This book examines how civil-military relations have been transformed in Russia, Poland, Hungary and Ukraine since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact in 1991. It shows how these countries have worked to reform their obsolete armed forces, and bring them into line with the new economic and strategic realities of the post-Cold War world, with new bureaucratic structures in which civilians play the key policy-making roles, and with strengthened democratic political institutions which have the right to oversee the armed forces.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 came to symbolise the dawn of a new era of openness and connectivity. Yet today, the world is ever more divided, demarcated and — quite literally fortified. We are living in a guarded age.   Why and how has this happened? Where will it take us? In this book, David Betz explores the expansion of fortified physical infrastructure at every level of the global political economy. In cities, where security is increasingly ‘designed in’ to public buildings and spaces as they are reshaped to mitigate mass terror attacks. Within corporations, who are burying their electronic assets in deep underground caverns and behind the leaded walls of ex-nuclear war bunkers against a range of threats and feared contingencies. In many urban areas, where the default condition of civil life is walled, gated, watched, and guarded. Year after year hundreds of miles of linear obstacles—walls, ditches, and watchtowers—are added to national borders. Practically everywhere you look there are signs of innovative fortification, often designed to be overlooked. The Guarded Age reveals the barriers which most have observed but few - until reading this book - have truly seen.

This book examines how civil-military relations have been transformed in Russia, Poland, Hungary and Ukraine since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact in 1991. It shows how these countries have worked to reform their obsolete armed forces, and bring them into line with the new economic and strategic realities of the post-Cold War world, with new bureaucratic structures in which civilians play the key policy-making roles, and with strengthened democratic political institutions which have the right to oversee the armed forces.

This study explores the complex military issues that are raised by the transition to post-communist rule with particular reference to Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, and the new members of NATO. All faced similar problems yet their responses, it emerges, were surprisingly diverse.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 came to symbolise the dawn of a new era of openness and connectivity. Yet today, the world is ever more divided, demarcated and — quite literally fortified. We are living in a guarded age.   Why and how has this happened? Where will it take us? In this book, David Betz explores the expansion of fortified physical infrastructure at every level of the global political economy. In cities, where security is increasingly ‘designed in’ to public buildings and spaces as they are reshaped to mitigate mass terror attacks. Within corporations, who are burying their electronic assets in deep underground caverns and behind the leaded walls of ex-nuclear war bunkers against a range of threats and feared contingencies. In many urban areas, where the default condition of civil life is walled, gated, watched, and guarded. Year after year hundreds of miles of linear obstacles—walls, ditches, and watchtowers—are added to national borders. Practically everywhere you look there are signs of innovative fortification, often designed to be overlooked. The Guarded Age reveals the barriers which most have observed but few - until reading this book - have truly seen.

The burgeoning of global connectivity in recent decades is without historical parallel and the 'wiring up' of the world continues apace, even in the poorest regions. Flux and ever-quickening change are the leitmotifs of the 'information age' across a swathe of human enterprise from industry and commerce through to politics and social relations. This is no less the case for the patterns of war, where change has been disorientating for soldiers and statesmen whose confidence in the old, the traditional, and the known has been shaken. David Betz's book explains the huge and disruptive implications of connectivity for the practice of warfare. The tactical ingenuity of opponents to confound or drop below the thresh- old of sophisticated weapons systems means war remains the realm of chance and probability. Increasingly, though, the conflicts of our time are less contests of arms than wars of hearts and minds conducted on a mass scale through multimedia communications networks. The most pernicious challengers to the status quo are not states but ever more powerful non-state actors.