Articles
“THE WHOLE IS GREATER THAN THE SUM OF THE PARTS”
Towards Developing a Multidimensional Concept of Armed Forces’ Resilience Towards Hybrid Interference
Vendula DIVIŠOVÁ, Libor FRANK, Jan HANZELKA, Antonín NOVOTNÝ, Jan BŘEŇ
In this paper, we contribute to the recent debate on resilience by exploring a specific issue of the armed forces’ resilience towards hybrid interference. While hard (or technical) resilience of some hybrid campaign elements such as cyber-attacks has been addressed in the literature, the soft dimension of resilience is seriously underdeveloped. For that purpose, we elaborate on the concept of soft resilience and describe its psychological, institutional, social, and national dimensions. This theoretical discussion enabled us to develop an understanding of resilience in the military as the capacity of the military to fulfil its core mission enabled by physical and moral components of the fighting power and to continually transform and adapt in face of external hostile influence targeting perception and decision-making of the armed forces members and leadership.
IDENTIFICATION OF SOCIAL, ECONOMIC AND SECURITY-POLITICAL GROUNDS FOR TERRORISM
Useful Tool or Useless Effort?
Jan BŘEŇ, Tomáš ZEMAN, Aleš KUDLÁK, Rudolf URBAN
An integral part of the issue of terrorism is not only the consequences of committed terrorist acts that lead to subsequent security measures, but also the causes of terrorist activities, which determine the reasons why people are motivated to commit them. This paper focuses on the social, economic, and security policy factors that potentially generate future terrorist activities. The main goal is to analyse the opinions of 52 respondents from 31 countries, i.e., experts from military, police, and academic institutions. The method of analytical hierarchy was chosen for the respondents, who decided on the importance of individual factors. According to the respondents, the most important factor of the current national and violent international war is the security-political area. It is followed by social inequality (in the social area) and unemployment (in the economic area). The achieved results show a certain reflection of the evaluated factors regarding the competitiveness of individual countries, which can significantly affect not only the level of threat of terrorist activities in the country, but also their potential mobility.
FRENCH COUNTERINSURGENCY IN MALI BEFORE AND AFTER THE COUP D'ÉTAT OF 2020
Fallout from Task Force Takuba’s Operational Activities
Ondřej ČÁBELKA, Stanislav ŠTĚPÁNEK
The civil war in Mali is one of the longest-running conflicts in the African Sahel region. The conflict is now a typical example of an asymmetric conflict, with nation-state forces on one side and non-state armed actors on the other. This article describes the roots of the conflict, its evolution, France’s involvement in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations, and the operational activities of Task Force Takuba. Finally, it provides an assessment of the overall issue, including an assessment of whether the objectives for which Task Force Takuba was formed have been met.
UNAMA MISSION IN AFGHANISTAN
Challenges, problems and causes of failure
The aim of this study is to evaluate the success or failure of a special political mission UNAMA, based on the evaluation framework of Paul Diehl and Daniel Druckman. It is adapted to the context of the Afghan environment. The criteria for the mission success evaluation and its volume can be used for the problems and defects identification of allies` effort in Afghanistan during the period of 2001 – 2021