MILITARY POWER AND ITS IMPORTANCE IN MAINTAINING MILITARY BALANCE IN EASTERN EUROPE

The frequent increasingly challenges, registered in the Eastern European security environment, require an unconventional approach due to the fact that classical typology of conflict has long become history, being replaced by the asymmetric type of conflict. Can European society overcome the new atypical security crises imposed by the military threat of Eastern European origin? Can the balance of military power be maintained so that Western society continues to enjoy security and democracy? These are just two legitimate questions that European states need to have a clear answer to, based on resource allocations in the military operational environment. Moreover, it is clear that security requires investments from a financial point of view and these must be continuous and at the minimum accepted level, like 2% of GDP, at the level of each NATO Member State.

The militarization of responses to COVID-19 in Democratic Latin America

Latin America has been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, prompting its governments to take action. In this context, countries within Latin America have used their armed forces for an array of tasks to serve citizens. But how militarized is the response to COVID-19 in Latin America? This paper proposes a typology of tasks provided by the armed forces as a response to COVID-19. The descriptive findings allow us to map these tasks, attributing scores to the fourteen Latin American democracies. We also show evidence for the potential consequences of some tasks. Policing the streets to enforce stay-at-home orders may lead to the military committing human rights violations, assuming eminently civilian posts to manage the public health crisis can result in long term implications for the civil-military balance that are detrimental to the democratic control over the military.

Understanding Deterrence

The challenge of deterrence—discouraging states from taking unwanted actions, especially military aggression—has again become a principal theme in U.S. defence policy. This chapter reviews the fundamentals of deterrence in theory and practice. It surveys basic definitions and types of deterrence, including central versus extended deterrence and techniques of deterring by denial or punishment. The chapter argues that it in inaccurate to equate deterrence strength with the local military balance, which is one important factor in deterrence success, but not the only one. It examines three essential conditions for deterrence success: The level of aggressor motivation, clarity about the object of deterrence and the actions the defender will take, and the defender’s capability and will to fulfil threats.

Rationalist Explanations for Two-Front War

By extending the extant costly-lottery models of dyadic war to three-party bargaining scenarios, we offer rationalist explanations for two-front war, where a state at the center is fought by two enemies at opposing peripheries. We found that even though private information exists only in one front, war can break out in both fronts. Because the war outcome in one front can affect the outcome in the other through the shift of military balance, a peripheral state may preventively join the war ongoing in the other front to leverage its power (e.g. Napoleonic Wars), or the central state may preemptively initiate war in one front to establish its preponderance in the other (e.g. World War I). These findings echo Waltz’s neorealism concern that a multi-polar system may not be so stable as the bipolar system that bargaining models of dyadic war commonly presume.