From the series “Sinai’s most wanted militants”, by Mosa’ab Elshamy. Image used with permission. Egyptian photographer Mosa’ab Elshamy has a few series of photos on Sinai.
In April of this year, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dubbed the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt a “kind of Wild West” after rockets fired from there targeted the resort town of Eilat. According to Netanyahu, the peninsula is exploited by Islamist militants helped by Iran to smuggle weapons and stage attacks on Israel. In August, 16 Egyptian border guards were killed in an attack by Islamist militants who then crossed the border. This is one of a string of violent incidents since Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi was elected president of Egypt in June.
Since the fall of the Mubarak regime, Egypt has had to recalibrate its interactions with Israel and Palestine. The August attack exposed a particular set of vulnerabilities in Egypt’s security policies. The country was already shaken by riots and sectarian violence challenging Morsi’s presidency, and the border incident placed the spotlight on the messy question of who actually controls the country’s national security policy.
Future learning for defense and security professionals, photo: ISN
Almost anyone involved in large-scale education and training activities has accepted e-Learning as an established method and technology. What started with early experiments by financially powerful large enterprises and armed forces almost twenty years ago, has become available and affordable to almost any organization today.
Open-source solutions for learning management systems and the authoring of content, as well as low-cost hosted solutions, allow for the minimizing of technology investments to about zero. And based on the experiences of early adopters, the dos and dont’s, as well as successful e-Learning scenarios are widely known.
As a result, e-Learning has found its way into most educational organizations, including many committed to education in the defense and security policy sector. Everything fine and dandy then? Well, almost …
Contrary to basic language and computer training for the broader market (of professionals in general), there is hardly any off-the-shelf online-content available for more specific educational topics related to defense and security. As a result, content in this area is usually produced by educational institutes from scratch, requiring close cooperation between subject matter experts, instructional designers and multimedia specialists. It also requires a lot of time and money.
Despite this, there is more and more content being developed in support of peace and stability worldwide, often supported by funding from various sources. Although most of this content serves its key audience and goals, the return-on-investment for production, as well as the overall effect of educational campaigns might often be improved significantly: The key lies in expanding the target audience.
Helmet and Flack Jackets of MONUC Peacekeepers, courtesy of United Nations Photo/flickr
As anger in Haiti intensifies, with some residents blaming Nepali peacekeepers for having brought cholera to the island, a closer look at the composition of UN peacekeeping missions seems in order.
In October 2010 the UN had approximately 100,000 police officers, military experts and troops operating around the world in more than 17 UN peacekeeping missions. These operations cost the UN, in the 2005-2006 period, more than $5 billion, more than triple the UN’s core operating budget.
If we look at who the main contributors are, somewhat surprisingly, almost 30 percent of UN troops come from three countries that can be found in one of the most unstable parts of the world: Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. How is it possible that a country like Pakistan, that ranks 10th on the Failed States Index of 2010, is also the second most active country in terms of UN peacekeeping? The answer, of course, is money. Poorer countries earn valuable financial resources by contributing to UN missions. But shouldn’t these soldiers be at home, trying to stabilize their own countries and can they, if ‘thrown together” in a single mission operate together effectively despite deep-rooted animosities ‘at home’?
Advocates of UN peacekeeping missions, and the biggest financial contributors to the UN itself, namely EU countries and the US, are among the countries that contribute the least with troops. Except for Spain, France and Italy, no other European country contributes more than 1,000 troops. Even countries like Yemen and Zimbabwe contribute more troops to peacekeeping missions than the US. The question naturally arises: Why do western countries not put their money (and their manpower) where their mouth is by sending well trained, well equipped troops to trouble spots around the world, where they, by international consensus, are needed the most?
“The decline of conscription is a key element in the transformation of European armed forces since the end of the Cold War. The majority of EU member states have introduced professional all-volunteer forces (AVFs). The reasons for this trend are both military and societal. Given today’s geostrategic environment and the resulting task spectrum of European armed forces, the shift to AVFs is a logical development. The transition, however, requires a range of thought-out measures to secure appropriate recruitment levels and make the armed forces competitive on the labour market.”
Download “To Draft or Not to Draft? Conscription Reform in the EU” by CSS Researcher Aleksandra Dier from Strategic Trends Analysis (STA).
No War Zone, courtesy of AustralianMelodrama/Wikimedia Commons
In a recent open letter Costa Rica President Oscar Arias Sanchez wrote to his Uruguayan counterpart Jose ‘Pepe’ Mujica to ask him to abolish the Uruguayan army. Sanchez’s argument is based on the concept of ‘helplessness’.
This theory argues that it is better to have no army at all than a weak army that will be destroyed by any kind of foreign army anyway. Sanchez states that “Uruguay can not win an arms race against Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Chile and Venezuela. In the present circumstances, helplessness is a better national security policy for your people, than a military apparatus below that of your neighbors.” Sanchez also mentions that “the armed forces have been the source of the most thankless collective memory. It was the military boot that trampled human rights in our region.”
So the army, for small states, is dangerous internally and not useful externally.
But having no army doesn’t mean having no security forces at all. Internal security, law enforcement and border security are the responsibility of the police force.
In the case of Costa Rica, this doctrine has proven to be successful. Since the country decided to abolish the army, it has lived in peace and relative prosperity, despite the fact that it is surrounded by ‘turbulent’ neighbors like Nicaragua, Panama – that later abolished its army too – or El Salvador.
So is the doctrine of helplessness really useful in preventing conflict? For small states like Costa Rica or other small states that do not have an army like Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco or Mauritius, I believe this concept is really a powerful tool in the hands of the ruling regimes. Instead of investing money in a useless army that will have weak or no defensive potential at all, governments can invest money in measures that will help to stabilize the country and the region, like education or development projects.
Having no army, argues Sanchez, is also an advantage when the regional peace is threatened by military actors. It helps the demilitarized country to be “perceived as allies of all parties to the conflict,” or at least it helps to develop a “non-threatening” image vis-à-vis of the rest of the region.
But could we imagine other powerful regimes like Brazil or Germany without an army?
