warontherocks

Are cyber capabilities escalatory? This is one of the most debated and important questions in cyber operations. If cyber capabilities, and more broadly, their use in operations and campaigns, will not meaningfully increase the nature or intensity of a conflict, states will not be willing to risk

In February, Abdullah Öcalan — the long-imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) — called on the group to lay down its arms and “dissolve itself” after more than 40 years of fighting Turkish forces. In an initial step, the PKK called for a ceasefire on March 1. In addition to

The 2016–2017 Battle of Mosul would have been unrecognizable to Henri Dunant, the founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Unlike the defined front lines in the Battle of Solferino, where Dunant witnessed the suffering of the wounded, 21st-century armed conflict is characterized by

Two years ago, we wrote in these pages about the sorry state of Irish defense and security that, we have on good authority, prompted a question on the matter to the then Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar when he visited the Biden White House on St. Patrick’s Day in 2023. This was exactly our hope.

In 2021, a Starlink satellite and OneWeb spacecraft came dangerously close to colliding in orbit.  While both companies’ automated systems detected a potential collision, the incident sparked intense debate about communication and de-confliction between autonomous space systems. As competing