The term “critical infrastructure” suggests a nation’s systems that deliver services and protection to its inhabitants. Here, we find a book that can be divided into three parts.

A lengthy introduction provides the history and motivation for, and organization of, a major project initiated in Hungary to define a research framework for investigating the subject of the title, Critical infrastructure protection research. Following this are 14 chapters discussing specific research projects. Eight of the chapters directly address critical infrastructure protection, covering topics that include safety aspects of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operation such as human factors, weather prediction, and ground control. Beyond UAV considerations, the chapters cover transport infrastructure protection, security and vulnerability management for computer cloud services, protection of military personnel in climate extremes, and a discussion of integrating national and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance doctrines for the employment of air defense missile units.

The other six chapters cover various topics in materials science, including surface engineering to improve machine reliability, particularly military vehicles, the alloying of metals using lasers, optimization of thermal boundary conditions during heat treatment, methods for determining the recrystallized volume of deformed and annealed metals, approaches to increasing biogas yields by pretreatment of input materials, experimental results of tensile stress testing using a new gripping method, and one on thermal image processing. Among these, only the one on surface engineering shows how the results of the research relate directly to critical infrastructure protection. For the others, interesting though they may be, the reader is left to infer the relationship.

The chapters are generally clearly written, with some rough spots of English usage but readily understandable. They are generally short, providing an overview and summary of the research covered. For depth, one must go to the references provided in each. This makes the book a good collection of references to the multiple research areas covered.