Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

In the years since the Dhofar war, the UK’s special forces have been
gradually expanded, and since 1996, all its members have been obliged
to sign a confidentiality agreement. This has reinforced the discretion with
which members of elite units within the military traditionally perform their
duties, and it has rarely been broken.
Meanwhile, the evolution of successive generations of unmanned
aerial vehicles, or drones, has presented military planners with greater
opportunities to mount operations that could remain unknown, other than
to those who are ordering, planning and executing them, and to those on
the receiving end.
The reliance of modern societies on the internet and the increasing
frequency with which states probe and attack each other’s cyber defences
have led some analysts to talk of a hybrid warfare, much of which is
shrouded in deniability. The result is that the line between war and peace
is increasingly blurred.
51
In the years after 9/11, hints began to emerge, in the footnotes of
the budget statements of the Ministry of Defence, and from scraps of
evidence salvaged from the coastal villages of Somalia, the mountains
of Yemen and the cities of Libya, that the British were once again waging
war in secret. It appeared that a lethal trinity of special forces, drones and
local proxies was being brought to bear in a way that would spare the
British public the disagreeable details of the nature of modern war, and
relieve parliament of the need to debate the wisdom of waging it.
SEPTEMBER 2016