A new RUSI book reveals an 'institutional blindness' at the heart of UK defence policy. This is exemplified by a pervasive obsession with 'grey zone' tools that ignores both real-world deterrence dynamics and the complex ends adversaries are pursuing using both conventional and unconventional methods.
Necessary Heresies, edited by RUSI experts Dr Jack Watling and Justin Bronk, highlights a range of damaging narratives and assumptions that dominate thinking at the highest levels of UK defence policy.
Emerging technologies are changing how militaries are structured and how they will fight in the future.
However, the authors of this book argue that many of the interpretations currently dominating the discourse in UK Defence about how these technologies and supposedly novel adversary activities will shape the future operating environment are provably false.
Called an "illiberal democracy" by its current prime minister Victor Orban, a new work by Catherine Horel (in French) explores the history of an emerging Hungary to the present day as a maverick member of the European Union.
Just before April Fool's Day 1971 Ivan Aleksandrovich Kulikov the Second Secretary of the Soviet Embassy in London walked into the Kensington High Street branch of bookseller W.H. Smith and stole a £5 Mickey Mouse kaleidoscope. He was tackled as he made his shuffling escape and was lucky not to be charged. A seemingly idiotic act of larceny was followed by the expulsion of Soviet Embassy personnel inSeptember.
