Challenges to national defence in contemporary geopolitical situation

The article analyzes the healthcare sector as a strategic target in hybrid conflicts, with a focus on cyber threats. Based on OSINT and a comparative analysis of incidents, it identifies typical attack patterns, their operational impacts, and systemic vulnerabilities in healthcare systems. The findings demonstrate that cyber incidents disrupt healthcare delivery and have broader security implications. The study emphasizes the need to integrate cybersecurity, crisis management, and the protection of sensitive patient data.

Personal body armor has evolved to address threats typical of contemporary warfare. Artillery effects, particularly fragmentation, have become a significant threat to military personnel, increasing the demand for effective protective solutions. This paper proposes a combined analytical–experimental framework for evaluating the effectiveness of personal body armor against artillery fragmentation. Fragmentation characteristics are examined using mathematical modeling and analytical methods. Additionally, existing body armor evaluation standards and testing methods are reviewed. The results indicate that fragmentation represents the dominant lethal mechanism of artillery fire. Although the V50 ballistic test is commonly used to assess fragment resistance, it does not provide a comprehensive evaluation of real-world protection effectiveness. These findings highlight the need for more advanced and realistic assessment methods.

9/11 made terrorism a part of everyday life on a global basis, attacking civilisation as a whole. As a result, the activity of terrorist organisations reduces people’s sense of security even in their everyday lives, by randomly attacking high public density targets with a huge emotional and publicity impact. The states cannot guarantee security through their law enforcement agencies alone, as the sources of danger have multiplied and become more unpredictable. Therefore, it is more important than ever to involve communities, social organisations, economic and market actors in maintaining common security. Private security thus plays by now an extremely important role in completing public order and security. The radicalisation trend within the terrorist organisations results in a growing number of internal terrorism threats. Given that terrorists aim to choose targets with a likely “success” of their acts, it is important to highlight those whose partial, temporary or total downtime entails consequences which would also make other infrastructures inoperative. Those who from these aspects turn to be the most important, and their continuous and well-functioning operation are essential to the operation of other infrastructures, are called critical infrastructures. If we put the above phenomena together, a clear conflict emerges: critical infrastructure protection, although in most cases not state owned, is also a common security issue, protected mostly by private security services, employing people mainly trained for private security tasks. Our article highlights this problem introducing the scientific background, also suggesting a possible solution for evaluation.

With the changing global security situation, increase in external threats or emergence of new ones (cyberattacks, onconventional warfare models, etc.), countries must feel concern regarding consolidation of their security (e.g. Novikovas et al. 2017; Šišulák 2017). The fight against terrorism and the mitigation of climate change are key challenges facing global social changing. The issue of climate change is in synergy with the concepts of ecological, economic and energy security. Global development increasing demand of energy, triggered by increasing population and respective increase of economic activities, and consequent environmental degradation (Tvaronavičienė, 2016). Climate change and increasing human activities posing a serious threat to the ecological security in different fields (Li et al. 2017). Terrorist attacks in the USA, floods in 2002, shaped new attention EU Institution to Critical Infrastructure (CI) concept, as an element of security. Critical infrastructure, as a phenomenon (for example energy), has become an argument in making political decisions (Tvaronavičienė, 2012). One of the ecological security elements is municipal waste management, which, as a business sector, is characterized as a complex phenomenon, which includes: infrastructure-engineering, administrative-functional, political and technological aspects. The aim of the topic is to analyze the municipal waste management sector as a phenomenon of national security. The topic reveals theoretical insights of the municipal waste management sector, identified it as a critical infrastructure object, in the context of Lithuanian national security. The object - peculiarities of legal regulation of critical infrastructure in EU and Lithuanian legal acts. The authors applied scientific methods such as document analysis, teleological, critical-analysis, comparative and generalization.

This paper presents a review of the advanced materials used in the structure of a novel armor systems and the bodies or frames of the military equipment and vehicles. One of the most often materials engaged in armors are the ceramics among of which the aluminium oxides are the widest spread. Nevertheless, there are more advanced ceramics alike a silicon carbide or boron carbide used for example to shield the pilots of assault helicopters. The section of the paper concerning the materials for the bodies is focused on the high strength steels and the conditions of appropriate joints realization. The examples of the welding imperfections were showed and its influence on the structure integrity was discussed taking into account also others factors.