21.01.10
Autor: Anthony Lawrence
There will be a general election in the UK this year, after which whoever wins will carry out a defence review. This will be the first since the 1997 Strategic Defence Review, which re-focused the UK’s armed forces from their Cold War role towards being a “force for good in the world”. The preliminary work is already underway and, not least because of substantial pressure on the UK defence budget, it seems that even key acquisition projects will be up for debate. These include, notably, the future carrier programme, the Joint Strike Fighter (F-35) programme, the Typhoon (Eurofighter) programme and even the independent nuclear deterrent.
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postitas: ICDS
23.05.09
Autor: Anthony Lawrence
During the Baltic Defence College’s Higher Command Studies Course, the excellent Professor Christopher Dandeker (who will be speaking again at ICDS in late August) delivers a seminar on the relationship between the armed forces and society. As part of this, he discusses the extent to which the armed forces can be different from wider society. The armed forces tend to be conservative, close-knit communities. Their overwhelming concern to maintain operational effectiveness often, understandably, leads them to push back against social and cultural changes. But at the same time, the armed forces recruit from and derive their support from wider society. If they do not reflect at least most of the values and beliefs of their host societies, they will have trouble attracting new members and find it more difficult to win the necessary backing of the public. So, mirroring developments in society albeit with some delay, the role of women) has grown considerably in most NATO armed forces. Gay and lesbian personnel have been also been welcomed in many armed forces; President Obama is reportedly in favour of reviewing the US military’s ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy.
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postitas: ICDS
23.10.08
Autor: Anthony Lawrence
English Version
Kui kiiresti jõuaksid NATO abiväed kohale Eesti vastase sõjalise rünnaku või tõenäoliselt aset leidva rünnaku korral? See sõltub kahest asjast. Esiteks peab NATO võtma vastu otsuse vägede paigutamiseks Eestisse kas Washingtoni lepingu 5. artikli alusel, kui rünnak on juba toimunud, või 4. artikli alusel, kui Eesti on esitanud palve konsultatsioonideks Põhja-Atlandi Nõukogus, sest Eesti „territoriaalne terviklikkus, poliitiline sõltumatus või julgeolek“ on ohustatud. Teiseks tuleb väed Eestisse füüsiliselt kohale toimetada. Et hinnata, kui kaua vägede paigutamisele aega võiks kuluda, tegi RKK mõned lihtsad arvutused tabelarvutusprogrammiga avalikkusele kättesaadavate andmete põhjal.
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postitas: ICDS
16.05.08
Autor: Anthony Lawrence
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” say the English, meaning that if someone makes you a present of a horse, you don’t show ingratitude by inspecting its teeth to see how old it is. It’s a free horse – you accept it with thanks. Although cavalry still survive in today’s armed forces, horses themselves tend only to be used for ceremonial purposes and Ministries of Defence are rarely offered real animals. But in the period following the end of the Cold War, there have been many occasions when nations building and modernising their militaries have been offered, and have accepted, used military equipment at little or no cost.
The usual human response to free stuff is to grab it. There are websites pointing you towards the many things you can get for free and few of us could deny that we get a buzz from acquiring something for an unexpectedly low price. This is harmless enough when it comes to cosmetics samples – you can always throw them away if they bring you out in a rash – but when bargain defence equipment is on offer, a little more care is needed. There are at least three questions that need to be thought about.
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postitas: ICDS
24.04.08
Autor: Tony Lawrence
In Tuesday’s Päevaleht, Leo Kunnas argued that the size of Estonia’s wartime defence forces should be driven by the strength of the permanent readiness units in Russia’s Leningrad Military District – meaning a wartime strength of 40-50 000 – and criticised the Ministry of Defence for spending money on projects that are unrelated to primary independent defence capability or are of secondary importance militarily. Kunnas is thus advocating that Estonia’s defence planning should be ‘threat-based’ – the force structure should be designed to meet the most stressing threat scenario.
NATO used threat-based defence planning during the Cold War; the existential threat posed by the Warsaw Pact defined almost all of NATO’s force structure. Intelligence allowed the threat to be characterised and measured; NATO’s objectives, in terms of deterrence, territorial defence and the restoration of captured territory, were quantified and agreed; and a mass of simulations and wargames were employed to calculate the force structure necessary to meet those objectives. This approach was attractive in the circumstances of the Cold War – the threat was immediate and real and the necessary force structures to meet it could be calculated with a fair degree of confidence. But even during its chilliest days, Cold War threat-based planning was polluted by the reality of financial constraints. NATO planned not for the most stressing threat, but for the most stressing threat its members were prepared to afford to meet.
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postitas: ICDS
08.02.08
Autor: Tony Lawrence
Burden-sharing, the way in which NATO member states divide up their collective defence obligations, is a recurrent source of debate among the Allies. The debates usually take the form of America asking Europe to make a greater contribution; the latest round , over troop contributions to NATO’s ISAF mission in Afghanistan, is no exception.
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postitas: ICDS
04.02.08
Autor: Tony Lawrence
Defence planning – the process of deciding the size and shape of a state’s armed forces – is probably one of the most difficult activities that the state must carry out. Defence structures and projects are complex, and their management is immensely challenging. Defence absorbs huge amounts of public money, yet there is never enough to provide for all the capability we would want, meaning that difficult choices have to be made. And, as Donald Rumsfeld eloquently observed , the greatest difficulty of all is that we now live in an uncertain world and cannot be really sure what we are planning for.
Since the end of the Cold War, defence planners have worked to develop a range of new approaches to dealing with these challenges. Despite their sometimes technical descriptions these approaches still all seek to answer three basic questions: what do we want to do, what can we do now, and how do we get to the first from the second?
At ICDS, we have recently carried out some work on the second question through a project to assess how well Estonia’s current force structure meets the requirements put upon it by national security and defence policies. As Estonia’s defence policy is expressed in rather vague terms, we needed first to make use of some analytical tools and techniques to pin down these requirements in greater detail.
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postitas: ICDS
