that the policies need to be updated. This study analyzes the preferred defense policy in the future defense environment using AHP. This is because efficient allocation and utilization of limited resources and rational decision-making according to policy priorities and in accordance with the paradigm shift in the construction and operation of future defense systems are necessary. The results reveal that the most important policy priority is utilizing science and technology effectively in the future defense. In addition, the policy priorities should be given to policies that focus on the development of weapons systems and acquisition of skilled manpower.

On the prevalence of software supply chain attacks: Empirical study and investigative framework

Software Supply Chain Attacks (SSCAs) typically compromise hosts through trusted but infected software. The intent of this paper is twofold: First, we present an empirical study of the most prominent software supply chain attacks and their characteristics. Second, we propose an investigative framework for identifying, expressing, and evaluating characteristic behaviours of newfound attacks for mitigation and future defense purposes. We hypothesize that these behaviours are statistically malicious, existed in the past, and thus could have been thwarted in modernity through their cementation x-years ago. To measure this, a large scale ground-truth corpus of over 10 million functions is assembled from three file classes: malware, benign, and Windows 10 binaries. An expressive query system is proposed for matching behaviours on top of semantic graphs constructed with data-flow, control-flow and AST-annotations. We leverage conditional probabilities to assess malicious intent by considering the SSCA behaviours matched in the three file classes. Our analysis reveals that the presence of an SSCA behaviour within a binary indicates malware with 86–100% probability. We also annotate each SSCA behaviour with context information that, when applied as a filter over matched dataset samples, is found to boost malicious intent by up to 30%. In addition, we present a novel data-flow metric, parametric momentum, which is a powerful gauge of malicious intent that alone matches 12.71% of malware with zero false positives. Finally, we perform a temporal analysis of the SSCA behaviours present in our dataset and discover that they have been available for 13–21 years prior to each attack; conceivably enough time to be identified for mitigating the SSCA instances.

Application of Artificial Intelligence in the Military: An Overview

Modern-day research and innovation have expedited the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Its impacts on society, economy, and power are ever-increasing. This paper highlights the remarkable advancements in the entire ecosystem of AI-associated technologies comprising machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, robotics, brain-machine interface, etc., and their innovative usage in pioneering military technologies/strategies. This paper scrutinizes the unprecedented contingencies and challenges of AI application on three core facets of future defence, i.e., Autonomous Weaponry and Warfare, Intelligence, and National Security. Several powers in the “geopolitical chessboard” have already begun to exploit AI for military applications like intelligence analysis, surveillance, autonomous weaponry, reconnaissance, and logistics. This will eventually propel AI to be the new dimension of military strength evaluation and a pivotal entity for national security. This paper predicts the future of military applications, their constraints and challenges, and also recommends the steps to be pursued by technologically fragile countries like Nepal to acclimatize with these AI-induced transformations. The research will follow a qualitative methodology to analyse AI development and its military incorporation, challenges, and prospects. The review of the published articles, opinions, commentaries, and findings worldwide on AI-driven innovations underscores the results. In sum, the research aims to discuss the future of military applications in light of the burgeoning ecosystem of AI.

Weaponising Europe? Rule-makers and rule-takers in the EU regulatory security state

ABSTRACT In contrast to the conventional wisdom that security is governed exclusively by nation states exercising political authority to generate public security goods, the European Union can also be considered a security state: it governs security indirectly by making rules incentivising and steering the provision of public security goods. To what degree, however, does the EU govern defence markets, shape the trajectory of national defence capabilities, and direct efforts towards European strategic autonomy? This paper traces the EU’s attempts to regulate arms production and identifies critical junctures in EU authority as a market rule-maker over the means of force. It finds that market rule-takers—non-state defence firms—are shaped by EU epistemic authority and regulation. Specifically, EU rule-making shapes firm perceptions of relative defence market uncertainty. Firms perceiving future home defense markets as less risky due to regulatory oversight are incentivised to reduce their own current profits by self-funding innovation towards future defence requirements and procurement sales to their home states. By incentivising the non-state production of public security goods with its rule-making and relational market power, the EU is a modern regulatory security state, even in the defence domain where it has little political authority.

Membership Inference Attacks With Token-Level Deduplication on Korean Language Models

The confidentiality threat against training data has become a significant security problem in neural language models. Recent studies have shown that memorized training data can be extracted by injecting well-chosen prompts into generative language models. While these attacks have achieved remarkable success in the English-based Transformer architecture, it is unclear whether they are still effective in other language domains. This paper studies the effectiveness of attacks against Korean models and the potential for attack improvements that might be beneficial for future defense studies. The contribution of this study is two-fold. First, we perform a membership inference attack against the state-of-the-art Korean GPT model. We found approximate training data with 20% to 90% precision in the top-100 samples and confirmed that the proposed attack technique for naive GPT is valid across the language domains. Second, in this process, we observed that the redundancy of the selected sentences could hardly be detected with the existing attack method. Since the information appearing in a few documents is more likely to be meaningful, it is desirable to increase the uniqueness of the sentences to improve the effectiveness of the attack. Thus, we propose a deduplication strategy to replace the traditional word-level similarity metric with the BPE token level. Our proposed strategy reduces 6% to 22% of the underestimated samples among selected ones, thereby improving precision by up to 7%p. As a result, we show that considering both language- and model-specific characteristics is essential to improve the effectiveness of attack strategies. We also discuss possible mitigations against the MI attacks on the general language models.

Instrument development for measuring determinants in defense R&D policy

The Korean military's defense research and development (R&D) policy was often shortsighted because of environmental changes, such as the Korea–U.S. alliance, security policies under the regime, and limited budgets. In addition, there was a lack of prior research focusing on identifying the determinants of defense R&D policy, making it difficult for stakeholders in defense R&D policies to determine the appropriateness or validity of decision making. To this end, the purpose of the present study was to suggest a basic reference for defense R&D decision making through the conceptualization of determinants in defense R&D policy and development of measurement items. For this, we developed operational definitions of influencing factors and preliminary items related to defense R&D policy decisions, considering the Republic of Korea Armed Forces. To test reliability and validity, we performed exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses based on discussions with experts. The results show a six-factor structure (security policy, defense posture, technological ambition, dominant and shifting paradigm, science and technology, industry knowledge base, and resources) and 24 items. It is concluded that the use of questionnaire results might better reflect multiple aspects of decision making in defense R&D policy. Future studies need to elaborate on the measurement indicators for defense R&D policy determinants and theorize on policy directions according to changes in future defense and private technology development.

THE FUNDING UNDER IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC ALLIANCE

In this article, I set out to present the importance of allocating financial resources within the North Atlantic Alliance, as well as the costs of operating and implementing Alliance policies, which are funded by direct and indirect contributions from Member States. Thus, direct financial contributions to NATO are common funding and joint funding and indirect financial contributions come in different forms. Indirect financial contributions are by far the largest type of contribution and include Allied participation in NATO-led operations and missions. The North Atlantic Alliance regularly collects data on Allied defense spending and presents aggregates and subsets of this information. The Ministry of Defense of each Ally reports the estimated current and future defense expenditures according to an agreed definition of defense expenditures. Allocated amounts are payments currently made by allied nations or to be made during the fiscal year. The essence of the article consists that NATO funding is found in the defense budgets of Alliance member countries. Of these, the majority are national expenditures, which are practically a form of indirect contribution to NATO funding. At the same time, it can be seen that NATO is an intergovernmental organization. The Member States allocate the necessary financial resources for day-to-day operations. The Member States shall provide the necessary and available facilities for consultation, decision-making, and implementation of policies established by consensus. NATO is a political alliance backed by a military structure. It provides for the common defense of member countries, cooperation with partner countries, and the implementation of Alliance policies, mainly for peacekeeping. Therefore, the novelty of this approach lies in the fact that it highlights the problems facing NATO funding today, the funding mechanism, and the construction of the common budgets of the Alliance.

An Insecure North?

State actors are becoming increasingly interested in the economic potential and security dynamics of the Arctic space as the effects of global climatic change rapidly shape the world’s polar spaces. National governments have responded to these changing dynamics by tailoring their defence policies to reflect what they believe to be the most pressing challenges to their presence in the region. This article asks; how is the north framed and whose voices are reflected in Canadian defence policy? It concludes that the conventional framing of Canada’s north remains deeply influenced by the idealized and imagined narratives of Canadian governance with little inclusion of disparate voices.
 By examining the defence white papers of prime ministers Chretien, Martin, Harper, and Trudeau, this article determines that Canadian Arctic security discourse has increased significantly in the post-Cold War era while the region’s Inuit population remain external to its dialogue. This absence of Indigenous voice in Canadian defence policy reflects an unsustainable Eurocentric viewing of the North that is unable to adequately address the region’s changing dynamics. As such, Canada’s future defence policy must acknowledge the distinct and transnational value of Inuit traditional knowledge to overcome the limitations of conventional trans-Atlantic policy frameworks.

An Empirical Study of Fully Black-Box and Universal Adversarial Attack for SAR Target Recognition

It has been demonstrated that deep neural network (DNN)-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR) techniques are extremely susceptible to adversarial intrusions, that is, malicious SAR images including deliberately generated perturbations that are imperceptible to the human eye but can deflect DNN inference. Attack algorithms in previous studies are based on direct access to a ATR model such as gradients or training data to generate adversarial examples for a target SAR image, which is against the non-cooperative nature of ATR applications. In this article, we establish a fully black-box universal attack (FBUA) framework to craft one single universal adversarial perturbation (UAP) against a wide range of DNN architectures as well as a large fraction of target images. It is of both high practical relevance for an attacker and a risk for ATR systems that the UAP can be designed by an FBUA in advance and without any access to the victim DNN. The proposed FBUA can be decomposed to three main phases: (1) SAR images simulation, (2) substitute model training, and (3) UAP generation. Comprehensive evaluations on the MSTAR and SARSIM datasets demonstrate the efficacy of the FBUA, i.e., can achieve an average fooling ratio of 64.6% on eight cutting-edge DNNs (when the magnitude of the UAP is set to 16/255). Furthermore, we empirically find that the black-box UAP mainly functions by activating spurious features which can effectively couple with clean features to force the ATR models to concentrate on several categories and exhibit a class-wise vulnerability. The proposed FBUA aligns with the non-cooperative nature and reveals the access-free adversarial vulnerability of DNN-based SAR ATR techniques, providing a foundation for future defense against black-box threats.

Augustine, Costs and Defense Industries

Augustine weapons systems are presented as a new class of economic good. Their distinguishing characteristics are identified in the form of advanced technology, inter-generational cost escalation and small quantities. A distinction is made between cost increases between generations of weapons and falling unit costs within a generation of equipment. The impact of Augustine weapons on learning curves is assessed and the article concludes with an evaluation of Augustine systems for the future defense industrial base.