Those who expected Jean Castex to announce a French military withdrawal from the Sahel will be at their expense. No indication has come during the Prime Minister’s visit to Chad over the past two days. Jean Castex insisted on  the will intact  of France to fight Islamist terrorism. He also paid tribute to the memory of the three soldiers who died Monday in Mali and for whom the national tribute will take place on Monday.[…]

Same feeling among politicians.  After seven years, despite our great tactical successes, the situation is not developing favorably on the spot. We see a heavy balance sheet, too heavy, and a significant financial cost for the Nation , recently judged the deputy Thomas Gassilloud (presidential majority) by suggesting to  stay otherwise, […] in a less heavy format ”.

Maybe we’ll have to wait until the force Takuba be fully operational before seeing the force format Barkhane evolve downwards? The horizon is uncertain, the arrival of certain European contingents still being delayed … Läs artikel

Two French soldiers were killed when their vehicle hit an improvised explosive device in northeastern Mali on Saturday, just days after three others died in similar fashion.

Their deaths brought to 50 the number of French soldiers killed in the West African nation since France first intervened in 2013 to help drive back jihadist forces, according to army staff.

President Emmanuel Macron ”learnt with great sadness” of the deaths of Sergeant Yvonne Huynh and Brigadier Loic Risser in the Menaka region, his office said in a statement. Läs artikel

[…] Geografien ligger fast. Småstaten Norges naboskap med stormakten Russland, har vært og vil forbli en sentral faktor i utformingen av norsk forsvars- og sikkerhetspolitikk, uavhengig av den politiske utviklingen i Moskva. Det samme gjelder Norges beliggenhet som kyststat til de ressursrike og militærstrategisk viktige nordlige havområder.

Av det jeg vil kalle semipermanente faktorer som er formende for Norges strategiske stilling, er for det første alliansen med USA i NATO. For det annet er det utviklingen av det russiske basekomplekset på Kolahalvøya som hjemmehavn for den russiske nordflåten og Russlands strategiske ubåter, Russlands kjernefysiske annenslagsevne, som plasserer Norge i spenningsfeltet mellom Russland og USA. Når spenningen mellom de to stiger, reduseres Norges utenrikspolitiske handlingsrom i nordområdene, og naboforholdet til Russland blir mer anstrengt og konfliktfylt. Faren for væpnet konflikt i nordområdene øker. Samtidig er det ingen ting som tyder på At Russland har territorielle ambisjoner i Norge.[…]

Kommisjonen bør vurdere om omkostningene for Norge ved å slutte seg til USAs og EUs sanksjoner mot Russland, i form av svekket samarbeid med Russland på områder hvor Norge og Russland har felles interesser, og i form av ytterligere økt spenning i nordområdene i strid med tradisjonell norsk lavspenningspolitikk, står i forhold til omkostningene ved at Norge ikke solidarisk stiller seg bak sanksjonene og dermed bryter Vestens felles front mot Russland. Bidrar sanksjonene til å øke europeisk sikkerhet slik at Norge bør holde fast ved dem, eller bidrar de til å svekke europeisk sikkerhet slik at Norge bør arbeide for å få sanksjonene opphevet. Hva er målsettingen med sanksjonene? Å tvinge Russland til å tilbakeføre Krim til Ukraina? Er det realistisk? Å straffe Russland for å ha endret grensene i Europa med makt? Hvordan står det seg i forhold til USAs og NATOs anneksjon av serbiske Kosovo og opprettelse av en ny stat på Serbias territorium, uten FN-mandat? […]

”En helt annen tilnærming er å gå inn i, og etterprøve forutsetningene for, det norske forsvarskonseptet med utgangspunkt i at Forsvarets oppgave ikke primært er å kunne slåss, men å bidra til å forhindre at Norge kommer i krig. Et slikt alternativt forsvarskonsept med hovedvekt på å bidra til å forhindre krig, og redusert ambisjonsnivå når det gjelder evne til å utkjempe en krig om den likevel skulle komme, krever innsikt i hvordan Forsvaret faktisk bidrar til å forhindre krig, hvordan småstatens militærmakt best kan omsettes i politisk innflytelse. Det krever at man tenker «forsvar på norsk».” Läs artikel

[…] Men den 20 oktober offentliggjorde Post- och telestyrelsen (PTS) att Huawei inte skulle få leverera utrustning till de svenska 5G-näten, med hänvisning till Försvarsmakten och Säpo. Det var ett beslut som överraskade hela den svenska telekombranschen – ingen hade fått några sådana signaler under den säkerhetsgranskning som pågått under året.

Dagen efter sade Börje Ekholm, som jobbat med Kina i decennier och sitter i e-handelsjätten Alibabas styrelse, till DN att han inte vill uttala sig om politik och nationell säkerhet.

Men åsikter hade han uppenbarligen, och vände sig direkt till Sveriges utrikeshandelsminister Anna Hallberg, precis som han talar med regeringar över hela världen. För telekom är förstås också politik och kräver ett nätverk på högsta nivå. Tanken var förstås att detta som vanligt skulle ske under radarn – nu kunde DN:s reportrar använda offentlighetsprincipen och få ut sms-konversationen. […]

Den visar en tydligt pressad och vredgad vd, som ber om hjälp av svenska regeringen och ifrågasätter den ansvariga myndigheten. Han verkar anse att den svenska nationalklenod han basar för har utsatts för det som militärerna kallar ”friendly fire”, att bli beskjuten av de egna styrkorna. Då blir strategin att hjälpa sin värsta motståndare – inte i första hand för att Huawei ska lyckas i Sverige utan för att Ericsson ska kunna fortsätta sina framgångar i Kina. Läs artikel

[…] USA bearbetade sina allierade på flera plan – framför allt genom samtal på olika nivåer och hot om uteblivna underrättelsesamarbeten.

Australien portade Huawei först – och drabbades av handelssanktioner av Kina. Det skickade stötvågor in andra västländers regeringars kärnor där nästan alla är starkt beroende av handel från en av världens största marknader.

Det blev nu uppenbart: valet stod ytterst mellan Kina och USA och kunde få stora konsekvenser. I det läget drog USA på full gas för att utesluta Huawei från västvärlden. […]

Åter till Sverige och PTS beslut hösten 2020. Den 19 november satt Säpos generaldirektör Klas Friberg och Försvarsmaktens ÖB Micael Bydén på ett seminarium anordnat av Saab. De förde fram ett gemensamt budskap: Beslutet att utesluta Huawei hade fattats självständigt och utan påtryckningar. På en fråga om USA utövat påtryckningar sade Klas Friberg:

– De har inte satt något starkt tryck men de tycker att det är viktigt att Sverige inte är alltför beroende av ZTE och Huawei.

– Vi viker inte ner oss och det är en helt självständig bedömning från den myndighet som ska besluta och det är PTS.

Samtidigt kan DN berätta att USA utövade påtryckningar mot politiker på hög nivå inför beslutet.

– Amerikanerna har ju hört av sig till oss och påpekat att de tycker att det är viktigt, säger DN:s källa som är politiker på hög nivå och som haft insyn i frågorna. Läs artikel

The Malian authorities on Thursday charged six figures, including a former prime minister, with seeking to mount a coup, a move that came after a military putsch in August, their lawyers said. The public prosecutor’s office in the capital Bamako said in a statement that six people were under investigation for “plotting against the government, criminal association, insulting the head of state and complicity”. A group of lawyers defending the six said the individuals, who include Boubou Cisse (photo above), the last prime minister before the August putsch, had been charged with an “attempted coup”. Five of the six have been detained in custody, except for Cisse, whose whereabouts are unknown, the public prosecutor said. […]

On Monday, security sources said a number of people had been detained on December 21, while the prosecutor’s office said a “preliminary inquiry” had been opened “relating to violations of state security”.Those detained, the sources said, included Aguibou Tall, Cisse’s half-brother; the secretary of the president’s office, Sekou Traore; and Mohamed Youssouf Bathily, a campaigner and radio presenter who is popular
among young Malians. In the runup to their arrest, social media said there had been a scheme to “destabilise” Mali’s post-coup transitional institutions. Läs artikel

[…] Russia’s relations with non-NATO countries in the Baltic Sea region—Sweden and Finland—have also become markedly strained. Stockholm has just decided on a major increase in its defense spending, citing the Russian threat. Moscow, of course, has always considered Sweden an informal member of NATO. What is new is that Finland, Russia’s direct neighbor and a neutral–friendly partner during the Cold War, is now cooperating very closely with the United States and NATO. The Baltic Sea has largely become a NATO lake.

In response, Moscow reversed the post-Cold War policy that had long seen its western flank as its safest. New military formations have been established. The Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, rather than becoming a laboratory for close Russian-European cooperation, has been rebuilt as a military fortress, a behind-the-lines West Berlin on steroids. While Russians worry about defending Kaliningrad, Poland and the Baltic countries fear a Russian strike to cut off the Baltics by seizing the Suwalki gap.

What we are witnessing here is not a new Cold War, but a new kind of confrontation, which is also fraught with high risks. The most likely danger is no longer a massive cross-border invasion or a large-scale nuclear attack, but an inadvertent direct collision between Russian and Western forces where they operate close to each other, or a miscalculation by one side linked to misperception about the other. Läs artikel

[…] History can be “an inconvenient truth.” But the last serious crisis in cross-strait relations appears to have been long enough ago (1996? 2008?) for some in Washington to have forgotten—or maybe never to have known—how serious it can get. In the meantime, U.S.-China relations have deteriorated to a point where Beijing’s perspective on almost any bilateral issue is now deemed invalid or unreasonable. Indeed, its views on many issues are invalid and unreasonable. But we should be extremely cautious about dismissing Beijing’s perspective on Taiwan, or underestimating how deadly serious the issue is to Chinese leaders. It represents the unfinished business of the Chinese Civil War and thus involves the legitimacy and the survival of the Chinese Communist Party. Despite American distaste for the Chinese Communist Party, the inconvenient truth is that Washington explicitly committed several decades ago to not “pursuing a policy of ‘two Chinas’ or ‘one China, one Taiwan’” as a strategic prerequisite to establishing a relationship with Beijing. China has since become both the United States’ primary global strategic competitor and a necessary strategic partner on a wide range of global issues. That will be hard enough to manage without endangering the relationship’s foundation of mutual understandings regarding Taiwan.

The good news is that, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, Beijing is not in fact looking for excuses or an opportunity to attack Taiwan: it is looking for reasons not to do so. The danger is that Chinese leaders currently do not perceive Washington and Taipei to be providing those reasons. Läs artikel

The security situation in Europe has deteriorated to its lowest point since the end of the Cold War. NATO and Russian military forces operate in much closer proximity than just a few years ago, previous lines of NATO-Russia communications have broken down, and the nuclear and conventional arms control system that took decades to build is rapidly unravelling, with nothing to take its place.

Against this backdrop, the ELN has lent its support to an extended series of detailed senior expert discussions led by ELN members Sergey Rogov and Alexey Gromyko on how NATO and Russia might reduce the risk of inadvertent conflict. The experts group has comprised some 30 people including retired diplomats and military officers from the United States, Russia and Europe. While members of the group differed over the root causes of the current crisis, they share a common concern that as tension builds between Russia and NATO, there is a growing danger of a real military confrontation.

1. Re-establishing practical dialogue between Russia and NATO, including direct contacts between the military commanders and experts of Russia and NATO member states.
2. Developing common rulesthat will reduce the risk of unintended incidents on land, air and sea.
3. Enhancing stability by increasing transparency, avoiding dangerous military activities, and providing dedicated communication channels that would avoid escalation of incidents that might occur.
4. Utilizing (and possibly supplementing) the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act to codify restraint, transparency and confidence-building measures.
5. Exploring possible limitations on NATO and Russian conventional force deployments in Europe to enhance transparency and stability.
6. Establishing consultations between Russia and US/NATO on the topics of intermediate-range missiles and ballistic missile defense, in order to prevent a new nuclear missile race in Europe.
7. Preserving the Open Skies Treaty. Läs artikel

Look at and listen in to three spheres of contemporary Western society – politics, research and media: The word” peace” and related words, such as the UN Charter norm of” making peace by peaceful means”, nonviolence, negotiations – have disappeared. And with the words, the discourse and with the discourse, the interest, the education and expertise, the focus, the awareness and the strategies.

Let us start with the political sphere. In Scandinavia where I happen to live, today’s status is very different from the 1980s. There are no global disarmament policies or disarmament ministers; the UN’s basically non-armed peace-keeping is hardly ever mentioned; while Sweden has integrated with NATO and has soldiers under NATO command, it no longer contributes a single UN peacekeeper. Läs artikel

On Jan. 23, 2020, Gen. François Lecointre, chief of the defense staff and France’s highest-ranking general, told the National Assembly that the French army knew what it was doing with Operation Barkhane, the French military intervention in the Sahel that began in 2014.

This was partly due, he explained, to the fact that the army could draw on the heritage of colonial-era doctrine personified by Gen. Joseph Gallieni and Gen. Hubert Lyautey. These men made their careers conquering and “pacifying” France’s colonial empire in Indochina and Africa during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Their ideas were the basis for doctrinal developments in the 1940s and 1950s, when colonial wars evolved into counter-insurgency campaigns and colonial doctrine became counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine. For Lecointre, the association between contemporary French military operations and French colonial practices was a positive one. He hoped to communicate confidence and cultivate the trust of the French public and France’s civilian leaders, assuring them that the French military mission in the Sahel was justified and its objectives attainable.

For some, Lecointre’s remarks had the opposite effect. He confirmed the idea that France was conducting a colonial campaign — that it was approaching Africa through a (neo)colonial lens and not, as the French government claims, merely defending friendly countries from Islamist terrorists. Critics of French interventions in Africa such as Bruno Charbonneau stress the continuities between colonial, neo-colonial, and contemporary policies and practices. Other regional experts like Yvan Guichaoua and Nathaniel Powell are troubled by the repetition of policies and practices that have, in their view, done more to destabilize the region since decolonization in the 1960s. In other words, the problem is not that the French military does not know what it is doing, but rather that France’s track record suggests the country’s savoir faire is doing more harm than good.

There is also a widespread belief that the French approach to the Sahel is overly militarized. In March 2020, Hannah Armstrong, a senior analyst with International Crisis Group, told the New York Times that “French counterterrorism mimics U.S. counterterrorism of 15 years ago.” Operation Barkhane was doomed to follow the course of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. According to Armstrong, sooner or later, the French will realize the war is a lost cause and leave. Alex Thurston has argued that “French policy seems to lack a vision beyond the theory that eventually, killing enough terrorists and undertaking enough development projects will eliminate the jihadist presence.” Charbonneau has taken issue with France’s application of the “global approach,” which he associates with actions that negatively impact Malian politics and society. Ultimately, most agree that, in Thurston’s words, “France is not succeeding at stabilizing the Sahel.” Läs artikel