Academic literature on the topic 'Special operations (Military science) – United States – Fiction'

The author explores the origins of the current Islamist insurgency in the northern province of Mozambique Cabo Delgado and the factors that enabled it to develop: a local traditional Islamic leadership out of touch with the interests of younger Muslims; an economic and social deprivation in the North of Mozambique amid a wealth of natural resources; the corruption and an ineffective local governance. The current and potential assistance to Mozambique”s flagging counterterrorism efforts on the part of African states – SADC’s members and USA are also reviewed though Washington while supporting SADC’s military operations limited itself until recently to periodical participation of the US special forces in the training of Mozambican security detachments to fight local jihadists.

The two-decade-long U.S.-led military mission in Afghanistan ended in August 2021 after a chaotic departure of the NATO troops. Power in Kabul transferred back to the Taliban, the political force the United States and its allies tried to defeat. In its failure to achieve a lasting change, the Western mission in Afghanistan is similar to that of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. These two missions in Afghanistan had many things in common, specifically their unsuccessful counterinsurgency efforts. However, both managed to achieve limited success in their attempts to impose their style of governance on Afghanistan as well. The current study compares and contrasts some of the crucial aspects of counterinsurgency operations conducted by the Soviet and Western forces during their respective missions, such as special forces actions, propaganda activities, and dealing with crucial social issues. Interestingly, when the Soviets withdrew in 1988, they left Afghanistan worse off, but the US-backed opposition forces subsequently made the situation even worse. On the other hand, the Western mission left the country better off in 2021, and violence subsided when power in the country was captured by the Taliban, which the United States has opposed.

Abstract Definitional work has authorized vaguely articulated, unending, US-led terror wars, constituting amorphous, violent, global terrain, spatially, temporally, and discursively. Mapping the terrain in which this violence is enacted helps us examine re-emergences of violence, including entangling Indigenous communities inside the United States—particularly as they engage acts of protest—within the same colonial machines of terror deployed in the name of war outside those boundaries. This essay maps these circulations as they coalesce at one point: the use of battle grade military equipment and former special operations teams against Indigenous protesters at the Standing Rock #NoDAPL resistance fight in 2016 and 2017. As Native protestors were transformed into jihadists and assaulted at Standing Rock, frames of savage indigeneity permeated boundaries from the terror wars’ battle sites of Pakistan and Afghanistan back to the United States. In this cartography, conditions of possibility for governing global communities are remapped. The inter/national crossroads expand and are weaponized into new necropolitical tools of colonization. Examining this violent landscape and engaging with histories of settler colonialism as well as the spatial, temporal, and discursive power of definition, this essay explores rhetorical cartography as the ground for mapping new rhetorical terrains and inter/national coalition against ongoing materializations of colonialism.

This special issue of the Industrial and Systems Engineering Review once again showcases the top papers from the annual General Donald R. Keith memorial capstone conference at the United States Military Academy in West Point, NY. After consideration of over 40 academic papers, the eight listed in this issue were selected for publication in this journal. Topics addressed in the papers span a wide spectrum, however the distinguishing aspects of each paper included a common trend; each of these papers clearly implemented some aspect of systems or industrial engineering underpinned by thoughtful analysis. The papers focus on three general bodies of knowledge: systems engineering, modeling and simulation, and system dynamics modeling.Systems engineering topics included two unique contributions. The work of Byers et. al examined the trades between weapon weight and weapon lethality. Bares et. al. examined computing and storage needs of a simulation-intense analytical organization, considering the processing, storage, and growth that such an organization would need to consider as part of their IT solution. Three papers created unique contributions primarily through modeling and simulation studies. Grubaugh et al. explored anomaly detection in categorical data, a notoriously difficult problem domain. Bieger et al. used discrete event simulation to analyze rail yard operations in support of military deployments. Kumar and Mittal analyzed the feasibility and benefits of alternative organizational structures to support cyber defense, primarily using a value modeling approach. Lastly, applied system dynamics modeling and research produced several outstanding papers, primarily across social science problems. Led by the extensive advising efforts of Jillian Wisniewski, three of her students contributed notably. Ferrer and Wisniewski used system dynamics to understand the growth of Boko Haram over the course of the last decade. Riedlinger and Wisniewski applied system dynamics to better understand the replication of mass killings across the United States. Lastly, Provaznik and Wisniewski explored the diffusion of news and information using system dynamics, analyzing important social problems created by echo chambers for ideologies. Please join me in congratulating our authors, especially the young undergraduate scholars that provided the primary intellectual efforts that created the contents of this issue.COL Paul F. Evangelista, PhD, PE

Relevance and subject of research. The circulation of firearms as a source of increased danger is subject to legal regulation and control in the Russian Federation. The use of weapons by police officers is no exception. The norms of the Federal Law of February 7, 2011 No. 3-FZ “About the Police” (hereinafter referred to as the Law “About the Police”) refer to the achievements of domestic administrative science as a result of the work of specialists. In systemic connection with the norms of criminal law, they regulate the conditions and limits for the use of coercive measures by police officers, including firearms. The fundamental ideas of the activities of the Russian police have successfully cooperated with the norms of international law. On the contrary, in the socalled “leading” democratic state – the United States of America, such cooperation does not look well-coordinated, which the Author substantiates when studying the origins of the right of citizens of this state to own firearms, the regulatory regulation of the circulation of weapons in the United States, the negative consequences of this regulation (based on research by American scientists and statistical data), the activities of the US police to counter armed attacks and its legal regulation. One of the US attempts to comply with international law in this area is analyzed, namely the adopted new policy of the US Customs and Border Protection on the use of force, including firearms.The purpose of the study is to determine the state of legal regulation of the circulation of civilian firearms in the United States, the use of these weapons as a coercive measure by police officers in order to identify its positive aspects, in the presence of which the decision on the possibility / impossibility of their introduction into Russian legislation. This led to the setting of the following tasks: to study the constitutional foundations of the right to own firearms by US citizens (historical aspect); to determine the current state of legal regulation of civilian circulation of firearms in the United States and its consequences; analyze the activities of the US police to counter armed attacks and its legal regulation, evaluate them and determine the prospects for their improvement; identify the provisions of American legislation that are of scientific interest, and the possibility / impossibility of their implementation in Russian legislation.The methodological basis of the study was a dialectical approach to the scientific knowledge of social relations associated with the circulation of firearms, the implementation of their state regulation, analysis and synthesis of the results obtained during the study, which made it possible to formulate and substantiate the conclusions. Among the special methods used in the study are the method of studying normative legal acts and documents, the empirical method, the method of processing and analyzing data, and their generalization. Findings. The study shows that the constitutional foundations for the right to own firearms by US citizens developed simultaneously with the emergence of statehood: first in individual states, and then in the very union of these states formed into a single US government. The existing multi-layered legal framework for regulating the circulation of firearms has created a wide range of owners with a relatively simple system of access, which negatively affects the criminal environment, in which armed attacks with mass casualties are of high importance. Cases of armed attacks and other negative illegal acts to a certain extent influenced the processes of militarization of the police, the creation and strengthening of special operations units, the adoption by the police of various types of military equipment, weapons and special means. Detailed legal regulation of the use of lethal force by the police is developing belatedly. The 2014 adoption of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Manual did not prompt other law enforcement agencies to adopt similar rules, indicating the fragmentation of U.S. law enforcement. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection Guidelines on the use of force is of particular scientific interest, and after its careful analysis, it is possible to introduce certain provisions into the legal regulation of the activities of the Russian police, especially the use of lethal force. The fundamental ideas of police activity developed in Russia can be recognized as certain guidelines for the development of the American police. The relatively small number of firearm owners in Russia and the high requirements for the circulation of firearms are a deterrent to the negative developments taking place in the United States.

The military parachutists are responsible of special air operations who require certain capabilities in their physical condition, due to their intense professional career. The analysis of oxygen con-sumption (VO2) and heart rate (HR) allows the determination of aerobic (VT1) and anaerobic (VT2) thresholds and used to study the adequacy of the organism to exercise and in the analysis of sporting performance. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of tactical equipment on the stress test performance of elite parachutists. 10 parachutists parti-cipated in the study, between 22 and 36 years old with an average of 27.75 years (±4.20). Anthropometric values were determined of: weight 75.69 kg (±8.79), height 173.34 cm (±5.72) and body mass index (BMI) 25.23 (±2.98). Each one, performed 2 maximal treadmill exercise testing: one a conventional stress test (A) and another with the tactical equipment (weight 20 kg) (B). We obtained maximum oxygen consumption (Metalyzer 3B) and monitored the electrocardiogram continuously. The test started at a speed of 6km/h and a slope of 1%. The results of the two test were compared. The average value and standard deviation (SD) of different variables with equipment (B) and without it (A) and p-value were obtained: velocity (A: 14.80±3.29; B: 11.50±1.42 Km/h; p=0.073), HR (A: 182.7±58.62; B: 177.75±9.71 b/m; p=0.038), VO2 (A: 51.75±13.60; B: 54.00±30.82 ml/Kg/min; p=0.891). Al-so, the values of ventilatory thresholds: VT1 and VT2 of both tests were obtained, with sig-nificant differences. Tactical equipment causes a decrease in stress test performance with changes in VT1 and VT2.

During the War on Terror, the United States military has been conducting an increasing number of foreign campaigns by remote control using drones—also called unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs)—to extend the reach of military power and augment the technical precision of targeted strikes while minimizing bodily risk to American combatants. Stationed on bases throughout the southwest, operators fly weaponized drones over the Middle East. Viewing the battle zone through a computer screen that presents them with imagery captured from a drone-mounted camera, these combatants participate in war from a safe distance via an interface that resembles a video game. Increasingly, this participation takes the form of targeted killing. Despite their relative physical safety, in 2008 reports began mounting that like boots-on-the-ground combatants, many drone operators seek the services of chaplains or other mental health professionals to deal with the emotional toll of their work (Associated Press; Schachtman). Questions about the nature of the stress or trauma that drone operators experience have become a trope in news coverage of drone warfare (see Bumiller; Bowden; Saleton; Axe). This was exemplified in May 2013, when former Air Force drone pilot Brandon Bryant became a public figure after speaking to National Public Radio about his remorse for participating in targeted killing strikes and his subsequent struggle with post-traumatic stress (PTS) (Greene and McEvers). Stories like Bryant’s express American culture’s struggle to understand the role screen-mediated, remotely controlled killing plays in shifting the location of combatants’s sense of moral agency. That is, their sense of their ability to act based on their own understanding of right and wrong. Historically, one of the primary ways that psychiatry has conceptualized combat trauma has been as combatants’s psychological response losing their sense of moral agency on the battlefield (Lifton).This articleuses the popular science fiction novel Ender's Game as an analytic lens through which to examine the ways that screen-mediated warfare may result in combat trauma by investigating the ways in which it may compromise moral agency. The goal of this analysis is not to describe the present state of drone operators’s experience (see Asaro), but rather to compare and contrast contemporary public discourses on the psychological impact of screen-mediated war with the way it is represented in one of the most influential science fiction novels of all times (The book won the Nebula Award in 1985, the Hugo Award in 1986, and appears on both the Modern Library 100 Best Novels and American Library Association’s “100 Best Books for Teens” lists). In so doing, the paper aims to counter prevalent modes of critical analysis of screen-mediated war that cannot account for drone operators’s trauma. For decades, critics of postmodern warfare have denounced how fighting from inside tanks, the cockpits of planes, or at office desks has removed combatants from the experiences of risk and endangerment that historically characterized war (see Gray; Levidow & Robins). They suggest that screen-mediation enables not only physical but also cognitive and emotional distance from the violence of war-fighting by circumscribing it in a “magic circle.” Virtual worlds scholars adopted the term “magic circle” from cultural historian Johan Huizinga, who described it as the membrane that separates the time and space of game-play from those of real life (Salen and Zimmerman). While military scholars have long recognized that only 2% of soldiers can kill without hesitation (Grossman), critics of “video game wars” suggest that screen-mediation puts war in a magic circle, thereby creating cyborg human-machine assemblages capable of killing in cold blood. In other words, these critics argue that screen-mediated war distributes agency between humans and machines in such a way that human combatants do not feel morally responsible for killing. In contrast, Ender’s Game suggests that even when militaries utilize video game aesthetics to create weapons control interfaces, screen-mediation alone ultimately cannot blur the line between war and play and thereby psychically shield cyborg soldiers from combat trauma.Orson Scott Card’s 1985 novel Ender’s Game—and the 2013 film adaptation—tells the story of a young boy at an elite military academy. Set several decades after a terrible war between humans and an alien race called the buggers, the novel follows the life of a boy named Ender. At age 6, recruiters take Andrew “Ender” Wiggin from his family to begin military training. He excels in all areas and eventually enters officer training. There he encounters a new video game-like simulator in which he commands space ship battalions against increasingly complex configurations of bugger ships. At the novel’s climax, Ender's mentor, war hero Mazer Rackham, brings him to a room crowded with high-ranking military personnel in order to take his final test on the simulator. In order to win Ender opts to launch a massive bomb, nicknamed “Little Doctor”, at the bugger home world. The image on his screen of a ball of space dust where once sat the enemy planet is met by victory cheers. Mazer then informs Ender that since he began officer training, he has been remotely controlling real ships. The video game war was, "Real. Not a game" (Card 297); Ender has exterminated the bugger species. But rather than join the celebration, Ender is devastated to learn he has committed "xenocide." Screen-mediation, the novel shows, can enable people to commit acts that they would otherwise find heinous.US military advisors have used the story to set an agenda for research and development in augmented media. For example, Dr. Michael Macedonia, Chief Technology Officer of the Army Office for Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation told a reporter for the New York Times that Ender's Game "has had a lot of influence on our thinking" about how to use video game-like technologies in military operations (Harmon; Silberman; Mead). Many recent programs to develop and study video game-like military training simulators have been directly inspired by the book and its promise of being able to turn even a six-year-old into a competent combatant through well-structured human-computer interaction (Mead). However, it would appear that the novel’s moral regarding the psychological impact of actual screen-mediated combat did not dissuade military investment in drone warfare. The Air Force began using drones for surveillance during the Gulf War, but during the Global War on Terror they began to be equipped with weapons. By 2010, the US military operated over 7,000 drones, including over 200 weapons-ready Predator and Reaper drones. It now invests upwards of three-billion dollars a year into the drone program (Zucchino). While there are significant differences between contemporary drone warfare and the plot of Ender's Game—including the fact that Ender is a child, that he alone commands a fleet, that he thinks he is playing a game, and that, except for a single weapon of mass destruction, he and his enemies are equally well equipped—for this analysis, I will focus on their most important similarities: both Ender and actual drone operators work on teams for long shifts using video game-like technology to remotely control vehicles in aerial combat against an enemy. After he uses the Little Doctor, Mazer and Graff, Ender's long-time training supervisors, first work to circumvent his guilt by reframing his actions as heroic. “You're a hero, Ender. They've seen what you did, you and the others. I don't think there's a government on Earth that hasn't voted you their highest metal.” “I killed them all, didn't I?” Ender asked. “All who?” asked Graff. “The buggers? That was the idea.” Mazer leaned in close. “That's what the war was for.” “All their queens. So I killed all their children, all of everything.” “They decided that when they attacked us. It wasn't your fault. It's what had to happen.” Ender grabbed Mazer's uniform and hung onto it, pulling him down so they were face to face. “I didn't want to kill them all. I didn't want to kill anybody! I'm not a killer! […] but you made me do it, you tricked me into it!” He was crying. He was out of control. (Card 297–8)The novel up to this point has led us to believe that Ender at the very least understands that what he does in the game will be asked of him in real life. But his traumatic response to learning the truth reveals that he was in the magic circle. When he thinks he is playing a game, succeeding is a matter of ego: he wants to be the best, to live up to the expectations of his trainers that he is humanity’s last hope. When the magic circle is broken, Ender reconsiders his decision to use the Little Doctor. Tactics he could justify to win the game, reframed as real military tactics, threaten his sense of himself as a moral agent. Being told he is a hero provides no solace.Card wrote the novel during the Cold War, when computers were coming to play an increasingly large role in military operations. Historians of military technology have shown that during this time human behavior began to be defined in machine-like, functionalist terms by scientists working on cybernetic systems (see Edwards; Galison; Orr). Human skills were defined as components of large technological systems, such as tanks and anti-aircraft weaponry: a human skill was treated as functionally the same as a machine one. The only issue of importance was how all the components could work together in order to meet strategic goals—a cybernetic problem. The reasons that Mazer and Graff have for lying to Ender suggest that the author believed that as a form of technical augmentation, screen-mediation can be used to evacuate individual moral agency and submit human will to the command of the larger cybernetic system. Issues of displaced agency in the military cyborg assemblage are apparent in the following quote, in which Mazer compares Ender himself to the bomb he used to destroy the bugger home world: “You had to be a weapon, Ender. Like a gun, like the Little Doctor, functioning perfectly but not knowing what you were aimed at. We aimed you. We're responsible. If there was something wrong, we did it” (298). Questions of distributed agency have also surfaced in the drone debates. Government and military leaders have attempted to depersonalize drone warfare by assuring the American public that the list of targets is meticulously researched: drones kill those who we need killed. Drone warfare, media theorist Peter Asaro argues, has “created new and complex forms of human-machine subjectivity” that cannot be understood by considering the agency of the technology alone because it is distributed between humans and machines (25). While our leaders’s decisions about who to kill are central to this new cyborg subjectivity, the operators who fire the weapons nevertheless experience at least a retrospective sense of agency. As phenomenologist John Protevi notes, in the wake of wars fought by modern military networks, many veterans diagnosed with PTS still express guilt and personal responsibility for the outcomes of their participation in killing (Protevi). Mazer and Graff explain that the two qualities that make Ender such a good weapon also create an imperative to lie to him: his compassion and his innocence. For his trainers, compassion means a capacity to truly think like others, friend or foe, and understand their motivations. Graff explains that while his trainers recognized Ender's compassion as an invaluable tool, they also recognized that it would preclude his willingness to kill.It had to be a trick or you couldn't have done it. It's the bind we were in. We had to have a commander with so much empathy that he would think like the buggers, understand them and anticipate them. So much compassion that he could win the love of his underlings and work with them like a perfect machine, as perfect as the buggers. But somebody with that much compassion could never be the killer we needed. Could never go into battle willing to win at all costs. If you knew, you couldn't do it. If you were the kind of person who would do it even if you knew, you could never have understood the buggers well enough. (298)In learning that the game was real, Ender learns that he was not merely coming to understand a programmed simulation of bugger behavior, but their actual psychology. Therefore, his compassion has not only helped him understand the buggers’ military strategy, but also to identify with them.Like Ender, drone operators spend weeks or months following their targets, getting to know them and their routines from a God’s eye perspective. They both also watch the repercussions of their missions on screen. Unlike fighter pilots who drop bombs and fly away, drone operators use high-resolution cameras and fly much closer to the ground both when flying and assessing the results of their strikes. As one drone operator interviewed by the Los Angeles Times explained, "When I flew the B-52, it was at 30,000 to 40,000 feet, and you don't even see the bombs falling … Here, you're a lot closer to the actual fight, or that's the way it seems" (Zucchino). Brookings Institute scholar Peter Singer has argued that in this way screen mediation actually enables a more intimate experience of violence for drone operators than airplane pilots (Singer).The second reason Ender’s trainers give for lying is that they need someone not only compassionate, but also innocent of the horrors of war. The war veteran Mazer explains: “And it had to be a child, Ender,” said Mazer. “You were faster than me. Better than me. I was too old and cautious. Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. But you didn't know. We made sure you didn't know" (298). When Ender discovers what he has done, he loses not only his innocence but his sense of himself as a moral agent. After such a trauma, his heart is no longer whole.Actual drone operators are, of course, not kept in a magic circle, innocent of the repercussions of their actions. Nor do they otherwise feel as though they are playing, as several have publicly stated. Instead, they report finding drone work tedious, and some even play video games for fun (Asaro). However, Air Force recruitment advertising makes clear analogies between the skills they desire and those of video game play (Brown). Though the first generations of drone operators were pulled from the ranks of flight pilots, in 2009 the Air Force began training them from the ground. Many drone operators, then, enter the role having no other military service and may come into it believing, on some level, that their work will be play.Recent military studies of drone operators have raised doubts about whether drone operators really experience high rates of trauma, suggesting that the stresses they experience are seated instead in occupational issues like long shifts (Ouma, Chappelle, and Salinas; Chappelle, Psy, and Salinas). But several critics of these studies have pointed out that there is a taboo against speaking about feelings of regret and trauma in the military in general and among drone operators in particular. A PTS diagnosis can end a military career; given the Air Force’s career-focused recruiting emphasis, it makes sense that few would come forward (Dao). Therefore, it is still important to take drone operator PTS seriously and try to understand how screen-mediation augments their experience of killing.While critics worry that warfare mediated by a screen and joystick leads to a “‘Playstation’ mentality towards killing” (Alston 25), Ender's Game presents a theory of remote-control war wherein this technological redistribution of the act of killing does not, in itself, create emotional distance or evacuate the killer’s sense of moral agency. In order to kill, Ender must be distanced from reality as well. While drone operators do not work shielded by the magic circle—and therefore do not experience the trauma of its dissolution—every day when they leave the cyborg assemblage of their work stations and rejoin their families they still have to confront themselves as individual moral agents and bear their responsibility for ending lives. In both these scenarios, a human agent’s combat trauma serves to remind us that even when their bodies are physically safe, war is hell for those who fight. This paper has illustrated how a science fiction story can be used as an analytic lens for thinking through contemporary discourses about human-technology relationships. However, the US military is currently investing in drones that are increasingly autonomous from human operators. This redistribution of agency may reduce incidence of PTS among operators by decreasing their role in, and therefore sense of moral responsibility for, killing (Axe). Reducing mental illness may seem to be a worthwhile goal, but in a world wherein militaries distribute the agency for killing to machines in order to reduce the burden on humans, societies will have to confront the fact that combatants’s trauma cannot be a compass by which to measure the morality of wars. Too often in the US media, the primary stories that Americans are told about the violence of their country’s wars are those of their own combatants—not only about their deaths and physical injuries, but their suicide and PTS. To understand war in such a world, we will need new, post-humanist stories where the cyborg assemblage and not the individual is held accountable for killing and morality is measured in lives taken, not rates of mental illness. ReferencesAlston, Phillip. “Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, Addendum: Study on Targeted Killings.” United Nations Human Rights Council (2010). Asaro, Peter M. “The Labor of Surveillance and Bureaucratized Killing: New Subjectivities of Military Drone Operators”. Social Semiotics 23.2 (2013): 196-22. Associated Press. “Predator Pilots Suffering War Stress.” Military.com 2008. Axe, David. “How to Prevent Drone Pilot PTSD: Blame the ’Bot.” Wired June 2012.Bowden, Mark. “The Killing Machines: How to Think about Drones.” The Atlantic Sep. 2013.Brown, Melissa T. Enlisting Masculinity: The Construction of Gender in US Military Recruiting Advertising during the All-Volunteer Force. London: Oxford University Press, 2012. Bumiller, Elisabeth. “Air Force Drone Operators Report High Levels of Stress.” New York Times 18 Dec. 2011: n. pag. Card, Orson Scott. Ender’s Game. Tom Doherty Associates, Inc., 1985. Chappelle, Wayne, D. Psy, and Amber Salinas. “Psychological Health Screening of Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) Operators and Supporting Units.” Paper presented at the Symposium on Mental Health and Well-Being across the Military Spectrum, Bergen, Norway, 12 April 2011: 1–12. Dao, James. “Drone Pilots Are Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do.” New York Times 22 Feb. 2013: n. pag. Edwards, Paul N. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.Galison, Peter. “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision.” Critical Inquiry 21.1 (1994): 228.Gray, Chris Hables “Posthuman Soldiers in Postmodern War.” Body & Society 9.4 (2003): 215–226. 27 Nov. 2010.Greene, David, and Kelly McEvers. “Former Air Force Pilot Has Cautionary Tales about Drones.” National Public Radio 10 May 2013.Grossman, David. On Killing. Revised. Boston: Back Bay Books, 2009. Harmon, Amy. “More than Just a Game, But How Close to Reality?” New York Times 3 Apr. 2003: n. pag. Levidow, Les, and Robins. Cyborg Worlds: The Military Information Society. London: Free Association Books, 1989. Lifton, Robert Jay. Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans: Neither Victims nor Executioners. New York: Random House, 1973. Mead, Corey. War Play: Video Games and the Future of Armed Conflict. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. Orr, Jackie. Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.Ouma, J.A., W.L. Chappelle, and A. Salinas. Facets of Occupational Burnout among US Air Force Active Duty and National Guard/Reserve MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper Operators. Air Force Research Labs Technical Report AFRL-SA-WP-TR-2011-0003. Wright-Patterson AFB, OH: Air Force Research Laboratory. 2011.Protevi, John. “Affect, Agency and Responsibility: The Act of Killing in the Age of Cyborgs.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7.3 (2008): 405–413. Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Saleton, William. “Ghosts in the Machine: Do Remote-Control War Pilots Get Combat Stress?” Slate.com Aug. 2008. Schachtman, Nathan. “Shrinks Help Drone Pilots Cope with Robo-Violence.” Wired Aug. 2008.Silberman, Steve. “The War Room.” Wired Sep. 2004: 1–5.Singer, P.W. Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Penguin Press, 2009. Zucchino, David. “Drone Pilots Have Front-Row Seat on War, from Half a World Away.” Los Angeles Times 21 Feb. 2010: n. pag.

Abstract Cybersecurity poses new questions for old alliances. These questions emerge with special force in the case of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Russian Federation wields substantial cyber capabilities, but NATO members have been ambivalent about stating what sorts of attacks would trigger the North Atlantic Treaty's Article 5 collective self-defense provisions. Nevertheless, NATO officials state that there are some attacks that would trigger Article 5. This leads to a puzzle: why would an explicit alliance guarantee designed to ensure collective defense against certain forms of attack be informally extended to include others? Because the policy of the United States toward such questions will likely be of great significance in determining NATO policy, we use a series of survey experiments to test American public opinion regarding support for defending allies and friendly countries against cyber operations. Respondents are likelier to support a response to an attack that causes fatalities and when the victim has a treaty alliance with the United States. In contrast, support falls if US participation is likely to provoke further retaliation or the target attacked is civilian rather than military.

In May 2019, the author was awarded the Australian Tactical Medical Association (ATMA) study grant to attend the Special Operations Medicine Scientific Assembly (SOMSA) 2019 in Charlotte, North Carolina in the United States of America. Whilst in the U.S. the author had the opportunity to hear many talks, attend labs and talk to many first responders in high threat and austere environments to learn about how they operate, and the lessons learned from their experiences. This report highlights the two objectives of the study grant: Record the key content and lessons learned by attendance at SOMSA 2019. Discuss techniques utilized and lessons learned by first responders operating in high threat environments and mass casualty incidents. The SOMSA brings together many like-minded pre-hospital, tactical, wilderness, austere, disaster and deployed medicine operators from all around the world to share their learnings with a primary goal to advance the art and science of special operations medical care. It is a great opportunity for military and civilian providers to learn, network and engage with industry partners showcasing innovative products and technology.

I will begin my introductory thoughts with a touch of humour. Just over a hundred years ago in the Austro-Hungarian army, it was not desirable for young officers to marry too soon and start a family. Their thoughts had to stay clear and their hearts in the right place – in the country, not the girl. A Slovenian soldier today can thus be happy to be able to marry and have a family. This cursory and humorous historical comment also touches on the content described in more detail and more seriously in the following pages of this special issue. Military families have been an important topic in different fields of science around the world for at least 50 years, while Slovenia is breaking new ground by putting down what is currently known and taking a comprehensive approach to studying military families. Since July 2019, the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Ljubljana, with the cooperation of The Peace Institute, has been carrying out the project Military Specific Risk and Protective Factors for Military Family Health Outcomes with the support of the Slovenian Research Agency. The researchers are very grateful to the Slovenian Armed Forces for supporting these research efforts, and to the editorial board of Contemporary Military Challenges for being willing to devote the entire issue to this important topic which, we have to admit, represents a support, although a marginal, activity alongside other military challenges. We are also aware, however, that support is very important in any fight, and may significantly contribute to victory. The introduction identifies the study subject of this issue of the publication. Family is placed in a civilian environment, but where do we place and how do we understand a military family? There are no military bases in Slovenia in which families are subject to military socialization; there is no intertwining of the military hierarchy with the social status of a family. In a welfare state like Slovenia, military families are not offered any special benefits that would set them apart from other families in the civilian environment. In the United States, for example, military families are often physically separated from the civilian environment and subject to military requirements; in Estonia, the term military family is associated with former Soviet officer families; in Sweden, the term is neither known nor used. And in Slovenia? The Service in the Slovenian Armed Forces Act, adopted in 2007, which significantly contributed to the legalization of comprehensive support for members of the Slovenian Armed Forces, defined military families indirectly by listing those, in addition to SAF members, entitled to comprehensive care. Our research shows that a military family is understood as a family in which at least one family member is employed by the Slovenian Armed Forces. We are talking of different forms of military families – it can be a parent or a child employed by the SAF; it can be a nuclear or a multigenerational family; a family in which both parents are employed by the SAF; or a family in which the military boots are worn by either the father or the mother. A military family is more than the legally defined core family of a SAF member. It is a question of identity and military culture which is passed (or not) on to the immediate or extended family. Likewise, the challenges and problems faced by SAF members are passed on to the family and may lead to mental, emotional and physical health problems, as well as poor interpersonal relationships and relationships between parents and children. Different risk factors are present in the wider society, not just the military, yet the military profession is particularly demanding. With regard to the opinion of a part of civil society, people face risks in many different professions in which parents are often away on business trips; moreover, work overload today is very common. A peculiarity of the military profession, however, is that parents are not away on temporary duty for only a few days, but are absent for several months, sometimes repeatedly. The tasks that military parents must perform during their absences are not daily routine obligations, but are often associated with an increased level of threat and the possibility of injury or even death. It is not uncommon for parents to be absent at the time of their child’s birth, and perhaps see the child for the first time when they are no longer a newborn. Work overload is not measured in hours of work during working hours, but in weeks in the field, mud, cold, wind, heat, and other adverse conditions. Work risk is not defined as the possibility of a work accident, but is a conscious decision of an individual who is willing to lose their life while performing tasks to achieve the goals of our nation. At this point, it would be difficult to say that all of the above only affects SAF members. It significantly affects their entire families. Sacrifice, coordination, stress, fear of losing a family member, and a range of other emotions are present in the entire military family, from children and partners to grandparents. At the time of writing this editorial, SAF members are facing a new challenge, as they represent one of the most important elements in the fight against the SARS-CoV-2 virus epidemic. Within the project Military Specific Risk and Protective Factors for Military Family Health Outcomes, a cross-sectional study was conducted in April 2020, in which it was determined how military families have adapted their daily lives to these extremely unusual circumstances. Based on the opinions of the respondents, it can be concluded that military families are quite resilient and adaptable. However, they are not indestructible, and would sometimes welcome support, whether coming from friends, colleagues, or in the form of formal support from the SAF or the state. Particularly vulnerable are families with pre-school and young children of compulsory school age, for whom measures at the time of the epidemic were least suitable and appropriate. In a time of quarantine and social self-isolation, during the closure of kindergartens and schools, and without the support of grandparents, military activities, such as several days of absence and military exercises, can a difficult challenge for a family and can lead to health problems. Satisfied and healthy military families are certainly a good basis for the successful and dedicated work of SAF members. Most likely, this is an important factor in deciding to continue one's career in the Slovenian Armed Forces. At the end, I hope you don’t mind, dear members of the Slovenian Armed Forces, if I address you directly. It is not just you who are serving the homeland, but your entire families who support you emotionally, logistically, organizationally, and in other ways; who adapt their everyday lives to your work requirements; subordinate their careers to your military mission; do not blame you when you are away on international operations and missions just when your child is celebrating their birthday or needs comfort because their pet has died. Again and again, in an upright manner, although sometimes with bitterness, they accept your departures and arrivals, being aware that soldiers are calmer, more successful, more confident in performing their tasks, and consequently safer by knowing they are supported by their families, an invisible pillar of the military profession.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited
This thesis presents two prescriptive models for approaching challenges to special operations forces with regard to personnel recovery in an urban environment. It begins by developing a model for overt recovery methods, using McRaven's model of Special Operations as the foundation. This model is then tested against three different case studies from operations in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993. The original six principles proposed by McRaven are complimented with four newly-prescribed principles that account for the interactions of the isolated personnel. Following this analysis, a nonconventional assisted recovery model is presented for clandestine personnel recovery methods. This model borrows the relative superiority concept from McRaven's theory, but proposes six different principles. This model is evaluated using three case studies from the World War II era through Operation IRAQI FREEDOM. These cases support the idea that while the urban operational environment may vary across time and space, the principles supporting successful personnel recovery operations endure.
Major, United States Army
Major, United States Air Force

Thesis (M.S. in Defense Analysis)--Naval Postgraduate School, December 2008.
Thesis Advisor(s): O'Connell, Robert. "December 2008." Description based on title screen as viewed on February 2, 2009. Includes bibliographical references (p. 43-45). Also available in print.

Thesis (M.A. in Security Studies (Homeland Sceurity and Defense))--Naval Postgraduate School, March 2005.
Thesis Advisor(s): Christopher Bellavita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 85-89). Also available online.

Thesis--Air Command and Staff College, Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, April 2005.
"April 2005." Thesis advisor: Dr. Bert L. Frandsen. Performed by Air University Press (AUL/LP), Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Ala. "AU/ACSC/6244/2004-05." Includes bibliographical references (p. 29-30). Also available online from the Air University Research Information Management System (AURIMS) and the DTIC Online Web sites.

The US military has proven its strengths many times over through its ability to dominate opponents on the conventional battlefield. However, when it comes to irregular wars and insurgent conflicts, which are defined by enemies who conduct war from the shadows and refuse to meet on the open field, finding success has been far more difficult. The nature and dynamics of these unconventional wars are dramatically different from the conventional warfare realm, and require innovative approaches and rethinking of many long held conceptions of waging war. Conducting unconventional warfare has been the core mission of US Army Special Forces (USSF) since they were founded in 1952. Throughout a relatively short history, USSF have shown a broad utility in conducting operations with indigenous military, paramilitary, and civilian personnel in "irregular wars" and low intensity conflicts (LICs), and thus Special Forces have been widely regarded as the preeminent experts in this particular field of warfare. Now more than ever, the capabilities of Special Forces are invaluable in supporting US national security strategy, continuing the Global War on Terror (GWOT), and supporting efforts to transform military capabilities for irregular warfare and unconventional conflicts. USSF are now faced with a difficult challenge: high demand and operations tempo require that USSF must find new ways to more effectively and efficiently employ their skills in unconventional environments. In order to enhance the capabilities of USSF in conducting unconventional warfare and counterinsurgency, this thesis proposes that USSF develop a training program that allows recruitment and selection of both indigenous personnel and US foreign-born as auxiliaries and surrogates to USSF operations. Training would take place in the US and would be for the explicit purpose of creating indigenous cadres for assisting Special Forces Operational Detachment Alphas (SFODAs) in developing operational/security forces and intelligence networks at the local level in order to create long-term stability in unconventional conflict areas.

The United States military employs multipurpose canines as force multipliers. A newly developed baseline audiology program applicable to noise effects on the hearing threshold for these dogs has just been developed by the University of Cincinnati FETCHLAB using brainstem auditory evoked potentials to detect estimated threshold shifts in this population. Dogs that are routinely deployed are subject to consistent exposure to noise in the field. Few investigations have focused on the effects of transport noise on the auditory system in multipurpose dogs. The consequence of these dogs having a significant hearing threshold shift is a failure of the dog to properly respond to voice commands and to miss critical acoustic cues while on target. This chapter specifically discusses the baseline protocol for audiological testing of special operations’ multipurpose canines related to helicopter transport.