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Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies and Autonomous Unmanned Vehicles are shaping our daily lives, society, and will continue to transform how we will fight future wars. Advances in AI technologies have fueled an explosion of interest in the military and political domain. As AI technologies evolve, there will be increased reliance on these systems to maintain global security. For the individual and society, AI presents challenges related to surveillance, personal freedom, and privacy. For the military, we will need to exploit advances in AI technologies to support the warfighter and ensure global security. The integration of AI technologies in the battlespace presents advantages, costs, and risks in the future battlespace. This chapter will examine the issues related to advances in AI technologies, as we examine the benefits, costs, and risks associated with integrating AI and autonomous systems in society and in the future battlespace.

The purpose of this paper is to determine and prioritize man-made threats that have the probability of occurring in civilian airports, as an important part of critical infrastructures in each country.

The paper is practical-developmental in terms of research type and its approach is descriptive. Desktop research methods and interviews (qualitative) have been used in identifying deliberate man-made threats that are faced by the civilian airports. Moreover, a questionnaire (quantitative) has been utilized to assess the civilian airports’ assets that are targets likely to be threatened and assess threats by determining and prioritizing.

The results of the paper show that the main threat faced by civilian airports is “Air and missile strikes.” An additional 15 threats endangering civilian airports that have been extracted and presented through integrating specialized literature were prioritized in the main components of civilian airports. This prioritization has been performed on the basis of the following five indicators: “Damage Severity,” “Threat Precedent,” “Target Attractiveness,” “Negative Consequences for the Enemy” and “Enemy Ability.”

This paper is extracted from master’s thesis that identifies and assesses the threats to civil airport, and prioritizes them, and the results were confirmed by the experts.

Contemporary wars are continuously striking population centres across the globe with devastating consequences of destruction and annihilation, and leading to mass casualties within civilians. The purpose of this paper is to question the role of architecture and urban tissue in packing up civilians’ resilience and survival practices during urban warfare.

The investigation is based on critical spatial analysis of survival narratives obtained from an empirical study conducted in the city of Nablus in Palestine.

This paper shows that, due to its unique and highly complex socio-spatial entanglement, the kasbah of Nablus represents a paradigm in the (re)creation of community resilience. This paradigm is based on the interaction of three main elements: a multi-layered urban tissue accumulated along 2,000 years of urban evolution; a thick matrix of cultural and social constructs; and the lifting and switching of a lot of social conventions related to space during times of war.

The agency of architecture in supporting civilian survival practices during urban warfare is visited, nevertheless only partially unpacked by a number of prominent studies. This paper provides a deeper level of investigation and understanding of the interplay between the architecture of the city and resilience capacity.

Military organizations participating in current expeditionary missions face new challenge associated with dilemmas common to asymmetric warfare. Apart from dilemmas faced by local government, populations, and organizations, military organizations struggle with their task environment, performance, and main and supportive processes. Complementing doctrinal innovations in this area, the chapter proposes a generic model linking these processes to value creation, and it examines specific changes introduced by asymmetric warfare. Notable changes include the increasingly dialectic, constructivist, and discordant nature of organizational processes. Moreover, asymmetric warfare challenges singular definitions of military organizations' and their members' professional identity, and demands ongoing, in-depth learning.

Technology has always been one of the decisive factors, by which the outcome of conflict or war ought to be influenced without any doubt. But with Information-Communication Technology (ICT) appearance it seems the revolutionary changes began concerning conflict perception, the organisation of actors waging a war and (spatial) spheres where conflicts are taking place. The case of last Iraqi war should confirm this thesis. The main purpose of my research paper is therefore to prove that ICT has really multidimensional impacts regarding recent conflicts and wars and these impacts should be analysed with interdisciplinary approach in any case.

So my research paper based especially on strategic (defence) studies as well as on communication and sociological theory guidelines, what actually ensures a real interdisciplinary approach. Within these three basic theoretical approaches the concepts such as propaganda, perception management and information operations/warfare as well as asymmetric warfare, have also been used.

Regarding research limitations and future work to do, my proposal is focusing towards information theory and informatics science, which should also be incorporated in modern conflict analysis. Without very good knowledge of how Internet is working and what are its technical possibilities there is no change, virtual part of recent conflicts is being treated properly.

Practical implications of the paper are visible especially in the proposal (model) how recent conflicts should be treated and understood and this is not important just for strategists and intelligence personal but also for journalists, academics etc. And practical implications as well as methodology approach based on the interdisciplinary has also added the main value and originality of the paper. It must be clear that the way how reality is constructed through the ICT (what is actually the point of constructivism theory) has tremendous importance also within conflict and strategic studies.

Purpose – An analysis of the security implications of asymmetric warfare and counterinsurgency.

Methodology/approach – This chapter provides a review of the relevant literature based on historical, defense-strategic and also a wider security-political qualitative approach.

Findings – The results show that the military is not always the best and the only instrument to counter asymmetric war. Intelligence and covert action play a certain role, but cause additional problems, also with regard to international law.

Research limitations/implications – Further research should be done with regard to a coordination and cooperation of the various actors and bodies engaged in countering insurgency and asymmetric warfare.

Originality/value of paper – This is a research paper with practical implications.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new algorithm for pendulum‐like oscillation control of an unmanned rotorcraft (UR) in a reconnaissance mission and improve the stabilizing performance of the UR's hover and stare.

The algorithm is based on linear‐quadratic regulator (LQR), of which the determinable parameters are optimized by the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm, a newly developed algorithm inspired by swarm intelligence and motivated by the intelligent behaviour of honey bees.

The proposed algorithm is tested in a UR simulation environment and achieves stabilization of the pendulum oscillation in less than 4s.

The presented algorithm and design strategy can be extended for other types of complex control missions where relative parameters must be optimized to get a better control performance.

The ABC optimized control system developed can be easily applied to practice and can safely stabilize the UR during hover and stare, which will considerably improve the stability of the UR and lead to better reconnaissance performance.

This research presents a new algorithm to control the pendulum‐like oscillation of URs, whose performance of hover and stare is a key issue when carrying out new challenging reconnaissance missions in urban warfare. Simulation results show that the presented algorithm performs better than traditional methods and the design process is simpler and easier.

In 2002, an issue of Open House International had already addressed the subject of war and the city. Scholars with different backgrounds and experiences reported on a number of cities. They analysed and reflected on the situation before the armed hostilities, both in physical terms and in terms of the conflicts of ethnic and civilian character, and the role of external forces and actors; the war in its different manifestations: a never ending conflict, a succession of battles and precarious truces, bombing, the threat of bombing; and the prospects of reconstruction, with particular reference to the different effects for the various groups and interests.

The merit of improvisation over command and control as an organizational approach is the subject of much debate in the management and emergency literatures. The purpose of this paper is to examine tactics employed by the two leading protagonists at the Battle of Stalingrad – Field Marshall Friedrich Paulus on the German side and General Vasily Chuikov on the side of Russia – and seek to identify the reasons for Chuikov's victory over Paulus and draw lessons from this for practicing managers.

The research project examined over a dozen publicly available texts on the battle, in the light of the crisis management and strategy literatures.

The paper shows how Chuikov improvised to meet the demands of the situation, relaxed the command and control structure of the Russian 62nd Army and developed a collective mind among Russian troops and that this triple approach played a significant role in his victory over Paulus.

The case provides support for the view that improvisation is important in crisis response and can be applied within a hierarchical command and control structure. The paper puts forward a framework for managers to respond to crisis based on two continua: mode of response (improvised or planned) and means of control (via the hierarchy or via rules embedded in a collective mind).