“MIRACLE AT CAPORETTO”

In 2018, the publication Modern Military Challenges celebrates the 20th anniversary of its publication. The 20th anniversary of the publication of military professional and scientific texts is an excellent achievement for the Slovenian Armed Forces, which has been off age for quite some time now. Initially, the goals of the Editorial Board were more modest. With the Bulletin of the Slovenian Armed Forces, as it was called at the time, they wanted mainly to distribute the knowledge of all those who had returned from various education programmes and trainings abroad. With the efforts of all those who took part in creating it, the publication has grown to gain a scientific and professional character and, as such, it has been indexed in the PAIS International database since 2010.The Slovenian Armed Forces publishes specialised military literature on the basis of Article 42 of the Defence Act, which within the control of armed forces also includes a regulation that the minister, in addition to other areas, also decides on specialised military literature. This allows for the care for specialised military literature to be constantly present in the defence sector; however, outside the defence sector, it is unfortunately missing. Military specialised and scientific topics can rarely be found in printed form. As a rule, they are prepared as a result of personal motivation and not so much of the systemic development of the subject matter.For this very reason, specialised military literature needs to be developed all the more carefully, and the development of military scientific topics promoted in cooperation with Slovenian and other foreign institutions, where the critical mass of intelligentsia and funding is significantly higher than in Slovenia.On this important anniversary, the Contemporary Military Challenges are in good shape. The statistics show that, in the two decades, 438 articles have been written by 594 authors. 51 percent of them were members of the Slovenian Armed Forces, 29 percent were from other Slovenian institutions and 12 percent of them were foreign authors. Only eight percent of authors come from the administrative part of the Ministry of Defence. The largest number of external authors participated in 2008, i.e. 50 percent, and most foreign authors in 2010 and 2016. In the former case, the share was 42 percent, and in the latter case, 50 percent of all authors. The share of contributions from the administrative part of the Ministry of Defence, which includes the Defence Policy Directorate in charge of monitoring the defence future and drafting important documents in the field of defence policy has, however, been the smallest in the history of the publication. Indeed, this is a smaller organizational unit, but in terms of substance, a very important one for the defence sector. Nevertheless, or perhaps, for this very reason, the Directorate did not contribute any professional or scientific article in 2013, 2015, and 2017.We expect and wish that this year this would change.