Picking up from my last entry. Let us review the following areas:

The general functions of the armed forces:

• To continually assess the politico-military environment and the real, potential, or predicted threats against the state

What are these threats? Environmental? Factions within the country? Rogue dissidents that come for pay back?

Let us reason on real threats and perceived threats by using (interests and means)

The nation and its commander must gather accurate data to assess threats and then based on the threats they must have the means to implement a plan to disrupt and neutralize the threats.

This can be currently seen with Islamic militant groups in the Sahara. They have the interests, which is religious and the means to incite and cause disorder within a geographic area.

Armed forces must address this to able to accurately fight them.

The remainder of the areas are straight forward and logical.

• To deter hostile forces that aspire to collapse and replace the government or seize areas that may provide economic or political advantages
• To contain hostile forces that have commenced offensives against the government
• To neutralize hostile forces that pose a direct armed threat to the state and the government
• To degrade the command and control structures of hostile forces
• To exhaust hostile forces
• To annihilate hostile force

Which brings us to a hierarchy of war.

Hierarchy of war

This is defined as a specific hierarchy of decision making that takes place before troops are committed to a mission.

• National Strategy
• National Security Strategy
• National Military strategy
• Campaign Strategy
• Operational Designs
• Operating Environment

In order for the military to be effective the nation must have an established a National Strategy about how it wants to position itself over the short, medium and long term. It must define the role that the government intends the state to play domestically, regionally and internationally.

The National security Strategy supports the National Strategy, which allows the formation of a National Security Strategy.

As you can see one build upon the other until all areas are defined.

One can start to see contributing factors as to why many of our Farafinna nations have issues with maintaining internal peace.

One of those reasons is that the current nations were not set up in a way to fulfill 100% nationhood from those that seek its demise, thus, what you end of up having is an armed force that serves external interests in a way that protects the economic viability of resources being taken out the country to its external enemies.

Currently, we can see a massive change in nations such as Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and CAF. They all have to define a national strategy that suits their needs and then follow through with a national security strategy which what one is seeing today with an military alliance between them to seek out those that disrupt and bring disorder on account of external interests.