This book examines the key dimensions of 21st century war, and shows that orthodox thinking about war, particularly what it is and how it is fought, needs to be updated.
Accelerating societal, economic, political and technological change affects how we prepare, equip and organise for war, as well as how we conduct war – both in its low-tech and high-tech forms, and whether it is with high intensity or low intensity. The volume examines changes in warfare by investigating the key features of the conduct of war during the first decades of the 21st century. Conceptually centred around the terms ‘kinetic’, ‘connected’ and ‘synthetic’, the analysis delves into a wide range of topics. The contributions discuss hybrid warfare, cyber and influence activities, machine learning and artificial intelligence, the use of armed drones and air power, the implications of the counterinsurgency experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, as well as the consequences for law(fare) and decision making.
This work will be of much interest to students of military and strategic studies, security studies and International Relations.
Chapters 1, 2, 5, and 19 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
This book examines the key dimensions of 21st century war, and shows that orthodox thinking about war, particularly what it is and how it is fought, needs to be updated.
Foreword Frank Hoffman Part I: Introduction: The Conduct of War in the
21st Century
1. Introduction, Rob Johnson, Tim Sweijs and Martijn Kitzen
2.
Strategic Underperformance: The West and Three Decades of War, Frans Osinga
Part II: New Strategies in the Conduct of Contemporary Warfare
3. Hybrid
Warfare and Counter-Coercion, Rob Johnson
4. Strategies for Communicating
Information and Disinformation in War: Managing and Exploiting Uncertainty in
Social Media, Filippo Tansini and Yakov Ben Haim
5. Control from the Ground
Up: Embedding Influence Activities in the Conduct of War, Rick Breekveldt and
Martijn Kitzen Part III: New Technologies and their Impact on Warfare
6.
Humans and Hardware: An Exploration of Blended Tactical Workflows using John
Boyds OODA Loop, Dave Blair, Joseph O. Chapa, Scott Cuomo and Jules Hurst
7.
Cyber Countermeasures for Democracies at War, Nori Katagiri Part IV: War from
Above
8. Air Power 2010-2020: from Helmand to Hypersonics, Johnny Stringer
9.
Armed Drones, Technological Momentum, and the Character of War, Johannes G.
Postma Part V: War from the Ground Up
10. The Challenge of
Territory-governing Insurgencies on War and Peace Strategies, Paula Cristina
Roque
11. Security Force Assistance as a Preferred Form of 21st Century
Warfare: The Unconventional Becomes the Conventional, Jahara Matisek and Ivor
Wiltenberg
12. Learning and Forgetting Counterinsurgency, Martijn van der
Vorm Part VI: Law and War
13. Fighting A War Without Violence: The Rules of
International Humanitarian Law for Military Operations Below the Threshold of
Attack, Bart van der Bosch
14. Cyber Operations and Targeting Rules, Raïssa
van den Essen
15. Contemporary Urban Warfare: Does International Humanitarian
Law offer Solutions?, Jeroen van den Boogaard
16. The Conduct of Lawfare: The
Case of the Houthi Insurgency in the Yemeni Civil, Sandra de Jongh and
Martijn Kitzen Part VII: Decision Making and War
17. Command in the
Operational Dimension: Challenges of the Information Age, Rob Johnson
18. The
Emotions of Adversarial Interaction, Lukas Milevski Part VIII: Conclusion:
Lessons for Thinking About War
19. Conclusion: Assessing Change and
Continuity in the Character of War, Tim Sweijs, Rob Johnson and Martijn Kitzen
Rob Johnson is the Director of the Changing Character of War Research Centre at the University of Oxford, UK.
Martijn Kitzen is Associate Professor at the Netherlands Defence Academy, Breda.
Tim Sweijs is the Director of Research at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies and a Senior Research Fellow at the Netherlands Defence Academy.
