Preparing for Cyber Conflict – Case Studies of Cyber Command
This is the first publicly available comparative study of the military cyber organisations in five European countries: Estonia, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway.
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Military Operations
Estonia Leaves UNIFIL
Estonia has announced that it will shortly discontinue its deployment of peacekeepers to the UNIFIL mission in Lebanon.
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Behind the European Intervention Initiative: An Expeditionary Coalition of the Willing?
The landscape of European security and defence cooperation has become a busy one. Last year, 25 of the 28 EU Member States signed up to commit to Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), spurring a wide array of specific cooperation projects and investment pledges.
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Ensuring Continued Allied Presence in Estonia: The Importance of Deploying an Estonian Contingent to Mali
The Enhanced Forward Presence (eFP) of allied troops in NATO’s north-eastern flank (Baltic States and Poland), as decided at the Warsaw Summit in July 2016, is a clear expression of strong political solidarity and seasoned brotherhood in arms, just as in the case of out-of-area NATO, EU or coalition-led operations since 1995.
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Afghanistan in 2017: Light at the End of the Tunnel?
President Donald Trump’s decision on 21 August 2017 to send an unspecified number of additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan to continue assisting and training the Afghan national security forces and to expand counterterrorism operations in the country marks yet another effort to stabilize Afghanistan, at least enough to allow the Western coalition countries to withdraw their forces from the country.
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Soldiers of Peace
Estonian, Finnish and Irish troops serve under a combined battalion in the UNIFIL mission in south Lebanon. The size of the contribution these three states make to UN peacekeeping is perhaps not well known – they are respectively the fourth, second and first largest European contributors, per capita, to UN missions. For each of them, UNIFIL is their single largest contribution to peace support operations.
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Defence Forces on Foreign Missions – End of One Era, Beginning of Another?
In April, Estonia marked Veterans Day for the third time to thank and recognize men and women who have strengthened Estonian security and international credibility by serving on international military missions far from home.
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Central African Republic: A weak country with a long border
In many ways, the Central African Republic (CAR) resembles Mali and Afghanistan. As a result, the impending CAR operation will not be so much a stability operation as a nation-building exercise. It will be a long, costly and extremely complicated process.
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Estonia’s views on security in 2010
Since 1991, the Baltic states have been continuously learning how to be independent states capable of providing for security of their people and warding off various security risks, threats and challenges. In that process, 2004 was seemingly a year of a major breakthrough. There was a strong feeling in the Baltic states that their membership of the European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was going to protect three small states from at least security challenges originating from other states. Only three years later – in April 2007 – Estonia experienced serious political pressure and riots. It was followed by an economic crisis that began in 2008.
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