#military - Finabel

The Changing Mediterranean: Geopolitical Tensions and Challenges

The Mediterranean Sea holds unparalleled strategic importance for several states in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Serving as the natural connection between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans through Gibraltar, Suez, and Bāb el-Mandeb, this maritime space is of inescapable centrality for the global trade system, with 90% of trade still concentrated at sea. Consequently, states highly dependent on the import of natural resources and the export of high-value goods, mainly European countries, consider the overall stability of this sea essential for their economic well-being and national security. Additionally, the Mediterranean’s relevance has increased due to recent discoveries of large offshore oil and gas fields in its Eastern quadrant, between the territorial waters of Greece, Cyprus, Israel, and Egypt. As noted by ISPI (2021), the Mediterranean is also crucial when it comes to fishing activities, migration flow, the presence of pipelines and fibre optic cables, and security competition among various state actors in the region.

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22 December 2023

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Orbiting a Solution to Anti-Satellite Weapons

One of the many problems that the scientific community is facing today is space debris. Space debris is exceptionally dangerous as it can cause the Kessler Effect, a scenario where objects in space collide, creating an exponentially growing mount of rubble orbiting the planet. What is especially concerning is the use of anti-satellite weapons (ASATs), which leave hundreds of thousands of debris items in space, putting astronauts and other satellites at risk. If states continue to test their ASAT weapons or use them to attack other satellites, this could have a dramatic impact on all space actors as well as future generations. This study will explore why the international community has not banned the use of ASATs yet and it will investigate how to achieve this outcome through an in-depth analysis of space-related treaties.

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18 December 2023

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Space Lessons Learned from the War in Ukraine

With each passing conflict, the space industry is gaining more and more relevance in the operation command chain, especially during interstate wars. The war in Ukraine is the perfect example of this, revealing the most significant trajectories in the space domain, and highlighting flaws and rapid developments; in a nutshell, this war is shaping the future of space, especially in the military sector. The focus of this paper will be first on the Russian entanglement in the conflict, followed by an analysis of the Ukrainian rapid adaptation of the new rules in space guided by Western help, and finally, conclusions will be drawn from the very interesting evolvement of the space industry in this war.

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14 December 2023

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European Main Battle Tank: Momentum for Interoperability

The land forces operations paradigm demands a series of cornerstones to be effective on the ground. In that context, a crucial feature is the tank, a weapon that has proven to be fundamental in the ground force realm since its creation. The future of Europe is to operate in collaborative frameworks thus, creating a tank collaborative framework is essential. However, the reality shows that there are problems in pursuing this objective.

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9 October 2023

News

Germany Back with France on MGCS after Rumours of a Separate Tank Project with Italy, Spain and Sweden

On 11 September, Handelsblatt (2023) reported that Germany was moving away from the Main Ground Combat System (MGCS), a Franco-German joint venture for the development of a next-generation main battle tank (MBT). On 22 September, however, a new meeting between the French and German MoDs rebuilt hope for the project, although postponing its delivery up to 2045 (Kayali et al., 2023).

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25 September 2023

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