Read more about the article Entering the Age of Tanks: The Evolution of Tanks in Land Forces
Food For Thought

Entering the Age of Tanks: The Evolution of Tanks in Land Forces

The tank’s earliest predecessors can be traced back to horse-drawn war chariots of the 2nd millennium BCE in the Middle East and, later, to the protected vehicles of the Middle Ages in Europe. Both ideas fused in the 14th and 15th centuries when Guido da Vigevano and Leonardo da Vinci developed battle cars. However, more practical forms emerged in early 20th century England with the first self-propelled armoured vehicle— an armoured steam traction engine— and the first motor vehicle mounted with a machine gun. The operational push to develop such vehicles arose from the vulnerability of horse-drawn carriages in the infantry, which were needed to improve the mobility of the heavy machine guns that dominated battlefields.

Comments Off on Entering the Age of Tanks: The Evolution of Tanks in Land Forces
17 November 2021
Read more about the article How can the European Defence Fund help the development of European Defence Capabilities?
Info Flash

How can the European Defence Fund help the development of European Defence Capabilities?

The geopolitical context of the European Union (EU) has changed significantly in recent years, leading Member States to face new threats. Confronted with this situation, European leaders have agreed to work more closely together in defence and security. EU Member States are not cooperating appropriately, which has led to inefficient use of funds, wasteful duplication, and inadequate deployability of defence troops. The military industry is characterised by rising defence equipment costs as well as expensive Research and Development (R&D) costs, which limit the launch of new military programmes and have a direct impact on the EU Defence Technological and Industrial Base’s (EDTIB) competitiveness and innovation (EU Parliament and Council, 2021). The level of defence spending varies significantly amongst Member States. Increased solidarity is required to deliver joint defence capabilities, particularly through the engagement of the EU budget. The cost of non-cooperation between Member States in the field of defence and security is estimated at between €25 billion and €100 billion every year (Maelcamp, I.; Ungaro, A.R.).

Comments Off on How can the European Defence Fund help the development of European Defence Capabilities?
16 November 2021
Read more about the article Reactivating the 56th Artillery Command in Europe: Making US Army Europe and Africa More Competitive
News

Reactivating the 56th Artillery Command in Europe: Making US Army Europe and Africa More Competitive

The US Army recently announced the reactivation of the 56th Artillery Command in Europe. This announcement constitutes part of a larger project: Multi-Domain Operations aiming at countering two key military actors in the international environment: China and Russia. Indeed, the first Multi-Domain Task Force (MDTF) was activated in 2019 by US Army Pacific, focusing on countering the Chinese military influence in the region. US Army Europe and Africa activated the second MDTF to counter the Russian military influence in their area of responsibility. In September 2021, this Europe-based MDTF tested a high-altitude balloons system in Norway. Those tests are enshrined in Thunder Cloud. They constitute a real opportunity to improve strike capabilities for Long-Range Precision Fires. It is a top modernisation priority regarding the international security environment and the need for enhancing large-scale ground combat operations. While US Army Pacific is constrained to this specific region and its own objectives, this European unit will focus more on land operations, being composed of HQ elements, land, air, intelligence, cyberspace, electronic warfare and space detachment, and a brigade support company. For this reason, robotics engineer Yasemin Ozkan-Aydin, Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, drew inspiration from the collective behaviour of ants, bees, and birds to solve problems and overcome obstacles to develop collaborative legged robots mimicking their counterparts from the natural world.

Comments Off on Reactivating the 56th Artillery Command in Europe: Making US Army Europe and Africa More Competitive
12 November 2021
Read more about the article The European Defence Fund and COVID-19: how will the pandemic affect cooperation in EU innovation?
Info Flash

The European Defence Fund and COVID-19: how will the pandemic affect cooperation in EU innovation?

For the better part of the last two years, the world has been embroiled in the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated financial drain, leading to the expectation that many Member States’ GDP will decrease, leaving fewer funds available to cover increasingly large budgetary priorities. This will necessarily lead to cuts in the spending envisaged before the pandemic hit. In that light, defence expenditure has historically been particularly vulnerable, as is readily demonstrated by the 2008 economic crisis, which saw a decrease of between 30% and 8% in Member States’ defence spending (Mölling, 2020, 2). This is a particularly troubling trend for the aspirations of technological autonomy for the EU, which requires the constant deployment of funds and does not include any immediate security threat needing containment. Particularly vulnerable is the European Defence Fund (EDF), a programme that provides funds for cooperative research and technology (R&T) projects between the industries of at least three Member States. Its initial proposal of €13 billion in 2018 has already been cut to €8 billion (Brzozowski, Euractiv, 2020) in the wake of the pandemic, which corresponds to a 38% decrease.

Comments Off on The European Defence Fund and COVID-19: how will the pandemic affect cooperation in EU innovation?
12 November 2021
Read more about the article Is AI the Future of the Military?
Info Flash

Is AI the Future of the Military?

Over the last seventy years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made incredible progress in leaps and bounds. First introduced by John McCarthy during the 1950s, he described AI as the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computers and programmes studied (McCarthy, 2007). More specifically, he invented the LISP programming language in 1958 using the lambda calculus, which was a major milestone in the development of advanced artificial intelligence applications (Allganize, 2020). Thereafter, AI has expanded its ties in several fields, including the civilian and military sectors. On the one hand, big companies such as Amazon and Google have used these tools to build vast commercial empires based in part on predicting the wants and needs of the people who use them (Gatopoulos, Aljazeera, 2021). On the other hand, the development of AI in the military originated a few decades before and has been more intense and challenging.

Comments Off on Is AI the Future of the Military?
10 November 2021