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This chapter focuses on the covert side of the Vietnam War. Secrecy famously helped Richard Nixon cope with dovish domestic opposition toward the end of the war. In contrast, the chapter highlights the role of covert intervention in helping both sides compete in Vietnam while keeping the war limited during the earlier Johnson years (1964–1968). Even as he greatly expanded U.S. military activity in Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson acted to avoid provoking a larger war with China or the Soviet Union. Covert U.S. military operations in places like Laos, though an open secret, were a way to prosecute a counterinsurgency while keeping a lid on hostilities. China and the Soviet Union similarly sought to control escalation dangers through covertness. Both communist patrons provided military personnel covertly to improve air defense in North Vietnam. The chapter suggests that all three outside powers worked hard to avoid public and acknowledged clashes up through 1968.

This chapter examines military activity and violence, as manifest in aspects of the archaeological and historical records for medieval times in the central Sahel and north-west Europe. It explores the contribution of military innovations to political centralisation, the prevalence of fortifications and town walling, and the widespread occurrence of slave raiding. It highlights the individual agency and motives in attracting followers for one's army, in building up stables of horses for prestige and power, and in building walls for purposes both definitional and defensive.

The first half of this chapter addresses the passage of warships with a focus on the exercise of that right in areas over which a coastal state has sovereignty: the territorial sea, straits, and archipelagic waters. It examines the respective rights and duties of the coastal state and the flag state of the naval vessel in relation to innocent passage and transit passage. A further section considers special requirements for submarines and for nuclear-powered or equipped vessels. In the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and on the high seas, the range of permissible military activities beyond passage increases. The second half of the chapter addresses this broader category of activities. Issues surrounding military activities in the EEZ, weapons tests on the high seas, and the peace-time use of security zones are all considered.

This chapter discusses naval forces in the exclusive economic zone (EEZ). There are no corresponding limitations on military activities in the EEZ or high seas. Consequently, coastal states that seek to limit military activities beyond the territorial sea have resorted to a host of legal arguments and interpretations that promote their goal, generally by trying to squeeze military activities into the definition of activities over which the coastal state has some legitimate competence.

This chapter investigates how variation in the political-military balance of power in a state influences its military activities and effectiveness. It compares two cases of autocratic states that show characteristics of shared power and political dominance, respectively: Egypt in the mid-1960s and Egypt in the 1970s. It is believed that the balance of power between military and political leaders profoundly affected military effectiveness through its influences on structures and processes important to organizing military activity and preparing for war. In 1973, Egypt has been able to obtain significant political, strategic, operational, and tactical integration in its military activity. Its performance made the most of its resources in men and equipment to attain its political objectives. The Egypt case generally indicates that special attention must be paid to the specific dynamics of civil-military relations: power relations between political and military leaders are fundamental in predicting the state's military effectiveness.

This chapter details the events leading up to the ratification of the 1967 Space Treaty. The Space Treaty was born from the need to determine the legal status of celestial bodies before man’s landing on the moon, and based on a tacit agreement on the part of the super powers to forgo territorial claims and military activities on all celestial bodies. In converting into legally binding rules non-binding norms contained in successive General Assembly resolutions on the legal regime of outer space and celestial bodies and on international co-operation in their exploration and use, the treaty now provides a proper legal framework for future activities of States in this New World of the space age.

When the first host-to-host message was sent across the ARPANET in October 1969, few could have fully anticipated the degree to which the internet, and now the internet of things, would explode across the globe and revolutionize nearly every facet of public and private life. Nor could anyone have predicted the degree to which it would establish an entirely new realm—cyberspace—through which States could engage in traditional, and not-so-traditional, statecraft and conflict. However, it is now clear that States have fully embraced cyber operations as a means to pursue their national interests and gain low-cost asymmetric advantages over their adversaries. Cyberspace has become a new instrument of statecraft and presents novel and challenging questions about the applicability of existing legal orders. Adversaries are leveraging and exploiting the numerous technical, policy, and legal ambiguities surrounding cyberspace operations to conduct a range of intrusive and increasing aggressive activities. While some of these cyber operations have been conducted as part of ongoing armed conflicts, the vast majority have taken place in the so-called gray zone—the far more uncertain space between war and peace. Also known as gray-zone challenges or gray-zone conflicts, these activities are more accurately understood as actions that are coercive and aggressive in nature and rise above normal, everyday peacetime geo-political competition, yet remain below the threshold of war. This chapter will identify and consider some of the more challenging domestic and international legal issues raised by the conduct of cyber operations in the gray zone between peace and war.

This chapter explores military-related challenges and opportunities in space. To date, most military space activities consist of support functions—that is, technologies that allow military forces on the ground, at sea, and in the air to operate more effectively. These include weather forecasting, communications, precision timing and navigation, reconnaissance, and early warning. Space assets make military systems work better and thereby enhance the tools that can be used in other environments, including improving weapons accuracy to reduce casualties and collateral damage. Currently, a number of nations are trying to develop space weapons capabilities, ranging from electronic jammers that interrupt signals to kinetic weapons that destroy enemy spacecraft. China's anti-satellite (ASAT) test in 2007 is a clear example of this. The main goals of such developments are to deny an enemy's “eyes and ears” in space, which could be extremely useful in conflict.

This introductory chapter situates the work of Peter Derow and the chapters in this volume, which respond to his views on Roman imperialism, within broad currents of thought on the nature of Roman military activity and foreign policy. Specific reference is made to a rather different approach, recently championed by Arthur Eckstein, to show the relevance of Derow's own work and the importance of the debate both for ancient history, and for contemporary political theory and, potentially, practice.

This chapter examines the conceptual themes of late development and regional completion in Asia's space programs. It describes how the relative availability of space technology in the early twenty-first century, the speed of recent space developments, and the failure of corresponding political institutions place Asia in an unstable position in terms of space security. Asia's Space Race, also called as the second Space Age, began with the emergence of Chinese human spaceflight capabilities in October 2003 when they launched Shenzhou 5, their first manned spacecraft. The chapter looks into the factors which differentiate this Space Race from the one during the Cold War, such as the lack of security negotiations that might promote mutual restraint. Most Asian nations share several common characteristics—they are relative newcomers to military space activity, are still engaged in longstanding regional competitions, and have no history of discussing these matters with their neighbors.

This chapter analyzes the development of Japan's national space program, the oldest in Asia and the one with the closest ties to the United States. Historically, Japan has long been the most accomplished space power in Asia, receiving support from the Western nations after the Second World War. It has more than five decades of achievements in space science with extensive experience in human spaceflight under the direction of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. However, Japan's space mandate formally excluded military space activities up until 2008, putting the country well behind leading powers in military applications and military operational experience. This all changed in 2008 when the Japanese Diet passed the Basic Space Law, which allowed military uses of space for the first time. This marks a major shift in attitudes toward space and has set off debates about the program's future direction.

Chapter 4 employs data from three new data sets, the Arctic Military Activity Events Data Set, the Arctic Bases Data Set, and the Icebreaker and Ice-Hardened Warships Data Set. These new data enable a systematic comparison of each state’s Arctic military forces and deployments before and after the 2007 climate shock. The data offer a corrective to both sensationalist media accounts that suggest that all states are scrambling to fight over Arctic resources and those who downplay real changes in states’ Arctic military capabilities and presence. Confirming Rent-Addition’s Theory’s predictions, the descriptive statistical comparisons reveal that the states that were most economically dependent on resource rents, Norway and Russia, were the most willing to back their claims by projecting military force to disputed areas and investing in Arctic bases, ice-hardened warships, and icebreakers.

Humans evolved within the limits presented by natural disturbances but have gradually increased the number and spatial extent of anthropogenic disturbances. Agriculture, forestry, and fishing constitute anthropogenic disturbances essential to human societies. Some anthropogenic disturbances resemble natural ones (e.g., pavement resembles lava), while other do not (e.g., chemical pollution, toxic mine wastes, urban smog). Recently, human impacts on biotic resources have accelerated exponentially, mirroring a similar rise in human population. Humans compound and intensify natural disturbances, in addition to contributing a novel set of disturbances. This chapter addresses the biological implications of twelve widespread anthropogenic disturbances, discussing in ascending order of spatial extent those that are both terrestrial (military activities, mining, urbanization, transportation, silviculture, agriculture) and aquatic (benthic structures, shoreline structures, sedimentation, oil spills, recreation, fishing). Other less extensive or more indirect anthropogenic disturbances mentioned include radiation releases, landfills, recreation, tourism, dam failures, toxic spills, and garbage dumps.

This chapter recounts that by the autumn of 1863, William T. Sherman had arrived at the summit of military activity, according to his contemporaries. Sherman would go higher in rank, but to the Civil War generation, army command would count for more than anything else. The kind of man he became would determine Sherman’s style as a commander, so it is important to review the evolution of Sherman’s personality, and the sum of his mental and moral qualities that mark out his individuality. Also relevant is the impact of his character on others, that combination of psychological traits and moral, intellectual, and social qualities, which can be acquired as well as inherited. In his classic works on the Civil War, General J.F.C. Fuller argued that the constituent parts of generalship embraced strategy, tactics, and logistics but the manner in which these elements combine to create military success vary due to circumstances often beyond the general’s control. Sherman’s personality remained nothing less than very strong, vibrant, quirky, strikingly individualistic, and sometimes defiant of authority or prevalent opinion. These attributes aided his leadership abilities. Those who follow tend to respect commanders of a sharp, distinct profile, who spoke to them, as Sherman did, bluntly with eloquence and wit.

In 2019, the Tribunal handed out a judgment on the merits in the Norstar case (Panama v. Italy). The decision adopted by a majority and opposed by seven judges, concerns inter alia the notion of freedom of navigation and its implications for bunkering on the high seas and developments on state responsibility concerning the causal link and the determination of quantum of damages. The Tribunal also handed out two provisional measures orders in disputes engaged by Ukraine against the Russian Federation, and by Switzerland against Nigeria, both under Article 290, paragraph 5, of UNCLOS. Both orders contain relevant developments on the law of provisional measures.

This chapter looks at the Tooth Hill campsites, which were a grail of modern conflict archaeology, as they preserved the faintest traces of military activity in a vast and hostile desert, and others probably lay undiscovered in-between Tel Shahm and Mudawwara. They are the rare imprint of the origins of modern mobile guerrilla warfare which shaped so many military actions across the twentieth century, and into the present. However, guerrilla warfare against the Hejaz Railway achieved arguably its most spectacular success not against a station but in what would later be regarded as a classic ambush. The Hallat Ammar ambush was about metal—trains, track, mines, and munitions—and so metal-detector survey was invaluable. No identifiable trace of the looting of the train was found, though the large quantity of railway debris had doubtless been sifted, robbed, and moved around in the intervening years. Indeed, despite its isolation, the archaeology of the ambush site could not be the pristine remains of the Arab Revolt, but rather, as elsewhere, a layering of the intervening century’s activities, disturbing, overlaying, and obscuring some of the events of the attack.