Military Modernization Research Articles

CHINA REACTIONS TOWARDS INDIA’S MILITARY MODERNIZATION AT ANDAMAN AND NICOBAR ISLANDS

This research studies the factors that lead to India's military modernisation in Andaman and Nicobar Islands (ANI). The research focuses on the geostrategic elements of the ANI and the contemporary Sino-Indian relationship. This research has three objectives namely 1) to study the factors that led to India's military modernization, 2) to examine the impact of India's military modernisation on China and 3) to analyse the China's reaction to it. The theory of realism was applied to support the argument of Sino-Indian relations, as both countries have a particular interest in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). This research uses a qualitative technique that is based on secondary data references from credible sources, both printed and online. This research findings that the Andaman and Nicobar archipelagos consist of 572 islands and islets chain stretched from the southern tip of Myanmar to the north-western tip of Sumatra is India’s potential fortress of defence in the Bay of Bengal. Since 2001, the Indian government has established a tri-service Andaman and Nicobar Command (ANC) at Port Blair to protect its sovereignty in the Indian Ocean. India announced the massive weapon procurement plan forecast for a 15 years period (2012-2027), followed by establishment of the Island Development Agency (IDA) in 2017 in effort to shift the archipelago from a merely military base into an active economic hub. This gained reaction from China as it sees India is projecting supremacy over its backyard, creating a possible “security chain” that would supresses China besides the existing “Malacca’s Dilemma”. This research concludes Andaman and Nicobar has a great potential in the future due to its location between two major seas, the South China Sea (SCS) and the Indian Ocean. Its proximity to the Straits of Malacca (SOM) gives leverage over one of the world’s busiest trade chokepoints.

The Use of Tactical Airborne Assault Forces in Modern Military Conflicts: Problems and Solutions

The Use of Tactical Airborne Assault Forces in Modern Military Conflicts: Problems and Solutions

In the Era of Uncertainties - Middle Power Politics in a Multipolar World

The Asia-Pacific region has transformed from a colonial past to an emerging economic power hub, thus bringing fluidity to its definition. The Asia Pacific region is a powerhouse of economic, technological, demographic, and social growth, drawing the attention of several scholars to the distinctive hotbed of great power competition and the emergence of a multipolar world order. The article studies the rise of middle powers by understanding the nature of their foreign policy behaviour by re-examining the regional security complexes of the Asia-Pacific region. In trying to bridge the imbalance of power and regionality, the author argues that the geopolitical flux in the security environment has severe implications for regional integration and cooperation. Countries in the Asia-Pacific region intend to constructively engage in widening their multi track diplomacy through multi-layered alignments with numerous formal and informal agencies and thus create multiple centres of power, influence, and order. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and ASEAN-plus continue to present themselves as indispensable in order to promote converged strategic hedging, scilicet, pursuing bilateral, minilateral, and multilateral efforts on the chessboard of geostrategic competition of- Low Politics, including supply chains, trade production, cooperation on public health, and infrastructure development; and High Politics, implying defence partnerships and military modernisation agreements. Nonetheless, strategic hedging is not a preferred option for competing powers as it provides these middle power agencies (in bilateral, minilateral, and multilateral) with space, a platform, and channels for pragmatic, cooperative, yet cautious partnerships. However, the region has a myriad of options for tackling the complex nature of ASEAN consensus and self-help governance, thus overlooking its functions of regional security diplomacy and aptitudes of prioritising and advancing the member states internationally.

Indigenous Military Reforms from the Outside: The Paradox of the UAE Armed Forces Modernisation

ABSTRACT In the past two decades, the United Arab Emirates has pursued the goal of its military modernization through various reforms that were driven by the aspirations of its rulers for self-sufficiency and strategic autonomy. This meant a greater emphasis on building local skills and resources allowing Abu Dhabi to claim the indigenous character of that transformation. A stronger focus on indigenous capacities implied a decrease of that country’s dependence on Western patronage. However, the study of the Emirati military transformation reveals a complex and somewhat contradictory reality: the push for a local military reform still relying for the most part on foreign advisors. This article argues that this transformation may have strengthened the technical effectiveness of the Emirati military apparatus, but it did so, not by abandoning past ties to Western powers, but merely by adapting these ties. In fact, the “Emiratisation” of the country’s national security relied on the use of foreign expertise at all levels: from the training and education of officers to the command of military elite units and the development of local military industries. Such reliance on outside expertise eventually compromises the initial goal of the UAE for greater autonomous capability.

Concept of global peace: military, terrorist and informational threats

The article deals with the analysis of transformational processes of the doctrinal and praxeological interpretation of the concept of global peace in the context of overcoming modern military, terrorist and informational threats. The tasks solved in the article are: the essence of understanding of the modern concept of global peace is revealed; the effectiveness of the mechanism of international institutions in providing counteraction to the military threat is analyzed; terrorism as an opposition to peace and stability is studied; the nature of the challenges to the information and educational environment as a significant factor in ensuring global peace is revealed. The humanistic approach is distinguished as one that has a special axiological value for research, with a methodological triad of methods used being philosophical, general scientific, and special scientific methods. The elements of the concept of the global world order are the functioning of international and national subjects to ensure peace and development of civil society, including the education of the global world order, tolerance, democratic values of constitutionalism and the rule of law, and other primary legal axiological values. The originality of the research lies in the comprehensive analysis of globalization threats to the concept of peace and security of the international society in the military, anti-terrorist and information spheres with the demonstration of empirical material from the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2022.

Ukraine’s third wave of military reform 2016–2022 – building a military able to defend Ukraine against the Russian invasion

ABSTRACT This article explores an important and often overlooked element of Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against the Russian invasion in February 2022 – the adoption of a modified western transformational model of military reform – which has focused on mass and building a western style NATO interoperable and trained military. This article argues that Ukraine’s military reform since 2016, in particular the focus on Command and Control, the development of an NCO Corps and Special Forces as well as clear procurement priorities have created the enabling conditions for the development of a flexible and adaptable military force, able to limit Russia’s battlefield success and bring the fight to the enemy. Despite this progress, however, a recurring problem facing the Ukrainian military, that is likely to continue in the future, is how to balance the ongoing requirement for mass against the urgent need for military modernisation.

Non-contact bacterial identification and decontamination based on laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy.

As a new kind of modern military biological weapon, bacterial agents pose a serious threat to the public health security of human beings. Existing bacterial identification requires manual sampling and testing, which is time-consuming, and may also introduce secondary contamination or radioactive hazards during decontamination. In this paper, a non-contact, nondestructive and "green" bacterial identification and decontamination technology based on laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is proposed. The principal component analysis (PCA) combined with support vector machine (SVM) based on radial basis kernel function is used to establish the classification model of bacteria, and the two-dimensional decontamination test of bacteria is carried out using laser-induced low-temperature plasma combined with a vibration mirror. The experimental results show that the average identification rate of the seven types of bacteria, including Escherichia coli, Bacillus subtilis, Pseudomonas fluorescens, Bacillus megatherium, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Bacillus thuringiensis and Enterococcus faecalis reaches 98.93%, and the corresponding true positive rate, precision, recall and F1-score reaches 0.9714, 0.9718, 0.9714 and 0.9716, respectively. The optimal decontamination parameters are laser defocusing amount of -50mm, laser repetition rate of 15-20kHz, scanning speed of 150mm/s and number of scans of 10. In this way, the decontamination speed can reach 25.6mm2/min, and the inactivation rates for both Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis are higher than 98%. In addition, it is confirmed that the inactivation rate of plasma is 4 times higher than that of thermal ablation, meaning that the decontamination ability of LIBS mainly relies on the plasma rather than the thermal ablation effect. The new non-contact bacterial identification and decontamination technology does not require sample pretreatment, and can quickly identify bacteria in situ and decontaminate the surfaces of precision instruments, sensitive materials, etc., which has potential application value in modern military, medical and public health fields.

ASEAN (in)Security Community

The existence of arms modernization can be regarded as the high degree of security dilemma among states. In Southeast Asia, the fact that defense budget escalation followed by the military modernization may be the biggest obstacle to create an ASEAN Security Community. Unfortunately, there have been a little attention on the issue studying the correlation between arms modernization and the prospect of ASEAN Security Community. This paper seeks to fill the gap by analyzing how arms modernization in Southeast Asia is counterproductive to the ASEAN Security Community development. Using constructivism in International Relations, this paper argues that arms modernization among several ASEAN member states hinders collective identity building as a fundamental factor behind the security community. This argument implies that the formation of ASEAN Security Community will not create long-lasting peace in the region. This paper suggests that ASEAN should focus on collective identity formation to strengthen its own body institution rather than merely declare in a formal treaty.

Computational Complexity of Modern Military Tasks

Computational Complexity of Modern Military Tasks

MODERN MILITARY PROSE: GENRE AND STYLE TYPOLOGY

The paper deals with the typology of modern Ukrainian military prose based on the analysis of relevant novels. According to the structural and functional features of the works, it is reasonable to classify them using division into high/mass/intermediate literature. The first type includes complex and multidimensional texts (with allusions, literary reminiscences, irony, parody, etc.), and their action takes place mainly in a mental sphere. Heroes are characterized by understanding of social processes and war realities (significant is the presence of two identities, “properly Ukrainian” and “Soviet”); they rethink their mistakes and transform in response to new challenges. These texts are mostly focused on the acquisition of individual subjectivity. They require a trained erudite reader who can discern the writer’s narratives behind their multi-layered nature. Mass literature includes works where action dominates, and such elements as shooting, chase, superman hero, excessive emotions, love triangle, etc. are widely used. The adventure genre, military detective, melodrama, and action novel are currently most fully represented. Intermediate prose may combine, on the one hand, topical social issues, character evolution, logical and consistent presentation of events (as a feature of “high literature”) with a simplified plot and images, the lack of attention to the psychology of the characters, and various means of mass literature. Contemporary Ukrainian writers have managed to create a large-scale cultural discourse, offering works that cover the problem of war, its causes and consequences, and the topic of a person at war from different perspectives and contexts.

The Rise of China and Evolving Defense Cooperation between India and Japan

This research paper investigates the evolving defense cooperation between India and Japan in the context of the strategic landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, particularly considering China’s rise. The existing literature recognizes China’s increasing influence as a significant factor in India-Japanese security cooperation, but tends to overlook the dynamics behind India’s shifting stance. The study reveals that India initially hesitated to actively engage in anti-China security cooperation with Japan until the mid-2010s, but later adopted a more proactive partnership. An analysis of policy documents, political speeches, and government records attributes India’s initial reluctance to its commitment to non-alignment and strategic autonomy, its desire to balance relations with both China and Japan, and its domestic political priorities favoring economic development over military expansion or strategic alliances. However, growing concerns over China’s assertiveness, military modernization, a change in political leadership, and the Quad’s development as a regional security platform have prompted India’s attitude shift. The research’s recommendations not only offer a roadmap for India, Japan, and other Indo-Pacific countries with deep economic ties to China, but also help combat China’s military threats to contribute to regional stability and security, address common challenges, and foster a peaceful and prosperous Indo-Pacific region.

The Use of a Simulated Environment to Optimize the Solution Identified Problems Specific to Modern Military Actions

Abstract This article presents the implementation and testing of a solution for perfecting the skills of operationalizing a tactical task and developing the ability to react under stressful conditions, individual and collective resilience based on virtual reality for military personnel. Also, a distributed network was configured and tested for increased flexibility and quick setup during multiplayer simulation. The distributed network comes to complement the networks used up to now, namely the local networks.

The Modern Military Leadership – The Anchor of Organizational Culture in the Contemporary World

Abstract This article states that for an innovative organizational culture, it is important to combine social intelligence, emotional intelligence with advanced technologies, information and artificial intelligence. The military leader focuses on new understandings of modern conflict, new resources, and new ways to extend war beyond the battlefield based on his or her ability to effectively coordinate high-tech and human resources. How can he create and build the right military approach? Within the military, artificial intelligence can be used for security, defence, attack strategies, but the involvement of human intelligence could add a competitive advantage precisely if it is intelligently managed and directed. The main hypothesis is that for a revolutionary implementation of new technologies in the contemporary world, a maximum pragmatic harnessing of emotional and social intelligences is required. With the alert evolution of man, with his self-awareness and organic maturation, even leadership has acquired new valences. The relationship between leadership and emotional intelligence, novel until a decade ago, is now a truism.

Objects Camouflage Possibilities Analysis in the Modern Military Conflicts Conditions

The article analyses the methods of camouflage used in modern military conflicts. The article gives a historical overview of camouflage of military equipment and personnel since the beginning of the twentieth century. The mathematical and physical principles that should be taken into account in the manufacture of camouflage nets are discussed, the requirement for which is the difficulty in recognising and differentiating between an artificial surface and real terrain. The mathematical model of a camouflage net pattern is a fractal, a self-similar scale-invariant object of noninteger topological dimension. From the point of view of physics, the fractal dimension is a statistical value that demonstrates how densely a fractal fills a space. This means, in particular, that by dividing a photo of a real surface into cells and then counting the number of black cells in relation to all of them (in the simplest case of a photo of a winter forest, for example), you can find out the average indicator of the landscape's scale similarity, which can be reproduced on a camouflage grid. In the context of active military operations caused by russian aggression, for effective camouflage, it is proposed to use the concepts and methods of fractal geometry in the manufacture of camouflage means, in particular camouflage nets, to maximise the imitation of natural landscapes and structures that will not be easy to recognise.

The Modern Military Education System During The Reign of Abdulhamid II

Bu çalışmada Osmanlı Devleti’nin modernleşme sürecinde meydana gelen askeri eğitim reformları ele alınmıştır. Özellikle II. Abdülhamid Dönemi’nde maarifin taşrada yaygınlaşmasıyla yeni açılan modern askeri okullar, mevcut okulların ıslahı konuları üzerinde durulmuştur. Osmanlı Devleti’nde eğitim reformu yüksek öğrenim kurumlarından başlamış, daha sonra bu kurumlara öğrenci yetiştiren alt kademe eğitim kurumlarının modernleşmesi yapılmıştır. Bu bağlamda çalışmada dönemin Dersaadet ve taşrasında yer alan askeri rüşdiye, idadi ve yüksek okullar incelenmiştir. Bu dönemde açılan mekteplerin nerede kurulduğu, yıllık ortalama kaç öğrencisinin bulunduğu, okutulan ders programları, yapılan modernleşme çalışmaları, mekteplerin ne kadar süreyle eğitim verdiği, mekteplere kabul edilecek öğrencilerde aranan özellikler, sınıf geçme şekilleri, mekteplerden mezun olan öğrencilerin görevlendirilmeleri gibi konular incelenmiştir. Bu çalışma, konuyla ilgili Osmanlı arşiv belgeleri, birincil kaynaklar ve araştırma eserler, makale ve tezler incelenerek ortaya konulmuştur. Çalışmanın amacı II. Abdülhamid Dönemi’nde Dersaadet ve taşrada mevcut olan askeri mektepleri belirtmek, mekteplerin kuruluş amacı ve işleyişlerini, izledikleri politikaları, bilimsel olarak inceleyerek ortaya çıkarmaktır. Araştırmanın sonucunda, ikinci abdülhamid döneminde eğitim alanında reform lahiyalarının hazırlandığı, bu doğrultuda ders programlarının ve ders içeriklerinin düzenlendiği, okulların batılı tarzda modernleştirildiği ve Cumhuriyet dönemi eğitim anlayışının temellerinin atıldığı görülmüştür.

Indonesian Defense Diplomacy in Responding to China’s National Interest in South China Sea

Economic interests dominating the interests of both claimant and non-claimant-states make the South China Sea conflict challenging to obtain a satisfactory solution for all parties. In protecting its financial security, mainly dependent on the South China Sea, China continues to exhibit aggressiveness and firmness in realizing its national interests in this area, thereby raising the conflict tension. This study analyzed Indonesia’s defense diplomacy to counter China’s national interests in the South China Sea. Defense diplomacy is expected to eliminate any obstacles hindering the achievement of the two countries’ national interests. This study utilized a descriptive qualitative method with primary data obtained through interviews with defense strategists, defense diplomacy actors, academics, and other supporting secondary data. This study discovered that China’s national interests in the South China Sea center on securing its economic interests and military modernization. Meanwhile, Indonesia’s national interests in the South China Sea concern the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) waters. Maintaining the integrity of the Unitary Republic of Indonesia is one of its national interests. Thus, Indonesia’s defense diplomacy should be conducted through win-win cooperation to promote its national interests in responding to China’s national interests in the South China Sea.

Design of an Au–Pt–Ti wire-grid polarizer based on midinfrared pixelated micropolarizer arrays

Polarization information is widely used in complex applications such as industrial detection, biomedicine, earth remote sensing, modern military, and aerospace. However, traditional polarization devices cannot adequately satisfy the requirements of increasingly complex environments. A subwavelength grating consisting of three types of materials, namely, aurum, platinum, and titanium, was designed to improve the performance of the polarimetric components of a midwavelength infrared polarization imaging system. The morphological structure parameters of the designed grating were optimized by analyzing the effects on the polarization performance through the rigorous coupled wave theory. The proposed Au–Pt–Ti composite grating could address the problem of grating peeling off from the substrate because of high temperature during preparation. The composite grating has some advantages such as high mechanical stability, lower oxidation, and great polarization properties. The diffraction can be reduced and the extinction ratio (ER) can be effectively enhanced in a midwave infrared (MWIR) focal plane array through appropriate reduction in the termination edge spacing and the addition of a gold frame between polarizer pixels. The grating with a period of 0.8 μm was designed for application in the MWIR band. The fill factor was 0.5 and the depths of Au–Pt–Ti in the grating region were 0.44 μm. Each pixel was separated by a 3.2-μm wide gold frame. Modeling results revealed that the ER of grating was higher than 28.68 and 32.77 above the incident wavelengths of 3.89 and 4.57 μm, respectively. Additionally, excellent polarization capability was observed over a wide MWIR spectrum. Furthermore, the current manufacturing process level may generate polarizers with the aforementioned structural specifications.

Penetration resistance of ceramic/PUE/GFRP multi-layered composite structure

The impact resistance of multi-layered lightweight composite structures is a hot topic in modern military and national defense. To achieve the goal of lightweight, a composite plate consisting of alumina ceramic/polyurethane elastomer (PUE)/glass fiber reinforced plastic (GFRP) with areal density of 3.6 g/cm2 was designed. The penetration experiment of the composite plate was carried out with a first stage light air gun, and the dynamic response of the composite plate under the impact of a large mass round nose projectile (mass 50 g, velocity 100–450 m/s) was studied by combining finite element simulation. Through analysis and discussion, the failure mode, deformation process, energy absorption effect and impact time of the composite plate during penetration process are determined. It is found that the ballistic limit velocity of the composite plate under this penetration condition is 169 m/s. The ceramic layer plays an important role in the energy consumption of the bullet during penetration and the PUE layer does a major part in the penetration time. The penetration time of the PUE layer is always higher than that of the ceramic layer and accounts for about 50% of the total penetration time. As the bullet velocity increases, the distance between the energy absorption of PUE and ceramic gradually decreases. The energy absorption of PUE, which accounts for 29% of the total mass, can reach 36%, while the energy absorption efficiency of the composite plate gradually decreases and finally reaches 18.7%. Through the damage process, it is found that the failure mode of ceramic is completely different from that of PUE. GFRP acts as an intermediate layer and backplane, which has an effective function in stress wave transmission and energy absorption. Finally, under the same penetration conditions, the ballistic limit velocity and damage of the four target plates are compared. The penetration resistance of composite plate is equivalent or better than that of the metal plate because it has a smaller deformation and damage area.

Flexible and transparent metadevices for terahertz, microwave, and infrared multispectral stealth based on modularization design.

Multispectral stealth technology including terahertz (THz) band will play an increasingly important role in modern military and civil applications. Here, based on the concept of modularization design, two kinds of flexible and transparent metadevices were fabricated for multispectral stealth, covering the visible, infrared (IR), THz, and microwave bands. First, three basic functional blocks for IR, THz, and microwave stealth are designed and fabricated by using flexible and transparent films. And then, via modular assembling, that is, by adding or removing some stealth functional blocks or constituent layers, two multispectral stealth metadevices are readily achieved. Metadevice 1 exhibits THz-microwave dual-band broadband absorption, with average measured absorptivity of 85% in 0.3-1.2 THz and higher than 90% in 9.1-25.1 GHz, suitable for THz-microwave bi-stealth. Metadevice 2 is for IR and microwave bi-stealth, with measured absorptivity higher than 90% in 9.7-27.3 GHz and low emissivity around 0.31 in 8-14 µm. Both metadevices are optically transparent and able to maintain good stealth ability under curved and conformal conditions. Our work offers an alternative approach for designing and fabricating flexible transparent metadevices for multispectral stealth, especially for applications in nonplanar surfaces.

Navigating China’s Military Modernization

Nepal has repeatedly experienced the lurching effects of the increased tension between China and India. Consequently, both countries have engaged in rigorous military modernization and securitization techniques. The emerging context has posed a question of how Nepal can adopt a military strategy. The capacity of a small power to curtail the reeling effect of the tension between the great power depends on its security preparedness policy. Historical military strategists require any country (powerful or weak) to conduct meticulous research about the opponent or the potential opponents’ military strength before devising any military defense or offense. Acknowledging India’s dominant position in the region and its overwhelming military engagement with the small powers in South Asia, the scholarly discourse on India’s military capacity is voluminous. However, only a few studies have examined China’s military modernization in the new era under President Xi Jinping and what it connotes to the small powers in the south. In this regard, the paper conducted a detailed analysis of China's military transformation under President Xi Jinping. The findings show that China's military organization has adopted a centralized reform mechanism, and its armed forces have been equipped with advanced technological ammunition to build a “World Class Army.” Such a powerful buildup in the northern front makes it imperative for Nepal to rethink its security preparedness policy to deter the spillover effect of the conflict between the great powers in the region or beyond.