The poverty of power in military power: how collective power could benefit strategic studies

Strategic studies deals intimately with the topic of power. Most scholars in the discipline work with a concept of power as an adversarial zero-sum competition. This is natural and necessary. However, other conceptions of power developed within political science and sociology could enrich strategic studies. Approaching two typical, traditional tasks of strategy – alliance building and war-fighting – this article demonstrates the heuristic mileage of theories of collective power. In particular, we can shed new light on the post-Cold War transformation of NATO as well as state-building as a strategy in counter-insurgencies with new ideas of power. Broadening the palette of theories of power is thus valuable if strategic studies is to prosper as an independent field of study.     

French Arms Exports and Intrastate Conflicts: An Empirical Investigation

The aim of this article is to evaluate how French Major Conventional Weapons (MCW) exports impact on the conflict intensity of recipient countries. The recent increase in French arms exports seems to contradict the French political discourse on the promotion of regional stability. We run zero-inflated ordered probit model in order to analyze the role of the arms trade on the intensity of civil conflicts in 144 countries from 1992 to 2014, using SIPRI and UCDP/PRIO data. Our results suggest that French MCW exports tended not to exacerbate intrastate conflicts during this period. This finding is robust to changes in the empirical framework. We propose two lines of explanations: France seems to be prone to choosing partners that respect human rights and selling more ‘defense-oriented’ MCW than the rest of the world.     

Defense Firms Adapting to Major Changes in the French R&D Funding System

The structural changes inside the French innovation system have impacted the role of defense firms since the late 1980s. Major changes have affected the defense budget and public R&D funding system in particular. The aim of this article is to understand French defense firms’ repositioning within the National Innovation System (NIS) based on an analysis of their R&D behavior over a long period of time (1987–2010). We show that French defense firms remain major players in the NIS and faced up to these major changes by adapting the funding of their R&D and their research priorities and rolling out new innovation capabilities. Additionally, they developed new innovation models to take advantage of new collaborative partnerships developed for civil and military markets.     

The ‘Third’ US Offset Strategy and Europe’s ‘Anti-access’ Challenge

Over the last two decades, a number of countries (most notably China, Russia and Iran) have been developing so-called anti-access and area denial (A2/AD) capabilities, such as ballistic and cruise missiles, offensive cyber-weapons, electronic warfare, etc. The development of A2/AD capabilities by non-Western countries undermines the foundations of US power projection and global military-technological supremacy. In order to overcome, or at least mitigate, the impending A2/AD challenge, the US Department of Defense (DoD) began to roll out its so-called ‘third’ offset strategy in late 2014. The strategy aims to bring about innovative operational concepts and technologies and spur new doctrinal and organisational debates. This article assesses which of the operational concepts and capabilities informing current US discussions on offset may be relevant in the context of the A2/AD challenges Europeans face on their eastern ‘flank‘ and in their ‘extended southern neighbourhood‘, and which may not. Europeans must grapple with the same conceptual puzzle as the US: how to strike the right balance between defeating A2/AD capabilities and hedging against them, i.e. through alternative strategies that are less dependent on unhindered access and resort to asymmetric forms of warfare. However, they must take into account the geographical features of their eastern flank and extended southern neighbourhood, the level of technological maturity of their challengers, and their own military-technological prowess and political limitations. This suggests a somewhat different approach to offsetting A2/AD than that adopted by the US.     

A periodic maintenance model with used equipment and random minimal repair

The maintenance strategy considered in this article is in the class of block replacement policies. The working unit is replaced by new ones at instants T,2T,3T,… independently of the age and state of the unit. If a failure occurs between these instants, the random repair cost is evaluated. If it is smaller than a predetermined control limit then a minimal repair is carried out. Otherwise the unit is replaced by a used unit. The performance of this maintenance strategy is evaluated in terms of average total cost per time unit over an infinite time span. The mathematical model is defined and several analytical results are obtained. A computer program has been written, which solves the mathematical problem, and some examples are given for the cases where the underlying life distribution is gamma, Weibull or truncated normal.     

Revenue maximization in two-station tandem queueing systems

We study optimal pricing for tandem queueing systems with finite buffers. The service provider dynamically quotes prices to incoming price sensitive customers to maximize the long-run average revenue. We present a Markov decision process model for the optimization problem. For systems with two stations, general-sized buffers, and two or more prices, we describe the structure of the optimal dynamic pricing policy and develop tailored policy iteration algorithms to find an optimal pricing policy. For systems with two stations but no intermediate buffer, we characterize conditions under which quoting either a high or a low price to all customers is optimal and provide an easy-to-implement algorithm to solve the problem. Numerical experiments are conducted to compare the developed algorithms with the regular policy iteration algorithm. The work also discusses possible extensions of the obtained results to both three-station systems and two-station systems with price and congestion sensitive customers using numerical analysis.     

Striking a deal on the F-35: multinational politics and US defence acquisition

Why does joint defence production of advanced weapons systems, which appears like a logical choice at first, become harder for both the primary production state and its allies to manage and justify as the acquisition process runs its course? To answer this question, we analyze the multinational politics of the F-35 JSF with a focus on how secondary states who have bought into the program are affected by domestic politics within the primary production state. We find that US congressional and bureaucratic politics, cuts to US defence spending, and a desire to retain tight control over the program has locked allies into a program with which they have little leverage. Potentially losing the ability to fight along side the US if they don’t follow through, coupled with inter-Alliance pressures, leaves secondary states who are involved with the F-35 program, vulnerable to the whims of US domestic politics.     

Why do they serve? Changes and differences in motives of Danish soldiers deployed to peace-keeping and peace-enforcing missions

This paper investigates what motivates young people to volunteer for peace-keeping or peace-enforcing missions and how their motives change between pre- and post-deployment. Data include information about social and military background, and motives for more than 600 soldiers, 444 of whom answered the survey both before and after deployment. Soldiers are deployed to different missions under the same circumstances. To conceptualize motives among soldiers, we use factor analysis and find three factors: challenge, self-benefit, and fidelity. Challenge represents an occupational orientation; fidelity, an institutional orientation; and self-benefit, a desire for adventure. Exploiting the within-subject design of our data, we find that pre- and post-deployment motives vary significantly according to the type of mission and soldiers’ previous experiences (first-timers or experienced soldiers). Our results suggest that after the mission, peace-keepers are generally more disappointed than peace-enforcers. Our results also show that self-benefit motives are important for younger soldiers with only a high school education, and that this group usually serves as peace-enforcers during their gap year.     

Estimating component characteristics from system failure‐time data

Suppose that failure times are available from a random sample of N systems of a given, fixed design with components which have i.i.d. lifetimes distributed according to a common distribution F. The inverse problem of estimating F from data on observed system lifetimes is considered. Using the known relationship between the system and component lifetime distributions via signature and domination theory, the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator _N(t) of the component survival function (t) is identified and shown to be accessible numerically in any application of interest. The asymptotic distribution of _N(t) is also identified, facilitating the construction of approximate confidence intervals for (t) for N sufficiently large. Simulation results for samples of size N = 50 and N = 100 for a collection of five parametric lifetime models demonstrate the utility of the recommended estimator. Possible extensions beyond the i.i.d. framework are discussed in the concluding section. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2010