Entries for the 'Crisis Management' Category

Amid the increasing use of violence by the Syrian government against uprisings, former NATO Secretary General and SDA Co-president Jaap De Hoop Scheffer shared his views on Russia’s shifting stanceon the situation of non-lethal support from the US and Turkey in an interview with Deutsche Welle

The EU members implemented legislation on Saturday banning the sale of technology which “may be used for the monitoring or interception of Internet or telephone communications.”

US President Barack Obama and UK Prime Minister David Cameron are to agree on an end to the US’ and UK’s “lead combat role” in Afghanistan by mid-2013.

The United Kingdom is experiencing another debate about its role in the Afghan war after the killing of six British soldiers by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged the government of Angola to provide helicopters for the UN’s peacekeeping missions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO) and in South Sudan (UNMISS).

Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al-Thani seconds the idea of arming the Syrian opposition in their fight against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, he confirmed during a visit to Norway yesterday.

The EU is extending its anti-piracy mission ‘EUNAVFOR Atalanta’ in the Indian Ocean until December 2014.

Last week’s Koran burning at the NATO base in Afghanistan has triggered a wave of violent protests against Western forces all over the country.

According to a French defence official, France may sell Mirage F-1 fighter jets to Libya. France is currently replacing its Mirage fleet by Dassault’s Rafale aircraft.

In the scope of its Alliance Ground Surveillance (AGS) system, NATO will purchase five US-built Global Hawk drones from Northrop Grumman.

The United Nations (UN) plan to reduce some of their peacekeeping missions to facilitate major budget cuts.

According to a report by the defence select committee of the British Parliament, the UK would struggle to conduct an operation of the dimension of the Libya campaign after the full implementation of the strategic defence and security review.

NATO warships rescued an Iranian vessel twice last week, once from Somali pirates and again, just days later, when the same vessel’s engine broke down.

A Royal Fleet Auxiliary supply ship (RFA), Fort Victoria, thwarted an attempt by Somali pirates to attack cargo ships in the Indian Ocean last Tuesday.

International concerns have been raised over Russian cargo ship possibly carrying ammunition which docked recently at Syrian port Tartus.

Ellen Tauscher, US Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security expressed her confidence yesterday, in the up-coming US-Russia ‘strategic stability talks.’

Officials of EU member states have agreed in principal on an embargo on oil imports from Iran suspected of developing nuclear weapons through its uranium enrichment program.

According to the Pentagon, the military dialogue between the US and Pakistan continues despite recent disputes following the killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers in a US-led airstrike on the Afghan-Pakistani border in November 2011.

On November 7th the SDA along with the CEIS and the KAS hosted the annual Security and Defence Day conference entitled "Re-thinking Europe's security priorities."

The European Parliament adopted a resolution concerning a stronger harmonisation of European defence policies last week.

The SDA yesterday hosted Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, NATO Assistant Secretary General for Public Diplomacy, for a lunch with SDA members to discuss NATO’s priorities for 2012 and objectives for the Chicago summit as well as the SDA’s programme for its 10th anniversary.

The UK is to seek new military alliances and will no longer invest in large-scale military missions, declares Chief of Staff Gen. Sir David Richards in his annual “state of the union” address on December 14th.

The US officially completed the withdrawal of their troops from Iraq in a ceremony in Baghdad yesterday.

NATO has announced that it will complete its Training Mission in Iraq (NTM-I) on December 31st 2011, the expiry date of the current mission.

As a direct consequence to a NATO airstrike which killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in the Afghan-Pakistani border region in November, the US followed the Pakistani request to vacate Shamsi airbase in the South-western Pakistani province of Baluchistan.

A US warship, part of NATO’s counter-piracy mission Operation Ocean Shield off the Horn of Africa, captured a group of pirates in cooperation with a Japanese military aircraft earlier this week.

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen urged Russia not to waste money on unnecessary measures to counterbalance European missile defence.

France will offer military training to the defence forces of the new Libyan regime, as announced by Adm. Edouard Guillaud, Chief of Staff of the French army, after his talks with representatives of the Libyan government.

The Netherlands are aiming to strengthen cooperation with other European countries and play a pioneering role in multinational defence projects.

According to Iranian media, the Iranian military has shot down a US RQ-170 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which had invaded Iranian airspace over the border region with Afghanistan and Pakistan on the weekend.

At their Council meeting last week, EU Foreign Ministers decided to install a Brussels-based EU Civil-Military Operations Centre for the Horn of Africa.

Ten years after the Petersberg Conference, setting the framework for the reconstruction of Afghanistan, Bonn is to host another International Afghanistan Conference on Monday.

European defence ministers agreed on a range of projects for pooling defence capabilities at their Brussels meeting on November 30th.

In a direct reaction to the NATO-led bombing of two Pakistani military posts in the Afghan-Pakistani border region, which killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on November 26th, Pakistan asked the US to leave the Shamsi airbase.

Moscow will send its only aircraft carrier, the ‘Admiral Kuznetsov’ to the Russian naval base in Tartus, Syria, according to the Russian navy.

The Franco-British summit will be dedicated to different aspects of the countries’ defence cooperation at the end of this week.

A US proposal for a new cluster munitions treaty was rejected by member states of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), also known as the ‘Oslo Convention’, an international treaty banning the use of cluster bombs.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai on the weekend announced details of the second phase of transition from NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to Afghan authorities to be completed by 2014.

In a move resembling early French support for the former Libyan opposition, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé officially recognised the Syrian National Council (SNC) in talks with SNC leader Burhan Ghalioun on November 23rd.

Following the announcement of a US troop deployment to northern Australia, Australian Defence Minister Stephen Smith expressed the country’s willingness to concretely consider plans for trilateral military training of US, Chinese and Australian forces.

Ahead of NATO’s Chicago Summit in May 2012, the Alliance has launched an initiative for concrete pooling of defence resources.

From 18 November to 6 December this year, the EU will organise and conduct its first crisis management exercise under the Lisbon Treaty.

Drawing from the experiences of the ongoing eurozone crisis and the Arab uprisings, panellists Jan Borkowski, Polish Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Francis Delon, French Secretary General for Defence and National Security, Ivan Soltanovskiy, Director of European Cooperation at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs,

Greek Prime Minister Georg Papandreou, who faces a vote of no confidence this Friday, fired the entire high commend of the Greek armed forces including several other high ranking officials, replacing them with officers more loyal towards Papandreou’s leadership.

During a visit of the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton to Beijing on Monday, the EU and China agreed to strengthen their defence cooperation.

NATO and EU have started a joint operation of their KFOR and EULEX missions in the border region between Northern Kosovo and Serbia on October 13th.

The EUFOR Althea mission to Bosnia will be considerably reduced.

German Defence Minister Thomas de Maizière arrived yesterday in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, to visit German troops and prepare their gradual pull-out, to be completed by 2014.

On June 29 the Security & Defence Agenda organised an international conference entitled “Shaping NATO’s reform agenda” with the support of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, NATO, Lockheed Martin, IBM, the Atlantic Council and the Euro-Atlantic association of Belgium.

US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta acknowledged progress of the US-led troops in Afghanistan in weakening the Taliban, but complained about the insufficient performance of the Afghan government.

Top NATO official in Kosovo Gen. Erhard Buhler announced on August 29 that, due to the lasting violence on the Kosovo-Serbia border since late July following a ban on Serbian goods, NATO-led KFOR troops remain “in the lead to control the border […] at least until the end of September”.

As Libyan rebels continue to consolidate their hold on Tripoli, NATO ambassadors met on August 23 to consider post-conflict options for the alliance. NATO’s spokesperson Oana Lungescu stressed that NATO would serve only a supporting role with a stabilisation mission led by the United Nation and the Contact Group.

Some eight weeks after the initiation of NATO’s air campaign against forces of Libyan dictator Gadaffi, France and Britain will deploy attack helicopters to the battle zone.

Whilst Egypt holds its first meetings with the opposition, the political beneficiaries of Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution are petitioning for assistance from the international community. Calling for financial and state building aid, interim Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi has appealed to Europe and the wider world to “protect the Tunisian experiment”. However, the EU has not significantly increased funding since Tunisia started on the road to democracy, despite a high-profile visit from Catherine Ashton.

As anti-government protests in Egypt enter their second week, the EU response continues to come under scrutiny. With the death toll over the weekend alone reaching 100 and footage of military aircraft “buzzing” the defiant protestors in Cairo occupying the Western media, a flurry of declaratory statements has been the strongest action to emanate from the EU bloc. The EU seems divided between the desire to support a democratic uprising, and the need the “hedge their bets” in the face of these largely spontaneous protests.

The European Defence Agency (EDA) will host a multinational working group on the 8th of February, to assess the viability of forming a shared helicopter resource pool for European expeditionary and disaster response roles. The proposals build upon European ambitions to increase the deployability of existing helicopter platforms, which is chronically low. According to Andy Grey, the Helicopter Project Officer at the EDA, out of 1,500 military support helicopters in Europe, only 50 are deployed in-theatre.

Europe’s flagship space programme and answer to the US dominated Global Positioning System (GPS) network, the Galileo project, has run into difficulties, with the announcement that it will need an additional €1.9 billion. The money, which will be used to raise the total number of satellites to 30, brings the bill to €5 billion. The news comes just days after the German satellite CEO Berry Smutny was fired, after Wikileaks reported he had called the project “doomed to failure”.

Catherine Ashton, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice President of the European Commission, has issued a statement supporting the peaceful conclusion of the Sudanese referendum on independence. The people of South Sudan have been voting for the last week over whether to secede from the North, in events that will likely see Africa’s largest nation split in two. Ashton’s statement comes after initial international reports confirm that the voting process was “credible and well-organized in a mostly peaceful environment".

Kristalina Georgieva, European Commissioner for Int. Cooperation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response, has given her perspective of the EU's ongoing efforts in Haiti, one year since the country was plunged into crisis by an earthquake. Speaking to EurActiv, the Commissioner hailed the international communities efforts and that of the Haitian people, saying that, "what is definitely visible is that people have survived a very devastating disaster and they have managed to go through it without chaos and a collapse of the country".

The European External Action Service (EEAS) has been formally launched, amidst ongoing budgetary disputes and continuing diplomatic revelations from the Wikileaks scandal. Catherine Ashton, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security, spoke with great enthusiasm about the service’s mission, at a ceremony noted for being surprisingly intimate, and closed to the press.

The worlds largest and most powerful military alliance has unveiled its New Strategic Concept, the document that formally outlines its strategic posture and role in the world. Despite controversy, the alliance has unanimously backed the draft.

Maj. Gen. Mark A. Barrett, Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategic Plans and Policy at NATO Allied Command Transformation, introduces this report on “Protecting the global commons.” He and a number of prominent policy-makers, military and civilian, focus on the dual requirements of promoting stability and protecting access within the global commons, comprised of the space, maritime and cyber domains.

Following official recommendations proposed last week, the European Commissioner for International Cooperation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response, Kristalina Georgieva, has further outlined the likely role and structure of the new European Emergency Response Capacity. Speaking of the need to develop a robust EU capability for handling large-scale environmental or humanitarian disasters, the Commissioner is attempting to clarify how the newly proposed centre would be distinct from the existing Crisis Room and the EU's Joint Situation Centre (SitCen).

During this innovative online experiment, leading think-tanks got together with the SDA to organise a 5-day brainstorm that was supported by NATO and the EU. The recommendations that emerged from this brainstorming event have been sent around the world.

In November 2009, high-level representatives from EU institutions, member state governments, NGOs, think-tanks, industry, and the media, gathered to discuss how the combination of civilian and military power is the key to the European Union’s “smart power”. The Security & Defence Agenda and the CEIS (European Strategic Intelligence Company) are pleased to present the main findings of the conference.

The Security & Defence Agenda (SDA), the European Company for Strategic Intelligence (CEIS) and the Robert Schuman Foundation are proud to present this Security & Defence Days 2008 conference report “The Outlook for European Security”. It reflects the contributions of the 27 speakers and 280 participants at this two-day conference on EU security policy issues held on November 3 & 4 November 2008.

Some 120 experts gathered in Brussels to discuss the chief ESDP weaknesses to be tackled and debate what the impact will be of France's return to NATO. Though the debate almost got sidetracked by discussions of the skirmishes in Georgia, participants discussed whether the French Presidency's agenda was too ambitious, and many voices agreed that the Presidency's call for informal high-level meetings between NATO and EU leaders was a way forward.

Romania will be hosting the next NATO Summit in Bucharest on 2-4 April this year. On 12 March the Security & Defence Agenda hosted Romania’s Ambassador to NATO Sorin Dumitru Ducaru, US Ambassador to NATO Victoria Nuland and Belgium’s Ambassador to NATO Baron Frans van Daele.

Adriano Martins of the European Agency for Reconstruction advocated success in his organisation’s operations, most notably in the Balkans. International Crisis Group’s Alain Délétroz made a case that the EU should be developing its own capacities, via the ESDP, eluding to a permanent civ-mil response HQ in Brussels. Giuliano Porcelli of the Council of the EU, envisioned the tangible improvements in the EU’s operational capabilities for responding to international disasters, vis-à-vis a Lisbon Reform Treaty ratification, that would streamline decision-making when time matters most.

This study has been prepared by the Security & Defence Agenda for the French Ministry of Defence. It looks at the quality of debate amongst defence and security experts of the future course of the ESDP (European Security and Defence Policy) in Brussels.

On June 13, 2006, European Defence Agency Chief Executive Nick Witney and Security & Defence Agenda Director Giles Merritt co-chaired an expert level seminar focussing on the nature and the drivers shaping the future military environment. The meeting came at a time as the EDA is undertaking detailed analysis, using a range of conceptual approaches, aimed at developing an initial long-term vision for European capability and capacity needs. Experts examined questions arising from consideration of European internal and global security in the coming decades. Major factors influencing future capability needs identified include continued EU geographical proximity to sources of instability, new military and technological challenges, greater EU Member State cooperation, global economic, demographic and political change, civil-military co-operation and a further shift towards crisis prevention and management.

At the outset of his presentation of his new book “The Utility of Force: the Art of War in the Modern World”,General Sir Rupert Smith called for fundamental changes in the way modern warfare is approached. General Smith argued that adversaries were now “of and amongst the people”. It was no longer a case of defending territory, the goal was now to defend a way of life. Wars had to be conducted differently, with the desired outcome being defined ahead of any campaign – force alone would never be sufficient

Ambassador Nicholas Burns opened his remarks by confirming the US’s firm commitment to NATO, a commitment that came from “every level and every branch of the US government”. Ambassador Burns stated that a strong NATO alliance was the basis of American policy. Despite well-publicised differences, he noted that the Alliance had proved to be “a flexible and supple instrument”.