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African Security: Band-Aids and Shotgun Wounds

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07.28.2018 at 04:28am

African Security: Band-Aids and Shotgun Wounds by Greg Mills – Daily Maverick

Security assistance to Africa can but only fail if it’s too diffuse, does not take into account widening differences between African states, and does not seek to create a sense of common strategic purpose between the donor and the recipient.

Donald Trump’s words at July’s Brussels Nato summit should have caused a severe case of introspection in the nearly 70-year-old organisation.

No doubt it did; but not entirely on the right stuff.

The US president waded in with a tough and unpopular message about burden sharing. This is nothing new from Washington, of course, even though the messenger and style of delivery was different and for some difficult to stomach. American presidents have frequently banged on about the need for Europeans to spend more, to end the perceived free loading on the overwhelming US defence budget contribution, which comprises two-thirds of all spending among the organisation’s 29 members.

Sensitivity to shake-ups within the global security architecture is heightened at a moment of resurgence in military threat to the West.

Cue Russia, experts in ‘hybrid’ warfare, mixing conventional and unconventional weaponry and tactics battle tested in Ukraine and Syria. With an emphasis on rapid pre-emption without long mobilisation, expeditionary movement and electronic warfare, the military aspect is but one of the instruments of national power Russia now seeks to employ. Its focus is also on closely integrated politico-military ‘system’ warfare, which seeks to de-legitimise and undermine the West’s political and social cohesion on which its military strength and steadfastness is founded, including the rules-based, post-1945 global security architecture. In this environment, the weapons of war are more benign but no less dangerous: including energy politics (such as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline), bribery and blackmail, corrupt business practices, cyber-attacks, assassination, fake news, and election tampering…

Read on.

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