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Az 1999-es háborús kutatásokat folytatván a LégierőBlogger ma a vajdasági Nádalja melletti szántóföldön elesett újvidéki kubosok (240.szrp) emlékművét kereste fel. Dragan Bandics sztari vodnik és Alekszandar Popovics vojnik egy Kub SzPU-ban vesztek oda június 1-re virradó éjjel, amikor az ütegük által célba vett amerikai F-16CG raj vezére (egy közeli CJ-ről indított HARM biztosította elnyomás fedezete mellett) a rakétaindítások helyét éjjellátó szemüveggel illetve célzókonténerrel felderítette, majd lézerirányítású bombákat dobott arra, és telitalálatot ért el. A támadást egy harmadik katona, Ivan Petkovics túlélte. A Trabant 61 hívójelű amerikai pilóta, Julian M.Chesnutt őrnagy tettéért Ezüst Csillag kitüntetést, majd 2001-ben James Jabara díjat kapott.

Bokor a horizonton. Ez mutatja a helyet, ahol a két jugoszláv lérakos életét adta a hazájáért.

A fiatalemberek emlékműve az irányjelző bokorral.

Az emléktábláról kiderül, hogy a katonák a 3947-es postífiókszámú újvidéki alakulatnál, azaz a 240. Önjáró Légvédelmi Rakétaezrednél szolgáltak.

Nádalja központja a háborús emlékművel, melyre külön elhelyezték a Szrbobranban (Szenttamáson) született Szinisa Lausev vodnik prve klase emléktábláját is, aki szintén a 240. ezrednél szolgált SzURN-on, mint 1Sz31 kezelő, és 990328-án Csenej mellett esett el, HARM-találattól. A képen látható kerekesszékes úriember volt segítségünkre a szántóföldi emlékmű megtalálásában.

A délszláv háborúk emlékműve a szenttamási (Szrbobran) templomkertben.

Cessna és gyülekező vadlibák Szegednél az őszi napsütésben.

Zord

German MAN KAT 1 6x6 Military Truck

Encore ce soir, la chasse française a tiré ses bombes sur Raqqa, à 19h30 (heure de Paris). Deux
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Au moins deux des filières historiques de contre-terrorisme et libération d'otages étaient présentes la
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United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Afghanistan Nicholas Haysom told an IPI audience that the country faced three transitions—security, economic, and political—and must manage them all to survive. “It has no option,” he said. “It can’t do two out of three and pass. If it goes down on the economy or on the security, or politically unravels, all three would be terminal.”

Mr. Haysom, head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), said the country would face critical tests at upcoming donor conferences in Warsaw and Brussels.

“Afghanistan is aid dependent, and the challenges it faces requires at least the same level of aid in a context in which there are a number of other conflicts making demands for the donor community, and the international community generally, because already, many of the donor countries have agreed to take money to meet the demands arising out of the influx of migrants, out of the development aid budget,” he said.

“So Afghanistan faces these two events with the task of persuading the international community that it has so managed its transition that it is worth investing in.”

On the economic transition, he asserted that despite more than a decade of foreign aid, the level of poverty in the country is unchanged since 2001. Hopes for mineral wealth proved illusory, he said, and even the agricultural industry has suffered, with foods once exported for profit now being imported. The formerly booming transport and construction sectors have also crashed.

In the capital, there is pervasive joblessness. “What we have in Kabul might be described by some as a pre-Arab Spring moment, where youth with higher expectations are meeting a situation in which there are simply no jobs,” he said.

The year 2014 began a number of changes that complicated the security transition for Afghanistan, he said. A Government of National Unity was formed, including the newly elected President, Ashraf Ghani, and his onetime chief political rival, Abdullah Abdullah, as its Chief Executive. At the same time, the responsibility for combatting the Taliban was assumed by the Afghan National Security forces after the departure of international forces.

A key question facing the country’s future is whether the government, the Taliban, and the neighboring government in Pakistan recognize that the situation is ripe to make peace. “There are certainly pockets within the Taliban that appreciate that a future Afghanistan cannot be administered by one party, and who recognize that at the end of the day there needs to be a political solution,” he said.

While the Afghan and Pakistani governments have gone on the record to state their ultimate ambition is a negotiated solution, this has not translated into action by President Ghani yet. “The government is yet to establish its architecture for engaging in a peace process,” he said.

As for progress for engagement with the Taliban, the governmental body tasked with doing so since 2010, the High Peace Council, “has been in stasis for over a year,” he said. This, he said, is because the “government has recognized that there is limited space domestically for it to engage in a peace process.”

Summarizing his recommendations for the economic, political, and security transitions, Mr. Haysom said, “Viability for Afghanistan requires success over the transition, requires a Government of National Unity to stay together, requires Afghan National Security Forces to hold the ground, requires the economy not to suffer a major default, and it requires the international community to be forthcoming in Warsaw and Brussels.”

He also said that donors would want to see progress in constructing and improving a system for elections before pledging funds to Afghanistan in 2016. The international community “will not be forthcoming in Warsaw and Brussels unless there is demonstrable progress, in the reforms, notably the anti-corruption reforms inside Afghanistan, and one thing we haven’t mentioned, the donor countries, if only for their own domestic constituents, will want to see proof of further democratization in Afghanistan.”

Asked if the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) had made inroads into the country, he said the extent of their presence is still unclear, but that the UN does not “take it lightly.”

He said that this non-state actor presents a unique challenge for the UN, an organization of states. “We believe that whereas the Taliban generally have some respect to [the] humanitarian framework, humanitarian workers, UN in general, ISIS doesn’t, and that our staff would be targets, for both abduction and symbolic attacks, and it really does effect” UN planning, he said.

For UNAMA, “as a mission with 13 field offices across the country, we have to have as good a reading as we can of the ISIS presence, and threats to our staff and operations.”

He also added that Afghans had become the second most populous refugee group, behind those fleeing the Syrian civil war. “We don’t underestimate the number of Afghans,” he said. “They are clearly #2 just after Syrians and in some cases surpassing even Syrians, according to my European colleagues in Kabul.”

He said he considers part of his job encouraging the Taliban to speak with the government of Afghanistan. “My own position with them, that I shared with them, is that there can be no progress towards peace if you don’t engage with the government because that is the only way in which you can strike real bargains, reach compromises, or at the minimum reach agreements that would serve as the basis for arrangements by which Afghans live in peace together.”

The event was held as part of IPI’s Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) series.

Warren Hoge, IPI Senior Adviser for External Relations, moderated the discussion.

Watch event:

Voici quelques images choisies diffusées ce soir par l'EMA pour illustrer les missions du jour. Trois
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Az egyik vasárnap őrizetbe vett férfi családjával beszélgetett az EUrologus Molenbeekben. Az Abdeslam család szomszédja elképedten mesélt a nagyon durva rendőri fellépésről.

La France a subi en janvier et en novembre 2015 deux séries d’attentats abjectes sur son territoire. Ce ne sont malheureusement pas les premiers qui touchent notre pays et il serait naïf de croire qu’ils pourraient être les derniers...

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Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

Quelle : © Europäische Union, 2015 - EP

 

So, as predicted, the world really is a more dangerous and complex place. It was ever thus.

Speaking on Radio 4 this morning, the Defence Secretary argued that no-one could have predicted the rise of a capable insurgent force, a global jihad or a Russia doing things we didn’t like at the time of SDSR 2010. Other views are definitely available. Indeed, lots of people were expressing just these views in 2010 for the rush-job, Cabinet Office and Treasury-led review that seemed to insulate itself not only from expert voices from outside Whitehall but from those in Main Building too (hence the circular PR firing squad of military voices that boomed out prior to the publication of the review). So, having been pilloried in the press, by military experts and even by academics (including myself in measured tones) you would be a reasonable person if you’d have thought the government would have learnt from the experience. And they may have. This is a balanced programme. It might not require the sort of revisions that most defence reviews are subject to, which would make a distinct change to the past. But Cameron still said ‘full spectrum’, which to me kicks the ‘we just don’t have the money for this’ can further down the road.
The ‘trip-wire’ brigades are an interesting innovation, even if they are not going to be rapidly formed (they’ll be ten years in the making). Whilst 2010 was an insular review, signalling a withdraw from expedition – followed immediately by Libya (oops) – this implies that we’re still in the expeditionary game (be it eyeing up Eastern Europe, or the Middle East). Should these brigades need moving via the oceans then we might have a problem, even with the new announced capacity. But from 2025 onwards, wherever there is a fight with a western coalition of the willing, the UK will be in the middle of it. On one reading of the recent past, this sort of activity then causes the requirement for further investment in counter-terrorism capabilities.

But the big missing element is the coherent strategic vision the Prime Minister promised. Having failed to articulate one in 2010 and now in 2015, I think we have to conclude that despite the hours that have been invested in discussing ‘strategy’, the Parliamentary Committee inquiry led by Bernard Jenkin and so on, that strategy is a lost art. And it’s an expensively lost art. Because it causes us to cover everything badly, rather than build capabilities behind something coherent. These best single line articulation of the strategy the UK ‘ought’ to have is from Malcolm Chalmers of RUSI – ‘a force for stability in the world’, amending the ‘force for good’ that was so widely scoffed at, at the time. Such a strategy would build upon cooperative work with our ‘frenemies’ (relevant today might be Russia and Iran, who will almost certainly need to be the boots on the ground element to sort out the Syria debacle). Prosperity and security as bonded concepts has some traction, but it definitely spending to save, and it’s not clear to me why the UK has to be at the centre of it (the old east of Suez debate writ large). I may be being unfair. If there is a strategy, it’s to return to the post-war UK, of global reach just reframed for today.

The positioning of the nuclear deterrent could have been sorted out with a simple political decision – to underwrite that the money attached to the deterrent could be kept within the defence budget not repurposed away from defence and into something else. I think that the issues around the nuclear question become much more solvable with that in place: pound for pound into conventional forces the nuclear money becomes not just useful, but game-changing. I wrote a few years ago about how and why the defence review had made our nuclear deterrent unsafe. The missing ladder of escalation not only rendered the deterrent useless, but potentially dangerous too. The death and/or retirement of those who really understand nuclear deterrence is a gaping gap in our collective knowledge of defence currently.

One of the most important things to have come between the 2010 and 2015 reviews was the decision to break the tie to our native defence manufacturers. I wrote about what I saw as the significance at the time, but I had subsequently concluded I just was interested by something very dull. The decision to replace Nimrod with Boeing P8s, and the potential (and large) markets for smaller, and alternative defence manufacturers to meet the new threats I think evidences that breaking the tie was significant. I’m not sure it can be justified in terms of off-the-shelf capabilities being cheaper (the shelf is still expensive to fill), and ultimately it will undermine our defence industries, who are already migrating to markets that appreciate them more. The European system of manufacturing – be it collaboratively, or brokered via the European Defence Agency – has merely entrenched competition between European states, rather than broken them down. Consequently, the UK has left itself hostage to its relationship with US defence giants, rather than being part of a European alternative, or an expensive indigenous capability. It is made expensive by the absence of competing supply. When the UK led the way in aircraft, four or more manufacturers competed for aircraft contracts, with the MoD underwriting the losses (they could innovate because failure didn’t result in bankruptcy). What we have now are contractors who have to be cautious and who are forced to underbid – and then overrun. There are half as many officials involved in UK defence procurement as there are in the entire European Commission. Given the scale of their respective challenges, that’s shocking. But losing a third of defence civil servants is equally shocking, in its own way.

The UK can offer something unique to its network of allies in ‘these dangerous times’. And that’s intelligence plus disruption. Because of our genuinely special relationship with the US in the intelligence field we do punch way above our weight in this field. The 1900 extra officers announced last week should be a welcome initiative, and meet some of the need of ‘Security Politics’, although recruitment and training puts extra capability years away. But in this area lies the British USP. Certainly on this budgetary spend.

So, do we have a coherent strategy? Maybe.

Do we have capabilities arriving quickly enough for the challenges? Not really.  

Is the navy still two men and a dinghy? Sadly yes.

Is the nuclear deterrent issue resolved? Yes.

Do we have answers for how we’re going to deal with the challenges presented in the Middle East and Eastern Europe? No…
But we have extra money, albeit coming relatively slowly, and some nice announcements and a balanced platform. Not a bad effort, given the timeline allowed for the review. But if you’re sat in Main Building tonight it’s one cheer and one raspberry apiece.

The headquarters of the DGSE, one of France’s numerous intelligence agencies, is known as “the swimming pool.” Intelligence will play a central role in efforts to combat terrorism. (Photo: franceculture.fr)

Whenever something unexpected happens, the airwaves immediately fill with the sound of pundits calling for the President to scrap whatever it is the government has been doing that is tangentially related, and start over again with something else. Thus, the recent terrorist attacks in Paris were met with assertions that Obama’s strategy against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was not working and had to be changed. This, however, is not the right way to look at it. I think it is more accurate to say that the president’s strategy has been working in Iraq and Syria, but ISIS is now reacting to the setbacks in innovative ways.

In 2014 ISIS spread across eastern Syria and western Iraq in a rapid, sudden, and unexpected way. The advance left such a strong impression that some people seem to think that it is continuing. Yet, at this point, ISIS has largely been brought to a halt. Moreover, it has been losing territory.

According to the Pentagon, as of April 2015, ISIS “can no longer operate freely in roughly 25 to 30 percent of populated areas of Iraqi territory where it once could.” (This calculation, presumably, leaves out the extensive empty desert areas that fall within ISIS’s borders.) The road between Raqqa and Mosul has been cut. Thousands of fighters have been killed. The Iraqi army has not been vigorous in its attempts to retake the most recent ISIS acquisition, the city of Ramadi (and in some cases may actually be happy to see the Sunnis kept outside of Baghdad’s jurisdiction and elections), but even there ISIS is physically surrounded and isolated.

War, however, is a highly interactive enterprise. Rather than simply taking its hits on the ground, ISIS has responded by shifting part of the fight to a different theater—one that features a different balance of advantages and disadvantages. As I have noted before, ISIS does not have a tradition of terrorist attacks against distant targets. This was a point of dispute between al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and the founder of ISIS’ predecessor organizations, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Both sought ultimately to depose the (un-Islamic or insufficiently Islamic) regimes of the Middle East (the near enemy). Bin Laden, however, saw these regimes as sustained by the West (the far enemy) and therefore directed his attacks at the West to induce Western countries to drop their support. Al-Zarqawi attacked Middle Eastern regimes directly or sought to incite civil conflicts within these countries as a way to increase local support for his cause. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, by bringing the far enemy near, led to a temporary alignment between the two, and to Zarqawi’s founding of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

In recent weeks, however, ISIS and its affiliates have engaged in an unprecedented series of attacks at distant targets.* Although some of the details have yet to be confirmed, these acts include suicide bombings at a Kurdish peace rally in Ankara, Turkey; the destruction of a Russian airliner over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula; suicide bombings in a Shiite neighborhood in Beirut, Lebanon; and most recently, the  attacks against random civilians by three coordinated teams of gunmen and suicide bombers in Paris. Unable to prevail against technically advanced forces on the battlefield, ISIS is shifting the battle to a place where it is in a better position to inflict costs directly on those countries that have taken up arms against it.

It is highly unlikely that the leaders of ISIS have ever read the works of Thomas Schelling, but these actions can be interpreted in terms of his notion of coercive threats, which include both deterrence and compellence.** Schelling, who played a large role in the development of deterrence theory, was the originator of the notion of compellence. The basic concept, deterrence, uses threats of retaliation to induce an adversary not to engage in some behavior that you want to prevent (e.g., Don’t attack me!). The derivative concept, compellence, is the use of threats or actual violence to compel an adversary to stop or change some behavior that is already under way (e.g., Stop attacking me!). Schelling reasoned that compellence would be the more difficult of the two inasmuch as it required a change in the status quo rather than the maintenance of the status quo. Both, however, entailed the manipulation of the adversary’s perceived costs and benefits so as to convince the adversary of the wisdom of avoiding, or ceasing, the undesired behavior.

Thus the recent attacks most likely represent a further round in the “natural” escalation of the sectarian war in Iraq and Syria—one carried out in the spirit of compellence. The expanding war on the ground has drawn in a number of outside powers who are concerned about the balance of power in the Middle East and eager to prevent an ISIS victory. These interventionists supply their preferred local factions, directly participate in ground combat, or in the case of the Western powers, bomb ISIS positions from the air.

Unable to defeat modern air forces, ISIS is raising the costs of intervention by attacking their homelands and killing their citizens, hoping to undermine their willingness to remain engaged in a distant fight in a foreign land. In the Vietnam War, the United States similarly used bombing in an attempt to raise the costs of war to the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, in the hope that they would recalculate their relative costs and benefits, pack their bags, and go home. Unfortunately for the strategy in that instance, the Vietnamese were already home and it was the United States that packed its bags. Compared with that, ISIS’s use of compellence is far more logical.

ISIS runs the risk, of course, of eliciting a backlash in the form of even more intense bombing. Deterrence theory suggests an additional response. The Western powers should strive for “escalation dominance.”*** ISIS is seeking to fight on a battlefield of its choosing, one where the circumstances favor it over its adversaries. Its adversaries will have to make sure that no such battlefield exists. That does not necessarily mean changing strategy in Iraq and Syria (although one may choose to adjust it for other reasons). It means creating the capacity to defeat ISIS at other levels—thus removing the incentive to escalate—while the fight in Iraq and Syria continues.

Since the nature of the fight differs, the means will have to differ as well. Stealthy terrorist attacks against soft civilian targets in home cities cannot be combatted with battalions or fighter jets. It calls for police action, surveillance of suspected terrorists, cutting communications and travel links between ISIS headquarters and its operatives abroad, countering ISIS ideology and recruitment efforts, and improving relations between Muslim communities in the West and their host societies.

This approach will not satisfy those seeking a quick and easy answer. Unfortunately, quick and easy answers have a tendency to make things worse.

*For this argument’s sake, we shall assume that these actions have been directed by a central ISIS command and are not simply the products of inspiration or loosely networked organizations.

**The noun normally associated with the verb “compel” is compulsion, but Schelling was not happy with all of that word’s existing connotations, so he invented a new word.

***Herman Kahn developed this notion with reference to escalation among finely measured gradations of nuclear war. In my opinion, the expectation of controlling nuclear war with such precision is unrealistic. In the present context, however, the idea might be more useful.

Russian television channels have recently showed, allegedly incidentally, a super secret lethal Russian weapon. All the information about the weapon was then cut from all materials. Obviously, it was an intentional move, but what was the point of the message, and for whom was it? Showing is always better for understanding than putting it in word