Dr Duraid Jalili and Dr Zeno Leoni, Defence Studies Department, King’s College London Nestled amongst the various catastrophic implications of global heating is an increasingly prominent discussion on the impact melting ice caps have for international collaboration and conflict within the Arctic region itself. Conservative estimates indicate that the Arctic Ocean could be navigable in… Read More Britain’s Arctic Conundrum (Part 1): Climate Change and Strategic Uncertainty

Dr Simon Saradzhyan, Director, Russia Matters Project, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, recently published his take on Russia’s responses to this year’s crises in Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Nagorno-Karabakh. Trenin infers from these responses that Russia’s foreign and security policies continue to be… Read More How Putin’s Karabakh calculus can undermine Russia’s clout in Post-Soviet Eurasia

Dr Jasper Humphries, Director of Programmes, The Marjan Centre for the Study of Conflict and the Environment, King’s College London. Lieutenant-General Richard Nugee, the Climate Change and Sustainability Strategy Lead for the Ministry of Defence, officially retired from the British Army in December. Before leaving, however, he oversaw an important report reviewing how the UK military… Read More ‘Greening’ the United Kingdom’s Armed Forces: the ‘Nugee Paradox’

Rod Thornton and Marina Miron, both of Defence Studies Department, King’s College London Currently, the focus of Western militaries tends to be on how to best counter sub-threshold (‘hybrid’) warfare and how best to conduct, in US terms, multi-domain operations or, in UK thinking, multi-domain integration. Where the Russian military is concerned, however, the stated… Read More Russian Military Latest: The ‘priority’ emphasis on nuclear weapons (Part One – ICBMs)

Dr Jasper Humphreys, Director of Programmes, Marjan Centre for the Study of Conflict and the Environment, Department of War Studies, King’s College London While one can debate whether climate-change and war are currently locked in a dialectical dead-end or observe Geoffrey Parker’s unwillingness to nail down the connection between climate-change and conflict in his Global… Read More Climate-change and War (Part Two): Atmospheric Intervention

Rod Thornton and Marina Miron, Defence Studies Department, King’s College London Late last month, a Pentagon report accused the UAE of providing financial support to Wagner, the Russian private military company (PMC) operating in Libya. For such a public denunciation to be made by the United States of an ally – the UAE – speaks… Read More What is Russia’s interest in Libya? From regional influence to hunting NATO submarines

Dr Jasper Humphreys, Director of Programmes, Marjan Centre for the Study of Conflict and the Environment, Department of War Studies, King’s College London It’s taken for granted that politicians stretch, twist and bowdlerise the connection between the word ’war’ with their ‘hot button’ topic, and climate-change is no exception. War-like rhetoric pulsed through a recent… Read More Climate-change and War (part one): Tilting at ‘Straw Men’

Marina Miron and Rod Thornton, both of Defence Studies Department, King’s College London The Russian military has been very active in Syria over the last few weeks. It has been conducting air and ballistic-missile strikes against Turkish-backed militant groups around Idlib. This activity can be seen as more fall-out from the recent conflict between Azerbaijan… Read More Russia’s ‘revenge’ after Nagorno-Karabakh: Reprisals in Syria for Turkey’s support of Azerbaijan

Ken Payne, Defence Studies Department, King’s College London Military leadership has some distinctive and enduring features, some of which look set to be challenged by the increasing adoption of autonomous systems, including AI weapons. When the British Chief of the Defence Staff speculates about an army of 30,000 robots, it’s probably a good time to… Read More Leadership in an age of Artificial Intelligence

Rod Thornton and Marina Miron This is the first in a regular series looking at news of the Russian military that comes predominantly from a review of the Russian media. There has been a series of confrontations in recent months between Russian and US naval vessels. While nothing serious has resulted from these clashes, they… Read More Russian Military Latest: Another Russia-US naval confrontation