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Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are cutting-edge technologies used for military purposes world-wide at tactical, operational, and strategic levels. This study provides an overview of the history and current state of military drones, considering a global and Ecuadorian background. Then, a classification of the UAVs developed and built in Ecuador is conducted based on their endurance, altitude, and wing span to understand the national context and progress. The research also delves into the applications of UAVs in several military operations and missions, aiming to create a framework that aligns UAV capabilities with specific operational needs; this permits the identification of the challenges and opportunities the country faces. Unmanned aerial systems have changed the battlefield, and the government needs to adapt to a national strategy that incorporates this technology; this research analyzes and provides insights to improve military capabilities such as exploring modern UAV military applications, technical updates in communication, navigation, and data acquisition systems; and the integration of emerging technologies like smart materials, artificial intelligence, and electric propulsion systems. This study provides valuable insights into the Ecuadorian UAVs that enhance the country’s military operations and offer some applications and uses of this technology for national security.

Capability-based planning as an approach to defense planning is an almost infinitely complex engineered system with countless nodes and layers of interdependency, influenced by state and non-state diplomatic activities, information, military and economic actions creating secondary and third order effects. The main output of capability-based planning is the set of capability requirements needed to achieve the expected end-state. One revitalized qualitative technique that allows us to gain insights into unstructured and fuzzy problems in the military is wargaming—in its simplest form this involves manual wargaming. At the same time, there has been a push to bring computer assistance to such wargaming, especially to support umpire adjudication and move more generally towards full automation of human elements in wargames. However, computer assistance in wargaming should not be pushed, regardless of cost, towards quantitative techniques. The objective complexity of a problem often does not allow us to replicate the operational environment with the required fidelity to get credible experimental results. This paper discusses a discovery experiment aiming to verify the concept of applying a qualitative expert system within computer assisted wargaming for developing capability requirements in order to reduce umpire bias and risk associated with their decisions. The innovation here lies in applying system dynamics modelling and simulation paradigms when designing the theoretical model of capability development, which forms the core of the expert system. This new approach enables qualitative comparisons between different sets of proposed capability requirements. Moreover, the expert system allows us to reveal the effects of budget cuts on proposed capability requirement solutions, which the umpire was previously unable to articulate when comparing individual solutions by relying solely on his own knowledge. Players in the wargame validated the proposed concept and suggested how the study might be developed going forward: namely, by enabling users to define their own capabilities and not being limited by a predefined set of capabilities.

The Diffusion of Military Power examines how the financial and organizational challenges of adopting new methods of fighting wars can influence the international balance of power. Michael Horowitz argues that a state or actor wishing to adopt a military innovation must possess both the financial resources to buy or build the technology and the internal organizational capacity to accommodate any necessary changes in recruiting, training, or operations. How countries react to new innovations--and to other actors that do or don't adopt them--has profound implications for the global order and the likelihood of war.

Climate change over the last two decades, coupled with the health crisis caused by the SARS COV-2 virus, requires central and local public authorities to involve all resources are available to preserve the health and life of the population, as well as for the protection of their material and cultural values.In addition to the fact that the Romanian Army performs support functions, it has unique capabilities whose use becomes indispensable for the management of civil emergencies.Compared to the tasks to be performed, in order to limit and eliminate the consequences caused by disasters, the military engineer structures in the Romanian Army represent the most adequate capability, by the fact that they are able to intervene in most situations. However, the military engineer capabilities must be constantly perfected and adapted so that they are able to respond to the new types of risks that may arise.

This rapid communication examines the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on the international military system, utilizing variations in systemic power concentration as a metric. Power is conceptualized in terms of military capabilities and quantified through two indicators: military expenditure and military personnel. The methodology for this quantification parallels that of the Composite Indicator of National Capability, developed by the Correlates of War Project. Modelski's approach is employed to calculate systemic power concentration, while Brecke's criteria are utilized to ascertain the system's polar structure-polarity-over the period from 2017 to 2023. The findings indicate that the international military system maintained a structurally multipolar configuration, with China, India, and the United States serving as principal power centers. A slight decrease in the value of concentration occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic years, but no significant post-pandemic alterations in the structure of the international military system were observed. Consequently, this study concludes that COVID-19 has had minimal, if any, effect on the global concentration of power.

Although it has declared itself a neutral state, the Republic of Moldova is compelled to consider potential sources of military threats. Defense is a fundamental and distinct field of national security, aiming to achieve national interests and the processes of political, economic, and social development of the state. According to international law, the Republic of Moldova has the right to defend and ensure its military security by all means at its disposal. It is legal to maintain Armed Forces, built on the principle of defensive sufficiency, for the defense of sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity, as well as for the annihilation of armed conflicts and other acts of violence within the country that endanger the constitutional order.

This paper analyses the role of autonomy in engineer support within the Czech Armed Forces (CAF), with a particular focus on its strategic and modernisation implications. While autonomy has become a critical dimension of contemporary defence capabilities, no existing strategic or operational document in the Czech Republic explicitly addresses the autonomy of military engineering forces. The study provides a normative analysis of autonomy in relation to the current corps of engineers, their operational assets, and prospective capabilities introduced through ongoing modernisation projects. By identifying critical points from national strategic defence documents, the article highlights the strategic areas that significantly influence the tasks of engineer support. Using a qualitative framework, the research evaluates the relationship between modernisation projects and strategic requirements, prioritising those with the highest potential impact on national security. The originality of this study lies in proposing a prioritisation framework that integrates autonomy levels with strategic alignment, offering guidance for future acquisition and modernisation efforts in the CAF's engineer support units.

Today’s challenging, unpredictable, and volatile international security environment and recent developments in Ukraine require the states of Eastern Europe, especially those that are not members of powerful military alliances, to focus on strengthening the most important instrument of national power, military power, in order to be able to defend their national interests. Enhancing military capability is usually associated with an increase in funding for defense programs. However, having a significant defense budget does not guarantee security, and the main question is how efficiently and effectively defense funds are allocated to particular programs, projects, or activities. The way to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of managing defense funds is through the introduction of the performance-based (program) budgeting approach. At the same time, it must be kept in mind that programs cannot disregard the structure of the MOD departments and services, since budgets are implemented by allocating resources to organizational units to use for conducting activities aimed at producing outputs. In this paper, I proposed some structural changes in order to place the organizational structure of the MOD of Georgia on more of a “product line” basis; bring it more in line with the basic principles of management , and improve capability planning and program development processes.

Much has been said about how China’s rapidly growing economy has led to increasing power disparity between India and China over the last two decades. China’s economic growth in this period has been spectacular, but it is not clear whether that gives a good sense of how effective its military capabilities are against India. In the context of the escalating Sino-Indian rivalry, this article asks the question: what is the nature of India’s power disparity vis-à-vis China? And does the existing power disparity between India and China give China a clear and uncontestable advantage? We argue that while there is significant asymmetry between India and China, the asymmetry is not as overwhelming when we consider certain facets of war-making capacity such as capital intensiveness of the military, military mobilisation, extractive capacity of the state and the institutional capacities to mobilise forces on a large scale, should the occasion demand. Moreover, India, with a more defensive posture against China, is in a better position to counter it because it mitigates the effects of power disparity. Therefore, we seek to understand the variation in asymmetries across different parameters of war-making capacity and force structure to better assess where the two countries may have advantages and disadvantages in the months and years to come. This article’s main contribution is to demonstrate through publicly available data the various levels of asymmetry between India and China. It also contributes to the security studies, rising powers and conflict literature.

States are more likely to engage in risky and destabilizing actions such as military buildups and preemptive strikes if they believe their adversaries pose a tangible threat. Yet despite the crucial importance of this issue, we don't know enough about how states and their leaders draw inferences about their adversaries' long-term intentions.Knowing the Adversarydraws on a wealth of historical archival evidence to shed new light on how world leaders and intelligence organizations actually make these assessments. Keren Yarhi-Milo examines three cases: Britain's assessments of Nazi Germany's intentions in the 1930s, America's assessments of the Soviet Union's intentions during the Carter administration, and the Reagan administration's assessments of Soviet intentions near the end of the Cold War. She advances a new theoretical framework-called selective attention-that emphasizes organizational dynamics, personal diplomatic interactions, and cognitive and affective factors. Yarhi-Milo finds that decision makers don't pay as much attention to those aspects of state behavior that major theories of international politics claim they do. Instead, they tend to determine the intentions of adversaries on the basis of preexisting beliefs, theories, and personal impressions. Yarhi-Milo also shows how intelligence organizations rely on very different indicators than decision makers, focusing more on changes in the military capabilities of adversaries. Knowing the Adversaryprovides a clearer picture of the historical validity of existing theories, and broadens our understanding of the important role that diplomacy plays in international security.