Suchergebnisse

Krishnan describes military applications of neuroscience research and emerging neurotechnology with relevance to the conduct of armed conflict and law enforcement. This work builds upon literature by scholars such as Moreno and Giordano and fills an existing gap, not only in terms of reviewing available and future neurotechnologies and relevant applications, but by discussing how the military pursuit of these technologies fits into the overall strategic context. The first to sketch future neurowarfare by looking at its potentials as well as its inherent limitations, this book's main theme is how military neuroscience will enhance and possibly transform both classical psychological operations and cyber warfare. Its core argument is that nonlethal strategies and tactics could become central to warfare in the first half of the twenty-first century. This creates both humanitarian opportunities in making war less bloody and burdensome as well as some unprecedented threats and dangers in terms of preserving freedom of thought and will in a coming age where minds can be manipulated with great precision.

This book analyzes U.S. pro-insurgency paramilitary operations (PMOs) or U.S. proxy warfare from the beginning of the Cold War to the present and explains why many of these operations either failed entirely to achieve their objective, or why they produced negative consequences that greatly diminished their benefits. The chapters cover important aspects of what PMOs are, the history of U.S. PMOs, how they function, the dilemmas of secrecy and accountability, the issues of control, criminal conduct, and disposal of proxies, as well as newer developments that may change PMOs in the future. The author argues that the general approach of conducting PMOs as covert operations is inherently flawed since it tends to undermine many possibilities for control over proxies in a situation where the interests of sponsors and proxies necessarily diverge on key issues. Armin Krishnan is Assistant Professor and Director of the Security Studies Program at East Carolina University, USA.

Military robots, and potentially autonomous robotic systems, could soon be introduced to the battlefield, meaning that humans may one day be largely excluded from both the battlefield and the decision cycle of warfare. Armin Krishnan explores the technological, legal and ethical issues connected to combat robotics, examining both the opportunities and limitations of autonomous weapons. He also proposes solutions to the future regulation of military robotics through international law.

This detailed study examines the ongoing privatization of the defence sector and offers an original theoretical explanation as to why the most modern armed forces throughout the world have come increasingly to rely on private companies for nearly everything they do.

The invention of the Internet has changed the way social resistance, revolutionary movements and terror groups are organized with new features such as loose network organization, netwars, social media campaigns, and lone wolf attacks. This article argues that blockchain technology will lead to more far-reaching changes in the organization of resistance to authority. Blockchain is a distributed ledger that records transactions using a consensus protocol, and when it meets objective conditions, it also enables smart contracts that execute transactions. Blockchain technology is not only a system for transferring value, but also it is a trustless system in which strangers can cooperate without the need for having to trust each other, as computer code governs their interactions. Blockchain will not only allow resistance/ terror organizations to easily receive donations globally, to have assets that a government can easily confiscate, and to disseminate censorship-resistant propaganda, but more importantly, to operate and cooperate across the world in a truly leaderless, coordinated, and highly decentralized fashion. Governments will need to be more proactive in the area of blockchain technology to mitigate some of the dangers to political stability that may emerge from it.

The article argues that armed drones are weapons made for unconventional warfare and have little value for conventional interstate conflict. The rise of armed drones to prominence has to be considered as an indicator for the changed nature of contemporary armed conflict that has now become focused on countering terrorism, insurgencies, transnational organized crime and fighting 'hybrid wars' globally. The US military is preparing for both global counterinsurgency and for civil unrest at home as they are creating a global surveillance architecture reaching from outer space to cyber space, where everything and everybody can be continuously identified, tracked and located. Unmanned systems assist in global surveillance and provide the global reach for intervening in internal conflicts without the need of deploying large ground forces. The new technological capabilities, including drones, biometrics and cyber warfare, are very useful for global manhunts in the context of the ongoing war on terror and for the control of large populations from afar. Western governments are also increasingly concerned about the spread of extremist ideologies and the possibility of mass civil unrest, which means that many of the lessons learned in the counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq could be applied within the West.