This article examines the dilemmas of North Korea’s nuclear strategy through an integrated framework linking realist security imperatives, strategic culture and leadership identity, and the inward-looking political economy. Existing studies typically capture only part of North Korea’s behavior; what remains underexplored is how these logics operate simultaneously and generate internal contradictions. The article conceptualizes North Korea’s nuclear posture as a triadic dilemma shaped by the interaction of deterrence needs, oppositional nationalism, identity-based legitimation, and a ruling-coalition logic for elite cohesion and controlled governance. This interaction produces a paradox in which nuclear weapons strengthen regime authority and deterrence while worsening sanctions-driven economic decline, diplomatic isolation, and security instability. By framing these tensions as a dilemma among deterrence, economic sustainability, and crisis stability, the article explains why North Korea remains locked into an internally contradictory yet resilient nuclear posture. It concludes with policy implications, highlighting the need to calibrate pressure and engagement.

Contemporary strategy lacks a good and correct understanding of positional warfare. This article finds that positional warfare is an approach to warfare in which one combatant purposefully manipulates movement and firepower in relation to the terrain, and force dispositions within that terrain, in pursuit of strategic and military objectives. Moreover, a combatant uses positional warfare to preserve their combat power, slow or impede their opponent’s advance, and create a favorable correlation of forces by using battlefield movements. Additionally, a combatant uses movement to occupy favorable terrain or evacuate tenuous settings which are proximal to their adversary. Lastly, a combatant uses movement and seeks to influence the threat to act in accordance with their intentions. In clarifying this strategy, the defense and national security community can better anticipate and understand the complexities of strategic competition in the twenty first century.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas, the Palestinian organization that rules the Gaza Strip from 2007, launched an unprecedented attack on several Israeli settlements, resulting in over a thousand casualties and nearly 250 hostages. In response to this attack, Israel declared war, leading to a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, with thousands of human casualties and destructions. The article aims to discuss the escalation process of the 2023 Gaza-Israel war and its expansion on the Lebanese front, the dynamic of Israel-Hezbollah conflict in the frame of regional transformations. This confrontation is considered within the broader context of the Israel-Iran conflict, which was manifested through proxy wars. The conflict is analyzed against the backdrop of regional developments, exploring the active mediation of global actors and initiatives aimed at conflict resolution. The dynamic of conflict is analyzed also in the context of decision-making of both sides during wartime, the transformation from dynamic war to static, which leads to the weakening and “collapse” of Hezbollah.

While the maritime industry is the central hub of global trade and houses government intelligence, it remains defenseless against state-sponsored cyberespionage groups. To date, there is limited scholarship on the elite forms of cyberattacks and how they target the maritime industry. This study aims to fill this empirical gap by analyzing Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) in the South China Sea, with a primary focus on the maritime industry. The authors analyzed APTNotes, a database containing cybersecurity reports on intelligence and investigations published over the course of 15 years, from 2008 to 2023. This analysis revealed a significant increase in APT activity in the South China Sea, with most attacks credited to Chinese state-affiliated actors. These findings underscore the importance of sharing information on cyberattacks across critical infrastructure and the need for training, especially in the maritime industry, where 80% of global trade volume is transported by sea.

Are the United States and China engaged in military competition? This article demonstrates that traditional indicators can produce misleading results due to the nature of contemporary military power and the specifics of the East Asian theater. Instead of examining budgets or ship numbers, we argue that analysts should look to military operational concepts to assess military competition. By using the joint functions, a doctrinal typology, we explore the operational concepts of the U.S. and Chinese and demonstrate how military competition is intensifying in key areas. This method of analysis contributes to the debate about military competition in the contemporary era.

In the wake of Brexit and increased geopolitical uncertainty, calls for a European nuclear deterrent have resurfaced. This article compares the nuclear doctrines of France and the United Kingdom to assess whether they could form the basis of a joint European deterrence framework. Despite shared principles such as minimum deterrence and second-strike capability, the two powers differ sharply in institutional alignment, strategic culture and political intent. France positions its arsenal as a tool of strategic autonomy and potential European leadership, while the UK embeds its deterrent within NATO and remains dependent on the United States. These divergences, far from being just technical, are also political. The article argues that current doctrines do not allow for a credible shared deterrent architecture. Without supranational mechanisms for strategic decision-making and political commitment, European extended deterrence will remain structurally fragmented and dependent on U.S. guarantees.

Contemporary U.S. plans for the modernization of nuclear forces are an approximately 15-year-old legacy of the Obama Administration. They were not established in anticipation of the dramatic changes in the security environment since 2010—when it was assumed that a one-for-one replacement for the legacy nuclear delivery systems and the New START Treaty limit on nuclear weapon numbers would be more than adequate. Rather, the existing U.S. nuclear modernization program was established at a time when many U.S. officials continued to believe that U.S. relations with Russia and China were benign and would remain so, or improve further. How the contemporary nuclear program, largely inherited from the Obama Administration, fares over the next few years, and how the new presidential administration entering office in 2025 decides to adapt the U.S. nuclear posture for the much more dynamic and dangerous contemporary threat environment, will affect the US strategic and non-strategic nuclear posture for decades, and, correspondingly, U.S. deterrence strategies and options. Given the past four decades of deep U.S. strategic and non-strategic force reductions and the atrophying of the U.S. nuclear production infrastructure, the United States has a limited near-term capacity to strengthen its nuclear force posture in response to an unprecedentedly threatening security environment. Whatever may be the preferred future U.S. nuclear force posture and characteristics for deterrence and allied assurance purposes, the reality is that U.S. options for adjustment are largely limited through the early 2030s to uploading the existing Triad of nuclear forces. Doing so is the only near-term option to strengthen U.S. deterrence force numbers to meet looming threats.

In contemporary geopolitics, Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) have become key tools of state-sponsored cyber operations, used for espionage, disrupting critical infrastructure, and advancing national interests through economic and strategic gains. This study comprehensively examines various Indian APT groups operating internationally, detailing their known aliases, targeted countries, sectors of interest, techniques, and malware used. It traces the evolution of Indian APT campaigns from 2010 to 2020, particularly focusing on operations targeting China. This research fills a critical gap in existing literature by examining Indian APTs, which remain underexplored compared to those from China, the USA, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. While Chinese cyberattacks on India are well-documented, Indian operations targeting China have not been explored with comparable depth. Moreover, these campaigns shed light on India’s developing offensive cyber capabilities, offering a broader understanding of its strategic posture—an area that has received limited scholarly focus. Drawing on Chinese government sources like CNNIC and cybersecurity firms such as Antiy Labs, Qihoo 360, Qi Anxin, and Tencent, this study analyzes documents from 2010 to 2020 to offer a unique perspective on how Indian APTs are perceived within China. It also addresses two central questions: (1) Does India possess significant offensive cyber capabilities targeting China, and has it established a sustained operational presence within Chinese cyberspace between 2010 and 2020? (2) Are India’s cyber operations primarily regionally focused, especially toward Pakistan, or has there been a strategic shift toward China? If so, what factors have driven this transition?