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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Ukrainian Crisis Makes Czech Drone Maker Withdraw from Russia

Czech and European news outlets reported that the current crisis unfolding between Ukraine and Russia is forcing a company that produces Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to halt their branch in the latter country. The company in question is the Czechia based Primoco UAV, which has business manufacturing drones. With Czechia being a NATO and EU member, as the crisis began, the company has faced several challenges in Russia and decided to shut down its operations at the end of January. As of now, Primoco UAV is still in business but not in Russia. After the halt, their Russian subsidiary AO Primoco BPLA was sold to Russian buyers.

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