Monthly Archives: December 2016

Britain, Defence, Government, Military, NATO, United States

British maritime surveillance of Russian submarines is weak

DEFENCE

smolensk

Danger: Smolensk nuclear powered submarine

BRITAIN is struggling to keep track of the growing number of Russian submarines in its waters.

The Russian president Vladimir Putin is increasingly using his fleet to hide off the coast to test the weaknesses of the Royal Navy.

The Navy has been forced to rely on NATO patrols since it scrapped its submarine-tracking aircraft in 2010, with replacements not due for at least two more years – a so-called security gap in Britain’s military power.

Figures on hostile incursions in British waters are kept secret, but of ten known incidents between 2005 and 2015, eight were in the past three years. In June, a Russian submarine was intercepted as it cruised towards the English Channel, while in October others were detected in the Irish Sea.

A defence analyst at the respected Henry Jackson Society, a security think tank, said: ‘Sadly, because of certain cuts, we don’t have the capacity to monitor Russian activity constantly. There is a security gap and doubtless the Russians are testing our reflexes and responses… We are now reliant until at least 2019 on our NATO allies to help us with the patrolling.’

Britain has not had its own submarine tracking aircraft since the Ministry of Defence scrapped its Nimrod maritime reconnaissance spy planes in 2010.

In November, last year, Downing Street announced the purchase of a fleet of Boeing P-8 Poseidon aircraft, but they are not expected to enter service until 2020. The UK has diminished its conventional war-fighting capabilities as it has faced the challenges of cyber warfare and terrorism. Intelligence initially suggested there would be no threat, but it has since transpired that there is a threat and from a rather traditional source. It will take time, once again, in building up our military capabilities.

At least twice in the past year a Russian submarine has been suspected of attempting to track one of Britain’s Clyde-based Vanguard-class submarines carrying Trident nuclear missiles in order to obtain the ‘acoustic signature’ it emits as it moves. Once this is obtained it can then be deduced where they are and tracked.

A Ministry of Defence spokesperson said: ‘The Royal Navy maintains a vigilant watch in international and territorial waters and is always ready to keep Britain safe from potential threats. We do not comment on operational detail, for obvious security reasons.’

Dr Julian Lewis, the Tory Chairman of the Commons defence committee, said: ‘We should look on Russia as an adversary but not an enemy. By showing Russia that we are strong, we can ensure it decides it is not worth its while becoming our enemy.’

OPINION

Since the Berlin Wall fell, Europe’s leaders have wound down their armed forces, apparently thinking the world has changed so much that a major war is no longer possible. If only this were true.

Indeed, as Russia’s Vladimir Putin experiments with cyber warfare, flexing his military muscles in Syria and the Baltic – and daily probes the Royal Navy’s defences and our air defences – the threat of attack remains ever with us.

Donald Trump has sent a strong message that we can no longer rely on America to go on bearing its disproportionate share of defending Europe through NATO. Mr Trump wants other NATO countries to be contributing far more. Just five countries in the alliance meet the minimum 2% of GDP on defence spending.

Add the terrorist threat and there could surely be no more insane moment to countenance a real-terms cut in our defence spending.

Yet this is happening, as the weaker pound and creative accounting at the MoD threaten to reduce our frontline capability.

We drop our guard at our mortal peril.

Standard
History, Japan, United States

Barack Obama and his work to heal the divisions with Japan

THE UNITED STATES & JAPAN

Intro: It has taken some considerable time with a lot of delicate negotiations, but it looks as if Barack Obama has cemented for his country a much better relationship with Japan. That legacy must be held in tack.

More than seventy years have passed since the infamous and devastating aerial attack on Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces. The attack imperilled more than 2,000 Americans and drew the United States directly into the Second World War.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has now become the first Japanese leader to make a public visit to the memorial for those killed in the bombing, and the first to the visit the Hawaiian naval base since 1951.

This momentous visit comes seven months after President Obama’s historic trip to Hiroshima, when he became the first sitting American president to visit the site where his predecessors authorised the dropping of a nuclear bomb in 1945. During the intervening years, the world has changed dramatically since the Pearl Harbor raid and it may seem inconceivable that we would ever again be at war with Japan. Two countries who are now close allies lies in stark contrast to the bitterest of enemies they once were. The significance of these recent gestures, however, cannot be underestimated.

Mr Obama’s presidency which will shortly come to an end will be largely remembered for his impressive skills within international diplomacy. Yet, it has taken his full eight years in office to create and cement this new understanding and heal the wounds that have been festering for many decades.

Of concern for many now is what may happen when he departs the White House next month and is replaced by Donald Trump. Mr Trump will be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States on January 20, 2017. Let’s all hope it doesn’t take him any more than a few minutes to undermine and unravel an important bilateral relationship – one that has taken a good part of a century of careful work and stewardship to piece together.

Standard
Arts, Books, Britain, Government, Iraq, Islamic State, Politics, Syria, Terrorism, United States

Book Review – Black Flag Down: Counter-Extremism & Defeating ISIS

BOOK REVIEW

Intro: In his new book Liam Byrne MP argues that the British government is making critical mistakes in its methods of combating home-grown extremism. Defeating Islamic State will probably mean taking on the digital caliphate.

THE WORLD was caught by surprise in June 2014 when the infamous terrorist group Islamic State (IS) declared a caliphate in the heart of the Middle East. Within the space of just a few short months, like a rapidly spreading avenging fire, it had scorched across Syria and much of Iraq. In so doing, the group carved out an empire stretching more than 400 miles from Aleppo to the Iraqi town of Sulaiman Bek, a town just 60 miles from the Iranian border.

IS, also known as Isis, or Da’esh, seemed unstoppable at first, but it has now been pushed back, possibly decisively. Since the group inaugurated, it has lost an estimated 45,000 jihadists, as well as a slew of key towns and resources it previously controlled. Its most direct enemies – Kurds, Iraqi troops and Shia militias – are largely contained in Iraq’s second city, Mosul, and are advancing on the group’s de facto Syrian capital, Raqqa.

In this timely book, the Labour MP Liam Byrne, points out that the fight against Isis and its brutal ideology has many fronts. Isis is obsessed with controlling territory, as well as having higher aspirations by creating a global caliphate. For many years, though, the group existed without any territory. With its war on the world going badly, its digital caliphate is becoming ever more important.

Byrne offers up a wide-ranging and discursive study. In his book, he elicits and concentrates on what is arguably the most significant fight of all: the ‘battle of ideas’. Whilst his journey has taken him to northern Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, his most interesting discoveries are found and reported upon within in his own parliamentary constituency of Birmingham Hodge Hill. Here, Muslims boast the highest share of the population of any area in the UK.

Byrne is assertive that Isis and other jihadi groups such as Boko Haram and al-Qaeda are fundamentally heretical by nature. Essentially, he says, they are death cults, with as much relevance to most Muslims as David Koresh has had on mainstream Christianity. Ironically, however, Isis claims to espouse the purest form of Islam, the creed and doctrine pursued in the 7th century by the Prophet Muhammad. It believes that it has the power to repudiate and excommunicate apostates, an act known as takfir. But as the world has come to witness, this has metastasised into exterminations and genocide, as Christians, Kurds, Yazidis, and Muslims in the Middle East can attest.

In the immediate aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the group, notoriously known to the world as al-Qaeda, morphed with Saddam Hussein’s avowedly secular Ba’ath Party. What emerged was something yet even more ferocious as the terrorist group had a firm apparatus in which to operate from.

The objective of Isis was to trigger conflict between Iraq’s Shia majority, which came to power after the invasion, and the Sunni minority, which hitherto had the reins of power. The group’s global aim was to foment division between Muslims and everyone else.

Mr Byrne is of the firm believe that the British government is making a critical mistake in its methods of combating home-grown radicalism and extremism. He says its doctrine is symptomatic of a ‘clash of civilisations’ which makes Islam the problem. Counter-extremism programmes which operate in the UK such as Prevent are based on a ‘conveyer belt’ theory that specifically highlights religious conservatism as the trigger for radicalisation. But the author, citing security and academic sources, argues that anger and resentment, often engendered by a sense of marginalisation, are more powerful factors.

We should – at the very least – recognise the true nature of the extremist threat we face. The U.S. president-elect’s declared solution to dealing with Isis including heavy bombing and barring all Muslims from entering his country are, though, the very antithesis of proper reason and rationality which seems to be in such short supply these days. For clear insight, we could do worse than reach for Liam Byrne’s excellent and revealing narrative.

–     Black Flag Down: Counter-Extremism, Defeating Isis and Winning the Battle of Ideas by Liam Byrne is published by Biteback at £12.99

Standard