Security and Defence

The Somali terrorist organisation, al-Shabaab, have not been having a very good month. Firstly, they have been suffering a string of defeats in their conflict with the Somali government and African Union forces, capitulating and allowing key towns to be captured with little in the way of resistance.

On Wednesday, the US House of Representatives backed plans proposed by President Obama to curtail the threat posed by ISIS (also known as ISIL or the “Islamic State”).

Though the Islamist insurgency of Boko Haram has been raging in Nigeria since 2009, perhaps the defining moment of the conflict was the 14th of April this year, when militants kidnapped over 200 female students in Chibok, with the intent of selling them into slavery, or else marrying them to members of the group.

Whatever Russia’s ultimate intentions in Ukraine are following their annexation of Crimea, NATO – an organisation that was facing what some saw as existential questions post-Afghanistan – is now required to once again turn its attention to the defence of its member states.

July saw the deployment of a pair of British Army reconnaissance platoons to Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) to provide additional support to the EU-led peacekeeping force in the run-up to the October 2014 general election. This latest move marks a continuation of British military involvement in the country that has (with a few gaps) so far lasted twenty-two years.

When the history of the current Coalition Government is written, probably their single gravest set of errors will be able to be summed up in four letters: SDSR. The October 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review, thrown together in just five months, will go down in history as a textbook example of what happens when short-term financial and political considerations are allowed to undermine sound defence thinking.

The recent declaration of a Caliphate by IS (Islamic State, formally ISIS) could have huge security ramifications throughout the Middle East. In territory captured in both Syria and Iraq by IS, the Islamic State has blurred the borders, leaving the potential for a break-up of an increasingly unstable Iraq an ever growing possibility.

Last week, the Japanese cabinet undertook a significant shift in their country’s defence policy, by agreeing to reinterpret the constitutional limits on the use of force in a less strict manner. The new understanding of the restrictions of Article 9 now allow for Japanese “collective self-defense” as well as military intervention to protect its treaty allies.

America’s commitment to the principle that one’s enemy’s enemy is one’s friend has come back to bite them on more than one occasion, and now Bashar Al-Assad is beginning to realise that even just leaving one’s enemies to fight it out can be problematic.

We humans do have a strange way of dealing with illness at times. So many of us seem to take the ‘if it ain’t hanging off it’s probably fine’ approach to that twinging chest pain or that cough that has not gone away for a month.