Read more about the article Reactivating the 56th Artillery Command in Europe: Making US Army Europe and Africa More Competitive
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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.

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12 November 2021
Read more about the article The European Defence Fund and COVID-19: how will the pandemic affect cooperation in EU innovation?
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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.

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12 November 2021
Read more about the article Is AI the Future of the Military?
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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.

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10 November 2021
Read more about the article Swarms of multi-legged robots overcome difficult land challenges 
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Swarms of multi-legged robots overcome difficult land challenges 

Currently, ground-based robots are accustomed to moving in relatively simple environments due to their lack of locomotor capacity needed to traverse more complex terrain. 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.

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5 November 2021
Read more about the article The EU at the Doorstep of the EU-NATO Joint Declaration : Time to Say Adieu to Berlin Plus
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The EU at the Doorstep of the EU-NATO Joint Declaration : Time to Say Adieu to Berlin Plus

Three years have passed since the EU-NATO Joint Declaration of Brussels in 2018. This troubled period that has seen the stepping down of key institutional leaders in both the EU and US left the West with an underlying feeling of imminent change in the operational relationship between the EU and the Alliance. This feeling can be summarised by European Commission President von Der Leyen in her State of the Union speech in September 2021:

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4 November 2021