Volume: 4 Issue: 1 (2026) Serial Number: 5

In 2021 the Belarusian state organised the movement of thousands of third-country nationals to its border with Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, channelling them toward the European Union as a deliberate instrument of pressure. The episode crystallised a mode of coercion that uses people rather than weapons and that operates carefully below the threshold of armed conflict, yet existing scholarship has explained it mainly descriptively, through the lens of securitisation or of the law, without a model that specifies how the leverage is actually generated. This article develops that model. Its original contribution is the Sub-Threshold Coercion (STC) model of weaponised migration, built around a novel concept, the target's normative-entrapment dilemma, and expressed through a composite Coercive Leverage Index defined as the product of cost asymmetry, deniability, and normative entrapment divided by target resilience. The model holds that the coercive power of instrumentalised migration comes not from the physical size of the flow but from the gap the coercer engineers between the target's security imperative and its own legal and normative commitments to asylum and non-refoulement, a gap that converts every available response into a cost. A conceptual theory-building method is combined with a structured comparison that applies the model to the Belarus–Poland case and, illustratively, to the 2020 Turkey–European Union and 2021 Morocco–Ceuta episodes, with the index components estimated ordinally to demonstrate the model's logic rather than to measure it. The analysis finds that deniability and normative entrapment, not flow magnitude, drive the index, that the Belarusian case scores highly because it combined a deniable channel with a target deeply committed to refugee-protection norms, and that effective counter-coercion works by lowering the index, chiefly by reducing normative entrapment through lawful, legitimacy-preserving responses and by building resilience, rather than by hardening the border alone. The model offers a transferable analytic for a coercive instrument that is becoming a standard feature of grey-zone competition. All index values are model-derived and require empirical operationalisation before use.

First-person view (FPV) drones carrying repurposed shaped-charge warheads have inverted the cost-of-attrition logic of mechanised warfare, and crews have responded with improvised roof grids, the so-called 'cope cages', whose engineering value remains contested. This article asks a narrow question: under what geometric conditions does a roof-mounted, modular cage measurably reduce the perforation probability of a top-attack FPV-delivered shaped charge, and when does it fail to do so? The study integrates the grid-interaction probability model developed for slat armour against the RPG-7 threat with the empirically anchored standoff–penetration response of a representative warhead and with established jet-formation and penetration mechanics. Its original contribution is the Top-Attack Cage Effectiveness (TACE) index, a dimensionless composite that multiplies the warhead-disruption probability of a grid by the residual-penetration margin of any jet that survives initiation at the cage standoff, evaluated against the roof protection threshold. The index makes explicit a counter-intuitive result: because a shaped charge reaches peak penetration at a finite optimal standoff, about 317 mm against 278 mm at contact for the modelled warhead, a cage that merely adds standoff without disrupting the warhead can raise penetration rather than lower it. Illustrative computation across grid pitches of 30–60 mm and roof gaps of 250–450 mm shows TACE values ranging from below 0.30 for poorly placed coarse grids to above 0.80 for fine, disruption-dominated configurations. The analysis concludes that cope cages are defensible as the outermost layer of a graduated counter-UAS survivability architecture rather than as standalone protection, and that their design must be driven by warheaddisruption geometry, not standoff alone. All numerical TACE values are model-derived and require experimental validation before fielding.

Wet-gap crossing has become one of the most dangerous engineering tasks on the contemporary battlefield, because a pontoon bridge is a large, fixed, thermally and geometrically conspicuous structure that must remain in place long enough for a force to cross, all under persistent unmanned reconnaissance. This article asks a narrow question: what determines whether a crossing survives, and where should engineering effort be spent to reduce the exposure that gets bridging units killed? The study reframes survivability as a race between two clocks. The first is the total exposure time of the crossing site — the sum of assembly, trafficking, and recovery; the second is the adversary's reconnaissance-strike loop, the interval from first detection to delivered effect. Its original contribution is the Crossing Exposure Index (CEI), defined as the ratio of total exposure time to the reconnaissance-strike loop time, together with a concealment-adjusted survivability function in which probability of completing the crossing before a strike arrives decays exponentially with the exposure that overhangs the enemy loop, scaled by a concealmentreduced detection rate. The model yields a sharp design rule absent from the bridging and operations-research literatures alike: when exposure is driven below the loop time, the crossing completes inside the adversary's decision cycle and timely engagement becomes near-impossible, whereas above that threshold survivability falls off rapidly and concealment, not further speed, governs the residual. Illustrative computation across assembly times of 30 to 150 minutes, loop times of 10 to 40 minutes, and concealment effectiveness of zero to eighty percent produces modelled crossing-survival probabilities ranging from below 0.10 for a slow, unconcealed crossing against a fast loop to above 0.90 for a rapid, well-concealed crossing. The analysis concludes that exposure reduction is a systems problem: modular and parallel assembly to compress the timeline, signature management to lower the detection rate, and sequencing to keep the detectable window beneath the enemy loop, each insufficient alone. All numerical values are model-derived and require empirical and exercise validation before use.

Operators of remotely piloted aircraft kill and watch from thousands of kilometres away and then drive home to their families, an occupational reality that fits poorly with a diagnostic model of combat trauma built around personal life-threat. The mental-health literature on these crews has documented real distress, yet it has largely measured that distress with fear-based post-traumatic stress disorder instruments, and it has not articulated why the operators' suffering should take a different form. This article develops that argument. Its original contribution is the Agentic-Exposure differential model, which locates remotely piloted aircraft operators in a twodimensional traumatic-load space defined by fear-based load on one axis and moral-emotional injury on the other, and predicts that this population occupies a distinctive region: high moral injury and attenuated fear, a profile qualitatively different from the fear-circuitry-dominant posttraumatic stress disorder of physically deployed combatants. The model identifies two exposure pathways that drive the moral load, an agentic pathway of precision killing and battle-damage assessment and a witnessing pathway of prolonged intimate surveillance without the power to intervene, and it derives a predicted symptom profile dominated by guilt, shame, loss of meaning, anhedonia, and social alienation rather than by hyperarousal, re-experiencing, and external avoidance. The model is built by integrative theoretical synthesis of the moral-injury and the operator mental-health literatures and is expressed through two conceptual diagrams and two comparative tables. Its central practical claims follow directly: that standard fear-based screening systematically under-detects clinically significant distress in this population and should be supplemented by validated moral-injury instruments; that selection should weight moral-emotional resilience and cognitive and moral-schema flexibility rather than only fear-reactivity; and that first-line support should be meaning- and values-based rather than fear-extinction-based. The model is conceptual and its predicted profiles are illustrative, generating testable hypotheses that the article specifies for empirical validation.

Haemorrhage remains the leading cause of potentially survivable death on the battlefield, and whole blood transfusion close to the point of injury is now established as the resuscitation of choice. The doctrine that surrounds it, however, was written for the golden hour, a world in which a casualty reaches surgery within sixty minutes, and that world is disappearing. In large-scale combat operations against a peer adversary, evacuation may be delayed for many hours, and the medic who gives a single unit of whole blood and waits for a helicopter that does not come is left without a plan. This article develops that plan. Its original contribution is the Point-of-Injury Whole Blood protocol for Prolonged Field Care, a phased and titratable resuscitation algorithm built specifically for delayed evacuation, together with the underlying argument that the prolonged scenario requires four departures from golden-hour practice: a shift from a single fixed bolus to a titratable resuscitation governed by a sustained permissive perfusion endpoint; a serial walking-blood-bank cycle that turns a finite blood supply into a renewable one; an explicit time-indexed monitoring loop for the metabolic derangements, hypocalcaemia, hypothermia, and acidosis, that accumulate over hours of transfusion and that short-evacuation protocols can neglect; and the integration of these into one decision algorithm a far-forward provider can follow without laboratory or imaging support. The protocol is grounded in an evidence synthesis, presented as a narrative forest plot of mortality estimates from recent trials and cohorts, that supports the efficacy of whole blood and early transfusion while acknowledging the null findings that temper it. The protocol is presented as two figures and two tables: a clinical algorithm, a forest plot of the supporting evidence, a comparison of the golden-hour and prolonged-care paradigms, and a time-indexed schedule for the accumulating metabolic threats. The protocol is an evidence-informed design and not a validated standard; it generates specific, testable predictions that the article specifies for prospective field evaluation.

Between October 2023 and early 2025 the Baltic Sea experienced a sequence of damaging incidents to submarine telecommunications cables and energy pipelines, from the Balticconnector gas pipeline and adjacent data cables to the C-Lion1, Estlink 2, and related cable breaks, most of them attributed in public debate to anchor-dragging by vessels linked to a sanctioned shadow fleet. This review synthesises the peer-reviewed literature published between 2019 and 2026 on three questions raised by these events: why the infrastructure is so vulnerable, why responsibility is so hard to attribute, and why international law struggles to prevent or sanction such acts beyond the territorial sea. A semi-systematic, thematic review method was applied across Scopus, Web of Science, and Crossref, supplemented by primary legal instruments and European Union and NATO documents, yielding forty-seven sources synthesised into four domains: the threat landscape, the attribution problem, the legal grey-zone gaps, and the emerging response. The review's contribution is an integrative attribution–accountability gap framework that joins three literatures usually kept apart, the maritime-infrastructure-security, the grey-zone and attribution, and the law-of-the-sea literatures, and traces a four-link chain from detection to attribution to legal characterisation to response, showing that Baltic subsea sabotage occupies a doubly permissive space in which an act is simultaneously hard to attribute and hard to sanction. The synthesis finds that physical vulnerability is structural and growing, that deniability is the deliberate design feature of grey-zone action rather than an incidental difficulty, that the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea protects the laying of cables and pipelines far better than it protects them from intentional harm, and that the institutional response is real but immature. The review concludes that closing the accountability gap depends less on new technology than on strengthened coastal-state jurisdiction, evidentiary cooperation, and a resilience-by-design posture, and it identifies the absence of an agreed legal threshold for sabotage below the use of force as the field's central unresolved problem.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced approved training organisations (ATOs) to move theoretical pilot instruction online, replace classroom examinations with computer-based testing, and ration the irreducibly hands-on flight phase. This review synthesises peer-reviewed evidence published between 2019 and 2025 on how pilot training adapted within the European Union Aviation Safety Agency regulatory framework, organising it into a four-domain framework: regulatory accommodation, online theoretical instruction, constrained practical training, and organisational-economic effect. A semi-systematic review of thirty-eight sources drawn from Scopus, Web of Science, and Crossref was conducted, with the case of a Bosnian-Herzegovinian ATO serving as an illustrative anchor. The synthesis shows that regulators permitted distance learning through competency-based provisions, that online theory proved feasible despite genuine assessment-integrity risks, that simulation and emerging virtual-reality tools only partially offset lost flight hours and the documented danger of skill decay, and that organisations which adapted early reported resilience. The review's contribution is an integrative framework connecting regulatory, pedagogical, technological, and economic strands treated separately in the literature. Distance learning emerges as a durable gain, assessment integrity and skill-decay monitoring as unresolved problems, and a hybrid model as the likely steady state

Military maintenance organizations hold some of the largest and least liquid spare parts inventories in existence, and they operate them under conditions that commercial after-sales networks rarely face: intermittent demand, aging platforms, vanished suppliers, and supply lines that an adversary actively tries to sever. This review examines what additive manufacturing (AM) can realistically contribute to such systems. Drawing on 49 verified sources published between 2019 and 2025, of which 46 are peer-reviewed journal articles, the analysis is organized along three axes: the technological maturity of AM processes relevant to spare parts production and repair; the logistical and economic evidence on when printing outperforms stocking; and the qualification, certification, and digital-security constraints that currently govern adoption. The evidence supports a consistent conclusion. AM already delivers documented value at the margins of military supply chains. Audit data record procurement lead times cut from two years to roughly one week, and unit costs reduced by several orders of magnitude for selected parts. Yet operations research modeling shows that printing complements rather than replaces inventory, with dualsourcing savings of 8-30% concentrated among low-demand, long-lead-time items. The binding constraints are no longer primarily technical: qualification pathways, fatigue-critical defect populations, and the cybersecurity of the digital thread now set the adoption frontier. The review contributes a three-axis readiness framing that connects engineering, logistics, and assurance literatures which have largely developed in isolation, and identifies the research gaps that matter most for defense maintenance planners.

Book review