Operation Motorman (1972) and the search for a coherent British counterinsurgency strategy in Northern Ireland

The role of the British Army in Northern Ireland during Operation Banner (1969–2007) is an instructive case study of counterinsurgency operations as well as an important chapter in recent British military history. Given troops deployed to the province as aid to the civil power, it is particularly useful in discussions about the principle of minimum force. This article seeks to explore the issue of minimum force through the example of Operation Motorman, the Army's successful attempt to remove the barricades, which had established so-go areas for the security forces in Northern Ireland.     

Civil Wars,International Conflicts and Other Determinants of Paramilitary Strength in Sub-Saharan Africa

Previous research on African military spending suggests the existence of civil strife as the best predictor of high levels of military spending. However, little is known about why some African nations maintain strong ‘auxiliary’ or paramilitary organizations while others do not. This study finds that the presence of civil or interstate war does not strengthen reserve or irregular forces. Civilian governments promote strong paramilitary organizations to counter any threat the regular military might pose to regime survivability as a form of clientelist politics.     

Manpower allocation with time windows and job‐teaming constraints

In this work, we study manpower allocation with time windows and job‐teaming constraints. A set of jobs at dispersed locations requires teams of different types of workers where each job must be carried out in a preestablished time window and requires a specific length of time for completion. A job is satisfied if the required composite team can be brought together at the job's location for the required duration within the job's time window. The objective is to minimize a weighted sum of the total number of workers and the total traveling time. We show that construction heuristics used with simulated annealing is a good approach to solving this NP‐hard problem. In experiments, this approach is compared with solutions found using CPLEX and with lower bounds obtained from a network flow model. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005.     

Incorporating learning curve costs in acquisition strategy optimization

Each year, the U.S. Army procures billions of dollars worth of weapons and equipment. The process of deciding what to buy, when to buy, and in what quantities is extremely complex, requiring extensive analysis. Two techniques used in this analysis are mathematical programming and cost estimation. Although they are related through constraints on available procurement funds, the use of nonlinear cost learning curves, which better represent system costs as a function of quantity produced, have not been incorporated into the mathematical programming formulations that compute the quantities of items to be procured. As a result, the solutions obtained could be either suboptimal, or even infeasible with respect to budgetary limitations. In this paper we present a piecewise linear approximation of the learning curve costs for a more accurate portrayal of budgetary constraints used in a mixed integer linear programming for acquisition strategy optimization. In addition, implementation issues are discussed, and performance results are given. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 46: 255–271, 1999     

Unity is the exception. Alliance formation and de-formation among armed actors in Northern Mali

Our paper investigates the political trajectories of armed actors in Mali since 2012, using recent theoretical advances on alliance formation and collapse in civil wars. Our paper establishes an analytically productive distinction between levels of wartime cleavages and factors shaping groups’ trajectories. Strategic alliances, we argue, emerge from anticipated benefits on the national political scene as well as in the local political economy. The two sets of considerations do not necessarily converge. This dual logic is studied through the cases of two armed groups, both siding with the government after originally aligning with jihadi and separatist coalitions respectively.     

Branch‐and‐price‐and‐cut for the manpower routing problem with synchronization constraints

In this article, we propose a branch‐and‐price‐and‐cut (BPC) algorithm to exactly solve the manpower routing problem with synchronization constraints (MRPSC). Compared with the classical vehicle routing problems (VRPs), the defining characteristic of the MRPSC is that multiple workers are required to work together and start at the same time to carry out a job, that is, the routes of the scheduling subjects are dependent. The incorporation of the synchronization constraints increases the difficulty of the MRPSC significantly and makes the existing VRP exact algorithm inapplicable. Although there are many types of valid inequalities for the VRP or its variants, so far we can only adapt the infeasible path elimination inequality and the weak clique inequality to handle the synchronization constraints in our BPC algorithm. The experimental results at the root node of the branch‐and‐bound tree show that the employed inequalities can effectively improve the lower bound of the problem. Compared with ILOG CPLEX, our BPC algorithm managed to find optimal solutions for more test instances within 1 hour. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 63: 138–171, 2016     

A practical organizational efficiency measure

There is often a call in any organization to make the system ‘more efficient’. This document describes a novel framework for measuring organizational efficiency at the microeconomic level. We show how this framework can be used to monitor an organization using data typically available in extant performance management frameworks. This is most useful in large organizations with eclectic outputs where resources may be too constrained to perform industry-level analyses, such as data envelope analysis, to infer efficiency. This method helps illuminate how the factors of an organization’s internal practices can affect its efficient use of resources.