Read more about the article Shining a light on Mali’s deal with the Wagner Group: a recipe for disaster
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Shining a light on Mali’s deal with the Wagner Group: a recipe for disaster

Worry has spread across the world as relations between Mali and France have been steadily breaking down. Last July, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that his country would be putting an end to Operation Barkhane (aimed at fighting jihadism in the Sahel in collaboration with the Sahel G5) as soon as the beginning of 2022. The French government reckons that its operation is not well adapted enough to the region’s needs and requires a transformation to combat ever-evolving threats. As a result, more than 2,500 French soldiers out of 5,000 are currently being withdrawn from the Sahel. The goal is to reintegrate them, to serve as the backbone of the European Takuba Task Force.

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18 November 2021
Read more about the article How can the European Defence Fund help the development of European Defence Capabilities?
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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.).

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16 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 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