Localization of optimal strategies in certain games

Assume the payoffs of a matrix game are concave in the index of the maximizing player. That player is shown to have an optimal strategy which uses at most two consecutive pure strategies, identifiable through approximate solution of a related continuous game. Generalizations are given, and the results are applied to a motivating hidden-target model due to Shapley. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Eisenhower,science and the nuclear test Ban Debate 1953–56

Though historians debate whether Eisenhower seriously pursued a nuclear test ban agreement at the close of his presidency, few have closely examined his consideration of the issue during his first term in office. Publicly, his administration ridiculed Democratic presidential candidate Adlai E. Stevenson's highly publicized test ban proposal in 1956. In fact, Eisenhower's private inclination to ban testing antedated Stevenson's campaign proposal by two years. A review of the administration's techniques of countering Stevenson's test ban proposal reveals the use of heated rhetoric, clever deception, and outright lies to manipulate public understanding of the test issue and to conceal the depth of Eisenhower's own sincere desire to limit, or even cease, tests.     

Dynamic policy for idling time preservation

This study aims to determine and evaluate dynamic idling policies where an agent can idle while some customers remain waiting. This type of policies can be employed in situations where the flow of urgent customers does not allow the agent to spend sufficient time on back-office tasks. We model the system as a single-agent exponential queue with abandonment. The objective is to minimize the system's congestion while ensuring a certain proportion of idling time for the agent. Using a Markov decision process approach, we prove that the optimal policy is a threshold policy according to which the agent should idle above (below) a certain threshold on the queue length if the congestion-related performance measure is concave (convex) with respect to the number of customers present. We subsequently obtain the stationary probabilities, performance measures, and idling time duration, expressed using complex integrals. We show how these integrals can be numerically computed and provide simpler expressions for fast-agent and heavy-traffic asymptotic cases. In practice, the most common way to regulate congestion is to control access to the service by rejecting some customers upon arrival. Our analysis reveals that idling policies allow high levels of idling probability that such rejection policies cannot reach. Furthermore, the greatest benefit of implementing an optimal idling policy occurs when the objective occupation rate is close to 50% in highly congested situations.     

The ‘bomber gap’: British intelligence and an American delusion

For most of the 1950s, manned aircraft were the prime nuclear bomb delivery method, and were therefore a vital metric for British and American intelligence when calculating the Soviet threat. Each community reached very different conclusions from the same raw intelligence, generating the ‘bomber gap’ myth in the US but not in the UK. The information available was inconclusive, so in order to understand it estimators had to rely on their assumptions, which were different. Contrasting scopes for parochial capitalisation drew their conclusions further apart. Contrary to orthodox accounts of this episode, Soviet deception did not play a central role.     

Demilitarising Demographics: US Policy Options for Strengthening Georgian Internal Security

How are refugees mobilised in identity based conflicts? How do internally displaced persons and refugees become utilised as a multidimensional source of agitation and escalation? Are there steps the international community can take to limit the political radicalisation and militarisation of refugees? The research and policy recommendations that arise in addressing these broad-based research questions represent a test of how the assistance the international community provides to transitional states operates in relation to the internal dialectic of national security. Specifically, a detailed case study of the Abkhaz-Georgian conflict and the degree of refugee militarisation is analysed through a series of state-centric, sociological and military models in order to form a basis for creating new US policy options able to demilitarise existing demographic pressures.     

Airpower in India's 1999 Kargil War

For 74 days in mid-1999, India waged an intense war against intruding Pakistani forces on the Indian side of the Line of Control dividing Kashmir in the Himalayas. The Indian Air Force (IAF) was a key contributor to India's eventual victory in that war. Among other things, the IAF's combat performance showed how the skillful application of air-delivered firepower, especially if unmatched by the other side, can shorten and facilitate the outcome of an engagement that might otherwise have persisted indefinitely. It also showed that a favorable position in the conventional balance remains strategically useful even in conditions of mutual nuclear deterrence.     

Forecasting Civil Conflict with Zero-Inflated Count Models

Advances in the study of civil war have led to the proliferation of event count data, and to a corresponding increase in the use of (zero-inflated) count models for the quantitative analysis of civil conflict events. Our ability to effectively use these techniques is met with two current limitations. First, researchers do not yet have a definitive answer as to whether zero-inflated count models are a verifiably better approach to civil conflict modeling than are ‘less assuming’ approaches such as negative binomial count models. Second, the accurate analysis of conflict-event counts with count models – zero-inflated or otherwise – is severely limited by the absence of an effective framework for the evaluation of predictive accuracy, which is an empirical approach that is of increasing importance to conflict modelers. This article rectifies both of these deficiencies. Specifically, this study presents count forecasting techniques for the evaluation and comparison of count models' predictive accuracies. Using these techniques alongside out-of-sample forecasts, it then definitively verifies – for the first time – that zero-inflated count models are superior to comparable non-inflated models for the study of intrastate conflict events.     

The sixteenth-century antecedents of special operations ‘small war’

The first conceptual, theoretical treatises about small war (la petite guerre) as special operations appeared only from the middle of the seventeenth century. The term is not used in the eighteenth-century sense of ‘special operations’ in older sources. The supposed absence of any treatment of the subject is surprising considering the obsession with the ‘art of war’ in the Renaissance, but other authors attribute it to a supposed antinomy between chivalric ideals and irregular warfare. But the absence of explicit manuals on the subject is not evidence of absence of advanced reflection on this kind of operations in the Middle Ages and in Early Modern times. We should thus look elsewhere, in other genres, for writings that contain and pass on military knowledge. Epics, romances, educational and military treatises, and memoirs in fact contain elements of a theory of special operations, even though these genres differ from our conception of rationality inherited from the Enlightenment.