Defence and strategy

History, Layouts and Prospects

Kuang-Ho YEH

Space military power refers to a state actor entering space freely, seeking the goals of benefiting national space interests, maintaining space security and the capabilities of fulfilling space infrastructure, and implementing space military policies. As the earliest “space power” in the world, Germany has been committed to continuous capacity building and policy planning in the space military field. This article seeks to provide a detailed overview of Germany’s unique historical background and evolutionary logic on space military power and strategic origin. Based on literature review and studies pertaining to space military strategy theories, this article reveals basic facts of Germany’s space military development under the “ideality - materialization” mutual constructed context, and illuminates the implications of theoretical changes in Germany’s space military strategy guidance from peaceful utilization and passive defense to effective control.

A comparative study on the member states of the European Union

Amar KHAIRI, Martin PETLACH

This pioneering study endeavours to ascertain how the Covid-19 pandemic impacted on digitalisation in the European Union member states. The second objective is to elucidate the ties between digitalisation and security in terms of military spending, security threats, and the government effectiveness. Whilst using hierarchical clustering, it was detected that the era of pandemic had diversified the EU member states even more. The fixed-effect model confirmed that changes in digitalisation had been associated solely with government effectiveness.

Countering Hybrid Threats in V4 Countries

Josef PROCHÁZKA, Pavel VINKLER, Krisztián JÓJÁRT, Zoltán SZENES, Artur GRUSZCZAK, Matej KANDRÍK

The new dynamics in the global security environment accompanied by the renewal of great power competition and its impact on security provision of Central European countries brought new challenges, especially in countering hybrid threats. The article embraces the outcome of a multilateral research analysing countering hybrid threat policies in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. The goal of the article is to discuss and explain the four nations’ policies towards the mitigation of the hybrid challenges and their complexity. Those national approaches are comprehensively assessed in four case studies and their main commonalities and key differences are discussed. The conclusion is that although the V4 countries have the same conceptual theoretical basis, the policies against the hybrid threat differ. The authors propose more efficient way ahead at the national level and the improvement of coordination between the V4 countries.

The Rise of Czech-German Defence Cooperation

Jana URBANOVSKÁ, Antonín NOVOTNÝ

The article explores the driving forces behind the increase in Czech-German defence cooperation since the mid-2010s. We argue that the growth is due to several factors: Germany’s more active role in European security, an upgrade of the political framework of Czech-German relations and the Czech Republic’s need to modernise its armed forces. Further enhancement of relations was hindered by underdeveloped cooperation within the defence industry. The war in Ukraine has broken through this ‘glass ceiling’, and the quality of Czech-German defence cooperation is increasing.

Scenarios and Factors

Moshe YANOVSKIY, Yehoshua SOCOL

The threat of the use of nuclear weapons by the aggressor is a significant factor in the ongoing war. Also in future, the Ukrainian government (any leadership) will be interested in its own nuclear weapons at least as long as Russia is ruled by an ill-predictable authoritarian regime. Nuclear arms could be helpful for Ukraine both for deterrence and to increase the attractiveness of the country as a military ally. However, due to many economic, political, and legal factors discussed in the paper, the likelihood of development of Ukraine’s own nuclear arsenal should be considered as extremely low. The unlikely scenario, in which Ukraine could nevertheless develop such weapons, would require such a significant improvement of political and economic institutions, that the risk for third countries from the new nuclear actor will remain minimal.

Analyzing the logic and utility of the approaches employed for the understanding of war

Samuel ŽILINČÍK, Ivo PIKNER, Jaroslav STANĚK

Strategic theory dictates that an understanding of a war’s character is imperative for the achievement of victory in strategic practice. This article identifies and analyses extant approaches to the understanding of war. These approaches include categorization, strategic analysis and historical comparison. A theoretical analysis accompanied by illustrative cases indicates that one can achieve the most in-depth understanding of a war’s character by combining strategic analysis and historical comparison, though the process of achieving such understanding is difficult and time-consuming.

Cognitive warfare and social impact operations

Serhii Dmytrovich MAKSYMENKO, Lidiya Mykolayevna DERKACH

The aim of the article is to examine an overview of historical western military thought on Theory of War and its relationship to Cognitive Warfare nowadays, as well as Ukrainian evidence for the efficacy of global resistance to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The study results showed that understanding the genesis of Cognitive Warfare in the Ukrainian context over 2014-2023 focused on brain, as the battlefield, and using social impact and psychological operations, neurosciences, social engineering had the goal to destroy human thinking, behaviour, social and military identity not only of Ukrainians, but globally.

Vlastimil ŠLOUF, Martin BLAHA, Ondřej PEKAŘ, Lenka BRIZGALOVÁ, Vojtěch MÜLLNER

The present paper presents an alternative approach to determining rational defence spending of the Czech Republic concerning the evolution of a society’s wealth, expressed in terms of the financial valuation of tangible fixed assets. The authors describe the view that the government’s stated commitment to defence spending of 2% is a political decision that does not reflect the impact of the wealth achieved by society, the likelihood of an attack by a foreign power, and the expected level of damage caused by an attack. The authors present a model for determining rational defence spending based on the fair insurance model. The authors conclude that the rational expenditure on the defence of the Czech Republic’s wealth should be between 3.5% and 4.2% of GDP.

A Tool for Measuring Czech Armed Forces´ Resilience Against Hybrid Interference

Vendula DIVIŠOVÁ, Libor FRANK, Vladimír BÍZIK, Antonín NOVOTNÝ

This paper introduces a questionnaire as a measurement tool that will help evaluate the armed forces’ resilience to hybrid interference. It is based on the previously developed conceptualisation of resilience as consisting of the national, social, institutional, and psychological dimensions and guides the reader through the operationalisation of the corresponding variables in the form of a questionnaire to be distributed within different groups of the Czech Armed Forces.