Category: Magazine

NATO: Mandate extension for NATO Military Committee Chairman

At their meeting in Oslo in mid-September, the NATO Chiefs of Defence agreed to extend the mandate of Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer as Chairman of the NATO Military Committee by a further six months until November 2024. He will then be succeeded by the Italian Chief of Defence, Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone. With this decision, NATO wants to maintain continuity in the leadership and at the same time enable his successor to fulfil his duties as Italian Chief of Defence until the end of his mandate. The Chairman of the NATO Military Committee is the principal military advisor to the Secretary General and the North Atlantic Political Council (Ambassador) and represents to them the common interests of NATO...

Weiterlesen

ASEAN/Indonesia backs Code of Conduct for South China Sea

The East Asian island state is chairing the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) this year and wants to use its opportunity to at least agree a code of conduct with China for the highly controversial South China Sea. The guidelines for a Code of Conduct (CoC) drawn up by Indonesia were adopted by the Director of the Office of the Central Committee for Foreign Affairs of the Chinese Communist Party in Jakarta in mid-July. The ten Asean countries and China now aim to finalise the CoC negotiations within three years. It is the first multilateral attempt to resolve the escalating dispute in the South China Sea. The code of conduct is intended to harmonise national...

Weiterlesen

Royal Navy sells legacy assets - reuse or scrap

The Royal Navy had held on to old, decommissioned hulls for reserve purposes for years. This surplus tonnage is now to be rapidly reduced, as it also costs personnel, money, time and berths. The recycling company of the British Ministry of Defence has drawn up a five-year plan for this and will begin selling four ships this year exclusively for material recycling. In addition to a minesweeper, the first lot includes the much-travelled Type 23 frigates MONTROSE and MONMOUTH as well as the Type 82 destroyer BRISTOL - a single ship with air defence duties for an aircraft carrier class that was never built - which entered service in 1973. In 1982, the BRISTOL led the two-destroyer air defence force in the Falklands...

Weiterlesen

France joins Belgian-Dutch mine action programme

At the end of August - as the defence ministers of Belgium and the Netherlands announced on their social media channels on the fringes of the EU defence ministers' meeting in Toledo - France finally joined their joint rMCM minesweeper programme. The development was not entirely unexpected: the navies of the three countries have been operating mine warfare units as part of the TRIPARTITE programme since the 1980s and had already come much closer together on the issue of a successor programme last year. Paris had originally intended to develop its future SLAM-F mine defence system together with London and in cooperation with Thales and Saab. However, during the Euronaval 2022 trade fair, the - probably also due to...

Weiterlesen

Ocean Governance - Germany is committed to protecting the oceans

Germany is committed to protecting the oceans and to the fair use of the sea. Maritime armed forces can also contribute to the enforcement of rules. A German frigate in the Mediterranean - under the NATO Sea Guardian mandate - could be deployed more easily to ensure comprehensive maritime security and to enforce fair and sustainable use of the seas than is currently the case in the North Sea and Baltic Sea. The deployment of the navy to protect shipping, critical maritime infrastructure or natural resources and the fragile marine ecosystem from criminal and hybrid, i.e. not clearly military, threats would take place outside of a corresponding international mandate in a legal framework.

Weiterlesen
en_GBEnglish