Global Defense Research Articles

La industria de defensa en el mundo: hechos estilizados y tendencias

As in other areas, technological transformations, along with their high speed, have been incorporated into weapons systems throughout the global defense industry. However, it is not possible to know to what extent the new technological leaderships are undermining the foundations of those that existed until now. Along with this, changes in the geo-political and geo-economics spheres are generating a reality in which aspects such as the international arms trade, the emergence of SMEs in the sector or, as far as the EU is concerned, the promotion of defense policy, transform the morphology and relationships between the agents that intervene in this market. What can be the future trends considering the main stylized facts that are observed today?

SWOT 분석을 통한 K9 자주포 수출 확대 전략 연구

The defense industry plays a key role in strengthening national security, and the most effective way to revitalize the defense industry is to expand defense exports. However, due to fierce competition in the global defense market and the COVID-19 outbreak, negative conditions for defense exports are being created. In particular, The K9 self-propelled howitzer was developed independently by the Republic of Korea and is a globally recognized self-propelled howitzer, and intends to expand exports to defense industry. The purpose of this study is to present a strategy for export expansion of K9 self-propelled howitzers by conducting SWOT analysis. 12 defense export strategies were presented by identifying internal and external environmental factors, and it is expected that these strategies will contribute to securing the competitiveness of the K9 self-propelled artillery in defense exports.

A conceptual framework of defence innovation

ABSTRACT Gaining a decisive technological edge is a never-ending pursuit for defence establishments. Intensifying geo-strategic and geo-economic rivalry among major powers, especially the U.S and China, and the global technological revolution occurring in the civilian and military domains, promise to reshape the nature and distribution of global power. This article provides a conceptual framework for a series investigating the state of global defence innovation in the twenty-first century. The series examines defence innovation in small countries with advanced defence innovation capabilities (Israel, Singapore), closed authoritarian powers (North Korea, Russia), large catch-up states (China and India) and advanced large powers (U.S.).

China's diversification strategy in Latin American and African markets: Defense software and hardware exports

AbstractIn the past two decades, China has become a strategic economic partner for both Latin American and African nations. China's economic global relevance is translating via its “Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)” into massive amounts of foreign trade, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), loans, and aid for both regions. Recently, China has added a national security and defense dimension to its BRI relationship with both regions. China's global strategic economic, geopolitical, and global defense goals are being expressed in its global “Road and Belt” power initiatives and strategies. This paper explores an additional dimension of China's BRI initiative: its role in both regions' defense industries and national security environments. China is increasingly using its trade and investment leverage with both regions to unbalance their defense choices and strategic defense relationships. China's increasing interactions with African and Latin American countries poses a number of geopolitical implications for both the United States and Western European countries.

129 Tulsi extract induces a global defense and protection against endogenous and exogenous stresses contributing to skin aging

Tulsi, or « sacred basil », has been traditionally used in ayurvedic medicine, in which this adaptogen plant is considered as an elixir of life. We developed a new active ingredient rich in polyphenols extracted from the leaves of Ocimum sanctum. Here, we have investigated the biological efficacy of the extract in vitro. We show that O. sanctum leaf extract significantly inhibited the production of reactive oxygen species by normal human keratinocytes stimulated by hydrogen peroxide. The production of nitric oxide induced by cortisol in keratinocytes was also significantly reduced by the extract. Cell bioenergetics as well as autophagy/mitophagy processes have been evaluated in primary human fibroblasts exposed to standardized urban pollutants. The extract was able to normalize energy efficiency by restoring oxygen consumption rate and ATP level that were decreased by the pollutants. It also reversed the pollution-induced increase in damaged mitochondria and normalized mitophagy and autophagy in pollution-exposed cells. Taken together, these results suggest a protection of the mitochondrial network. Finally, the extract was evaluated in a model reproducing inflammation processes observed during aging and known as inflamm’aging. Conditioned medium obtained from reconstructed epidermis subjected to inflammatory stimulation was applied on dermal fibroblasts. Typically, in these conditions, the expression of a number of genes linked to ageing processes is altered in fibroblasts, in particular markers of inflammatory processes, stress response and dermal matrix. The extract was able to normalize the modulation of gene expression in fibroblasts induced by inflamm’aging. Overall, these results suggest that the newly developed Ocimum sanctum leaf extract contributes to the skin global defense and helps it fight against exogenous and endogenous stress. The extract was able to neutralize the impact of these stresses which, in the long-term, can accelerate skin aging process.

Muslim Inventions and The Global Fight Against COVID-19

COVID-19 has wreaked havoc all across the globe, whether it be through the rising number of cases, deaths, lockdowns, economic slowdown or just the media induced panic. In this sense we are all affected by the 'virus'. As the world grapples with this pandemic, there is a notable resonance with the past, especially between the global defense against the pandemic and the great medical innovations of the Islamic golden age. During the Islamic scientific revolution, Muslims became pioneers in the field of medical science. Inspired by the Quran and the various Hadith that consider the science of healing a sacred endeavor, Muslims made ground breaking discoveries in different areas of medicine like anatomy, pharmacology, physiology, surgery, epidemiology and so on. These contributions led to the significant growth in the field of medical science and its various branches and went on to influence the modern medical revolution. In the present survey an effort is made to discuss the historical roots of the global medical response and measures made to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and the various significant contributions of Medieval Muslim scientists in this field.

Arabidopsis UGT76B1 glycosylates N-hydroxy-pipecolic acid and inactivates systemic acquired resistance in tomato.

Systemic acquired resistance (SAR) is a mechanism that plants utilize to connect a local pathogen infection to global defense responses. N-hydroxy-pipecolic acid (NHP) and a glycosylated derivative are produced during SAR, yet their individual roles in this process are currently unclear. Here, we report that Arabidopsis thaliana UGT76B1 generated glycosylated NHP (NHP-Glc) in vitro and when transiently expressed alongside Arabidopsis NHP biosynthetic genes in two Solanaceous plants. During infection, Arabidopsis ugt76b1 mutants did not accumulate NHP-Glc and accumulated less glycosylated salicylic acid (SA-Glc) than wild-type plants. The metabolic changes in ugt76b1 plants were accompanied by enhanced defense to the bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas syringae, suggesting that glycosylation of the SAR molecules NHP and salicylic acid by UGT76B1 plays an important role in modulating defense responses. Transient expression of Arabidopsis UGT76B1 with the Arabidopsis NHP biosynthesis genes ALD1 and FMO1 in tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) increased NHP-Glc production and reduced NHP accumulation in local tissue and abolished the systemic resistance seen when expressing NHP-biosynthetic genes alone. These findings reveal that the glycosylation of NHP by UGT76B1 alters defense priming in systemic tissue and provide further evidence for the role of the NHP aglycone as the active metabolite in SAR signaling.

Actual problems and limiting factors in the development of the Russian military-industrial complex

Research background: The completion of the ideological confrontation of socio-economic systems that occurred in the early 90s of XX century after the collapse of the USSR did not radically affect the development of the global defense industrial complex (DIC). Taking into account the place and role of national DICs in the economies of the world’s leading powers, we can only talk about the modification of their development in the new historical conditions. The defense industry complex in Russia, as before in the USSR, is one of the priority areas of the country’s development. Purpose of the article: The aim of the article was to study the current state of the Russian DIC, to analyse problems, limitations and prospects for its development. The hypothesis was put forward that the condition of the Russian DIC is currently determined by the whole complex of factors, both internal and external, and therefore the solution of these problems should also be comprehensive. Methods: The study was based on statistical analysis of information from both official databases (SIPRI, World Bank, Federal Government Statistics Service) and other open sources. Findings & Value added: The analysis showed that all corporations of the Russian DIC have positive dynamics in the value of their assets and generally demonstrate good financial stability under difficult external and internal economic and political conditions. At the same time, a number of problems requiring prompt resolution pose a threat to the successful development of the Russian defense industry in the near and distant future. The scientific value of research is determined by the comprehensive approach itself.

Perspectives and the role of Bosnian defense industry in national innovation system

The increased global demand for weapons is growing fast both military and civilian grade equipment. The defense industry is experiencing an increase in its trades and production over the globe. Currently global market trade of arms is about US$ 1.9 trillion, with a trend of increase. This paper investigates global trends in defense through analysis of global defense spending and R&D activities with the focus to Bosnian defense industry perspectives. It was observed that Bosnian defense industry has potential to be one of the key players of the national innovation system through which the national R&D output would make notable positive impact on the national economic performances.

Smoothing Adversarial Training for GNN

Recently, a graph neural network (GNN) was proposed to analyze various graphs/networks, which has been proven to outperform many other network analysis methods. However, it is also shown that such state-of-the-art methods suffer from adversarial attacks, i.e., carefully crafted adversarial networks with slight perturbation on clean one may invalid these methods on lots of applications, such as network embedding, node classification, link prediction, and community detection. Adversarial training has been testified as an efficient defense strategy against adversarial attacks in computer vision and graph mining. However, almost all the algorithms based on adversarial training focus on global defense through overall adversarial training. In a more practical scene, certain users would be targeted to attack, i.e., specific labeled users. It is still a challenge to defend against target node attack by existing adversarial training methods. Therefore, we propose smoothing adversarial training (SAT) to improve the robustness of GNNs. In particular, we analytically investigate the robustness of graph convolutional network (GCN), one of the classic GNNs, and propose two smooth defensive strategies: smoothing distillation and smoothing cross-entropy loss function. Both of them smooth the gradients of GCN and, consequently, reduce the amplitude of adversarial gradients, benefiting gradient masking from attackers in both global attack and target label node attack. The comprehensive experiments on five real-world networks testify that the proposed SAT method shows state-of-the-art defensibility against different adversarial attacks on node classification and community detection. Especially, the average attack success rate of different attack methods can be decreased by about 40% by SAT at the cost of tolerable embedding performance decline of the original network.

Differential Defense Responses of Upland and Lowland Switchgrass Cultivars to a Cereal Aphid Pest.

Yellow sugarcane aphid (YSA) (Sipha flava, Forbes) is a damaging pest on many grasses. Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum L.), a perennial C4 grass, has been selected as a bioenergy feedstock because of its perceived resilience to abiotic and biotic stresses. Aphid infestation on switchgrass has the potential to reduce the yields and biomass quantity. Here, the global defense response of switchgrass cultivars Summer and Kanlow to YSA feeding was analyzed by RNA-seq and metabolite analysis at 5, 10, and 15 days after infestation. Genes upregulated by infestation were more common in both cultivars compared to downregulated genes. In total, a higher number of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were found in the YSA susceptible cultivar (Summer), and fewer DEGs were observed in the YSA resistant cultivar (Kanlow). Interestingly, no downregulated genes were found in common between each time point or between the two switchgrass cultivars. Gene co-expression analysis revealed upregulated genes in Kanlow were associated with functions such as flavonoid, oxidation-response to chemical, or wax composition. Downregulated genes for the cultivar Summer were found in co-expression modules with gene functions related to plant defense mechanisms or cell wall composition. Global analysis of defense networks of the two cultivars uncovered differential mechanisms associated with resistance or susceptibility of switchgrass in response to YSA infestation. Several gene co-expression modules and transcription factors correlated with these differential defense responses. Overall, the YSA-resistant Kanlow plants have an enhanced defense even under aphid uninfested conditions.

Defence Innovation: The Role of Design-Led Innovation in Disrupting the Conservative Paradigm

Design thinking is actively promoted in the military to accelerate innovation. However, governments do not provide adequate funding or prioritise design methods in defence innovation programs. Our study audits global defence innovation programs, the strategic direction for innovation labs, funding and the role of design. The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent and effectiveness of design methods used in defence innovation labs. We also examine the structure, methods and outcomes of three lab case studies within the global defence context. Results reveal a disproportionate focus on science and technology in innovation labs. Few organisations incorporate design methods, seen as critical to successful innovation, in their R&D programs. Where design is encouraged in military organisations, it is primarily directed at bottom-up innovation programs. In contrast, government and defence heavily support science and technology innovation programs as part of organisational strategy, with funding as well as sponsorship from senior officers. Therefore, government and military organisations have systematically constrained the potential to accelerate innovation using novel strategies such as design. We discuss the unrealised opportunity for use of design in defence as well as the potential model for increasing cross discipline collaboration and disruptive innovation.

Twenty-first century perspectives on the Biological Weapon Convention: Continued relevance or toothless paper tiger

ABSTRACT While the secretary-general of the United Nations has questioned whether the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a gap in global defenses against bioterrorism that a nefarious group may seek to exploit, the reality is that the pandemic has only underscored the folly of biological warfare, a strategy which relies on weapons – viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens – that would indiscriminately wreak havoc on the attacked and the attacker alike. Indeed, most countries in the world are part of the Biological Weapons Convention, the international treaty that – while lacking an enforcement mechanism – has successfully bolstered the near universal norms against the use of biological weapons.

The World Defense Expenditure 2019 and trends in the Covid19 era

This paper focuses on the recent publication of the SIPRI Institute on global defense spending for 2019. The latter is on the rise for 5th consecutive year, climbing to the highest point since 1988, the Cold War era. This fact has multiple interpretations. The most important construe apropos the geopolitical competition, from hegemonic competition between the United States and China to regional ones, can constitute perils to international security with unpredictable and catastrophic consequences for global peace, economy and trade. The recent crisis over the Covid-19 pandemic has expanded the breach between the West and China, raising skepticism or even suspicious on both sides. Relations between the two powers, the United States and China, have deteriorated, threatening global stability while states are unable to find a commonplace for a successful and definitive fight against the pandemic.The unstable geopolitical environment has experienced the burden of the pandemic crisis due to Covid-19. The restrictive measures taken by governments to intercept the pandemic may be the reasoning for restraining defense spending world widely. This prospect can be a future reality if we take into account the cost caused to national and global economy by the protracted lockdown. Therefore, governments may be compelled to increase spending on the welfare state (health infrastructure, support for the lower classes, support for sectors of the economy most affected by the pandemic such as transportation and tourism) by cutting the defense budget. The latter consists a critical indicator of national sovereignty and its fully understandable the fact that is exceptionally difficult for states to make unforced military budget cuts. However, because of the recent extremely critical situations experienced by humanity as a whole, governments should consider limiting their defense spending, which will be monitored closely by the United Nations for a limited time and focus on dealing with the economic and social effects of the lockdown.

Artificial Intelligence in Nuclear Warfare: A Perfect Storm of Instability?

A significant gap exists between the expectations and fears of public opinion, policymakers, and global defense communities about artificial intelligence (AI) and its actual military capabilities, ...

Predicting Flight Demand under Uncertainty

The motivation of this study originates from the need for the United States Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) to estimate the annual flying hours budget for future fiscal years. USTRANSCOM is responsible for managing the global defense transportation network and creating movement plans in response to various world events. Recently, USTRANSCOM has overestimated annual flying hours by 25% and underestimated by 402%. This article presents analyses of historical flight data and a methodology to forecast annual flying hours. A main contribution of this article is the meticulous coupling of the forecasting methodology and intricacies of a complex and challenging real-world problem. The methodology may be extended to applications where historical data are used to predict future demand and requirements under uncertainty. An application using the programming language R and open source platform R Studio is developed to ingest data and produce forecasts using the methodology developed in this article. Due to data classification concerns, a representative data set of annual flights in and out of Los Angeles International Airport from 2006–2016 is used as a case study to validate the methodology for public release.

British Interventionism in the Red Sea Eastern Sudan and Britain’s Global Defence Strategy

The following article explores the significance of two British military expeditions deployed to the ancient Sudanese port city of Suakin on the Red Sea coast in 1884 and 1885. Although the British government claimed the expeditions were organized to support Egyptian forces in Sudan during the Mahdist revolt, the evidence suggests instead that the intervention was orchestrated as part of a wider effort to seize all Egyptian ports in the Red Sea to prevent them from falling into French hands. This move came as Britain began increasingly to rely on the imperial sea lanes to support its status as a global power in the late nineteenth century.

Capability building and alliance cohesion: comparing the US-Japan and US-Philippines alliances

ABSTRACT The level of alliance cohesion is measured along the following dimensions of alliance operation: attitudinal, behavioural, and functional. However, it is insufficient to evaluate the level of cohesion only by examining how those indicators have changed over time. If it were sufficient to do so, it would presume the level of alliance cohesion would be bound to become similarly high in cases such as those of the US-Japan and US-Philippines alliances in which the commonly perceived threat is now widely and deeply entrenched. This article argues that the capabilities dimension be included in the list of indicators evaluating the level of cohesion. The US places greater emphasis on encouraging its allied partners to address specific capability gaps, foster trust, and improve jointness and interoperability with the US forces and thus contribute further to the evolution of division of alliance labour in which they take a larger role in both regional and global defense as well as cater for their own needs. The evolving division of labour that has been facilitated—and made possible—by a junior ally's enhanced capabilities has incentivized both the US and its ‘capable’ ally to work together to enhance alliance cohesion and credibility.

An engineered pathway for N-hydroxy-pipecolic acid synthesis enhances systemic acquired resistance in tomato.

Systemic acquired resistance (SAR) is a powerful immune response that triggers broad-spectrum disease resistance throughout a plant. In the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, long-distance signaling and SAR activation in uninfected tissues occur without circulating immune cells and instead rely on the metabolite N-hydroxy-pipecolic acid (NHP). Engineering SAR in crop plants would enable external control of a plant's ability to mount a global defense response upon sudden changes in the environment. Such a metabolite-engineering approach would require the molecular machinery for producing and responding to NHP in the crop plant. Here, we used heterologous expression in Nicotiana benthamiana leaves to identify a minimal set of Arabidopsis genes necessary for the biosynthesis of NHP. Local expression of these genes in tomato leaves triggered SAR in distal tissues in the absence of a pathogen, suggesting that the SAR trait can be engineered to enhance a plant's endogenous ability to respond to pathogens. We also showed tomato produces endogenous NHP in response to a bacterial pathogen and that NHP is present across the plant kingdom, raising the possibility that an engineering strategy to enhance NHP-induced defenses could be possible in many crop plants.

Practical Applications of The Long and Short of Trend Followers

Practical Applications Summary In The Long and Short of Trend Followers, published in the Fall 2019 issue of The Journal of Alternative Investments, Joakim Agerback of Finserve Nordic, Tor Gudmundsen-Sinclair of Global Defense and Security Fund, and Jarkko Peltmaki of Stockholm Business School develop a new set of risk factors to better understand the performance of trend following commodity trading advisors (CTAs). Trend following CTAs use futures to follow both upward trends with long positions and downward trends using short positions. They do not face significant short-selling constraints that are present in many other investment vehicles. The relatively constraint-free ability to follow both upward and downward trends implies that skilled CTAs should be able to make money in both bull and bear markets. Theoretically, investment in CTAs can therefore provide desirable diversification to portfolios and enhance returns. Until now, an understanding of the exact nature of long-short CTA strategy performance has been thwarted by the inability of performance attribution studies to disentangle the effects of the long and short sides. The results of this article reveal new insights into the determinants of CTA performance. TOPICS:Commodities, futures and forward contracts, performance measurement