EDA Live Cyber Exercise for Military CERTs in its Second Edition

The second live-fire cyber exercise of the European Defence Agency (EDA), specifically dedicated to improving European cooperation between member states’ national military Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) has reached and concluded its second edition in the last days of January 2022. Even though European countries have established mechanisms and processes to exchange information between civilians of the CERTs over time, cooperation and communication channels are much less developed in the military domain due to the high sensitivity of the information. Therefore, many stakeholders have decided to extend the information sharing practices used in civilian circles to military CERT and their operations. Through this Info flash, we will briefly investigate the birth of this project, the two editions carried out and conclude with a perspective on the future.

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European forces to relocate from Mali to Niger in fight against jihadist insurgents

A contingent of some-2400 European troops are set to leave Mali and continue counter-insurgency operations from Niger, as the former colony’s President Mohamed Bazoum said on February 18th. The Sahel area has been constantly plagued for years by Islamist groups, with hundreds of victims and millions of displaced. In the past decade, France, at the helm of a European coalition, has shown a keen interest in collaborating with former colonies to contrast the threat, but the missions have encountered both logistical problems and local dissatisfaction with foreign presence, with Malian armed forces spokesperson Souleymane Dembele lamenting the inefficacy of European troops and Nigerine anti-foreign leader Maïkol Zodi considering them «as an occupying force».

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High-power Microwave Pod for Drones proposed by Epirus

On 14 February, the Venture capital-backed startup Epirus unveiled a high-power microwave system capable of deploying on a drone. According to a company statement, the Leonidas Pod makes the company’s ground-based system designed to protect forward operating bases from incoming threats and mountable on a variety of other systems. This system is thought to address drone swarms rather than singular done threats. In fact, these swarms are a growing problem for the U.S military as it develops counter-unmanned aircrafts system capability.

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New Developments in Cloud Initiatives in Land Forces – Advantages and Challenges

We have entered a modern era of warfare, where the battlefield is no longer exclusively physical but also digital. Information is vital to national security. In this context, the storage and process of data become crucial to guarantee mission success (Department of Defense, 2018). An effective ally to do so is represented by cloud technologies that empower the military infrastructures. Cloud technologies or services are defined as “a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction” (Mell & Grance, 2011). Cloud services are an information technology model that allows information and resources to be available via the Internet (Al-Gharibi, 2019). As a consequence, reliance on the traditional IT model is reduced.

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US and UK Army to Cooperate on Future Vertical Lift (FVL)

On 14 February, the army leaders from the United States and the United Kingdom signed a Future Vertical Lift Cooperative Program Feasibility Assessment project agreement on behalf of their re-spective countries' services, promising to collaborate to ensure interoperability between the two countries' future rotorcraft aviation forces. The two nations will share information regarding their rotorcraft requirements and future projects. Moreover, they will look into and evaluate new ideas for using coalition airpower in the lower-tier air domain, which is where Army aviation usually oper-ates.

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