The purpose of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is to safeguard the freedom and security of its Alliance members by political and military means. In the military domain, the Alliance accomplishes this purpose by maintaining and developing its individual and collective ability to deter and resist armed attack, by consulting together whenever the security of one of the Alliance nations is threatened, and by defending Alliance territory and population from armed attack, as set out in Articles 3, 4, and 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.

Over the last two decades, Russia’s use of cyber proxies has expanded on a global scale and impacted nearly all aspects of international relations. From effectively shutting down a neighboring government and its financial sector in response to moving a World War II era statue, to disrupting communication platforms in Eastern Europe in concert with kinetic operations, to gaining access to American critical infrastructure,4 Russia is actively pursuing its strategic objectives through cyber proxies.

Every new Army recruit is also an investor. In fact, they invest in government securities, bonds, international corporations, and virtually every company in the entire U.S. stock market. Now that the blended retirement system (BRS) is the retirement plan for all new recruits and many mid-career Service members, Soldiers are automatically enrolled and have money invested monthly into the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). 

In the early weeks of October 2020, sprawling across 100 countries, an enhanced form of cyber weapon called a botnet began positioning itself to influence the U.S. Presidential election. Nicknamed Trickbot, the weapon was a for-rent botnet that had surreptitiously implanted malicious software into nearly 250 million systems across the globe, massing computing power through hundreds of millions of “zombie” computers.

In common with many historians, my parents wanted me to go to law school. But I disappointed them in this respect and, to the dismay of my Quaker mother, I became not only a historian—but a military historian. This article is a personal overview of my encounters with Army military justice over four decades in conjunction with my research on other topics. 

Governments create alliances and partnerships, but people create the relationships that make those alliances and partnerships effective. Defender Europe 2021 was an exercise that involved twenty-six militaries operating in twelve countries, airport operations in sixteen countries, and port operations in five countries.