Category: Articles

By Aleksandar Nacev, Executive Director of the Center for Security Research

At the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Meeting of Heads of State and Government in London in December 2019, Alliance leaders asked the NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg to undertake a Forward-Looking Reflection Process to assess ways to strengthen the political dimension of the NATO Alliance. To this end, in April 2020, Secretary General Stoltenberg appointed an independent Reflection Group, and tasked the Group with providing recommendations in several areas that are crucial to NATO and its essence.

After extensive consultations within and outside NATO, including with scholars, leaders from business and the technology sector, parliamentarians, military officials, and government representatives from all thirty Allies, most NATO partner states, and numerous international Organizations, the Group presented its final report, titled NATO 2030: United for a new era, to the Secretary General.

Battlefields are constantly evolving, and modern warfare is quickly advancing. In turn, this is causing countries around the world to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into their militaries in the constant race to develop the most advanced training, technology and weaponry. The permanent pressure to have the best armed forces in the world is usually connected to certain geopolitical and geostrategic goals, and military force or the projection of this force is a very important factor in achieving those goals.

But head-to-head comparisons of military strength between countries are extremely hard to come by — which is what makes the Global Firepower annual rankings so noteworthy. Their 2021 Military Strength Rankings draw on more than 55 factors to assign a Power Index score to 139 countries. The ranking assesses the diversity of each country’s weapons and pays particular attention to their available manpower. Geography, logistical capacity, available natural resources, and the size of defines budgets are also considered. The top power index score is 0.0000, which is “realistically unattainable,” according to Global Firepower. The closer a country is to this number, the more powerful its military is. But who are the top five militaries in the world? Let us take a quick glance over the list and the explanation behind the rankings.

What started in 2011 as a popular uprising against the Syrian regime escalated into an all-out war that engulfed both Syria and Iraq, drew in a suite of regional actors and world powers, and attracted an unprecedented number of volunteer combatants from more than a hundred countries.

Among those countries are many of the nations in the Western Balkans, from which more than a thousand nationals of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, N. Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia are estimated to have travelled to the battle­fields of Syria and Iraq since 2012. The significance of this number becomes apparent when you consider the context of the combined population across these small countries, a total population of less than nineteen million. The rates of volunteer mobilisation relative to the population size of the Western Balkans nations are far higher than any other in western European afflicted by volunteer fighters and terrorists. 

Violence in Ethiopia’s northern state of Tigray has escalated in recent weeks, with hundreds of soldiers and an untold number of civilians killed in a worsening dispute between regional forces and the national government. The long-simmering tensions between Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government in Addis Ababa and leaders from the country’s northern Tigray region have spilled out into the open and hundreds of people have been reported dead. The escalation in hostilities has spurred a mass exodus from parts of the region, with tens of thousands of people fleeing over the border into Sudan.

In this new work-from-anywhere environment that we’re all in thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, cybersecurity, trust, and protecting customer data is more important than ever. We saw the largest workforce transmit transformation in history as everyone went remote almost overnight in March 2020.

The best thing that any business can do in securing yourself, especially as adapting to this new environment, this new work from anywhere environment, is to nail the basics. There are a small number of really important cybersecurity hygiene actions, so think about it in the current climate as washing your hands from a cybersecurity perspective, that businesses can do to really eliminate the risk associated with a lot of common cybersecurity threats. So some examples of this are enabling strong multi-factor authentication or ensuring that you’re rapidly patching all of your devices to it to inoculate them against known vulnerabilities, to prevent things like ransomware attacks. And then finally, treating cybersecurity like a team sport, building a culture of awareness in your company so that all the employees in your company can act like security trailblazers.

International concern is growing over the rapidly escalating turmoil in the South Caucasus, as fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan continues and is threatening to draw regional powers directly into the conflict, destabilising an area that serves as an important energy corridor for global markets.

The clashes that erupted on the Armenia-Azerbaijan border are threatening to push the countries back to another prolonged war 26 years after the last ceasefire was reached. The last Nagorno-Karabakh War took place from February 1988 to May 1994, in the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave in southwestern Azerbaijan, between the majority ethnic Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh backed by Armenia, and the Republic of Azerbaijan.

From December until today, we are facing a disease that took the world by surprise. The pandemic caused an economic and social crisis that diverted the attention of the authorities from crime. Police and the military are being used to implement quarantine, many businesses have collapsed and many jobs have been lost. Hospitals have been, and still are, overflooded with patients for whom there is no cure, and those suffering from other diseases have remained almost neglected. This set of circumstances is ideal for the rise of criminal activity around the world.

In the overall situation we are in, we wonder where are the additional activities of the police during the pandemic? Until now, they have included enforcing curfews, as well as conducting state quarantine,compliance with the orders for self-isolation, supporting the staff from public health facilities in establishing contacts with an infected person, specific tasks and responsibilities of border police officers, and so on. It is more than clear that these additional activities carry an additional, but also a very large burden on the already stretched resources. (more…)