TAX EFFICIENCY AND QUALITY/QUANTITY TRADE‐OFFS IN DEFENSE PROCUREMENT*

In this article the effect of defense spending on aggregate output is discussed. Recent publications in this area are reviewed and new additional evidence is provided. The findings presented in this paper are supportive of the positive effect of defense spending. However, in light of the contrary evidence presented in other papers, empirical evidence taken as a whole, suggests that a definitive conclusion about the effect of defense spending at this time should be avoided.     

Domestic violence legislation for development,peace and security in Nigeria

Though laws have been enacted in different parts of Nigeria to address some aspects of gender-based violence, domestic violence persists with serious consequences for social and economic development. Nigeria has not enacted specific domestic law that is applicable throughout the federation, despite the United Nations mandate to all countries to adopt and enforce such laws by 2015. This article examines the causes and nature of domestic violence in Nigeria, and the legal reform needed to address the situation. In addition to library sources, the study used focus group discussions and individual interviews (involving the general population, key informants, legislators and traditional rulers) to discover that enacting specific national domestic violence legislation is necessary to address the problem in Nigeria, but enacting laws alone is not a magic bullet.     

The “yellow rain” controversy: Lessons for arms control compliance

Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam recently announced that they are launching nuclear energy programs, and Malaysia and the Philippines soon may follow suit. As a result, by 2020, at least three states in Southeast Asia could possess latent nuclear capabilities—the option to pursue military applications of dual-use nuclear technology. Analysis of the nuclear programs, domestic proliferation pressures, and the external threat environment in Southeast Asia leads the authors to conclude that the nuclear intentions of states in that region are entirely peaceful and the probability of future nuclear breakout there is low. However, this finding does not justify complacency. In the long term, the benign outlook for regional security may change, and in the near term weak regulatory regimes present serious challenges to nuclear safety and create opportunities that non-state actors may exploit. To minimize these risks, the authors recommend creating a “proliferation firewall” around the region, which would combine strong global support for Southeast Asian nuclear energy programs with innovative regional multilateral nuclear arrangements.     

Book Reviews

Iain McCallum, Blood Brothers Hiram and Hudson Maxim: Pioneers of Modern Warfare. London: Chatham, 1999. Pp. 224, 33 illus., 2 maps, biblio., index. £20. ISBN 1–86176–096–5.

Eric Ash, Sir Frederick Sykes and the Air Revolution, 1912–1918. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1999. Pp.xviii + 268, 20 illus., 3 maps, biblio., index. £42.50/$59.50 (cloth), £18.50/$27.50 (paper). ISBN 0–7146–4828–0 and ‐4382–3.

Azar Gat, Fascist and Liberal Visions of War: Fuller, Liddell Hart, Douhet, and other Modernists. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Ppviii + 334, biblio., index. £45. ISBN 0–19–820715–8.

David B. Woolner (ed.), The Second Quebec Conference Revisited: Waging War, Formulating Peace: Canada, Great Britain, and the United States in 1944–1945. Basingstoke; London: Macmillan Press, 1998. Pp.xiii + 210, index. £32.50. ISBN 0–333–75970–2.

Jeffrey Grey. Up Top: The Royal Australian Navy and Southeast Asian Conflicts 1955–1972. St Leonards NSW: Allen &; Unwin in association with the Australian War Memorial, 1998. Pp.xx + 380, 110 illus., 12 tables, 23 maps &; diagrams, appendices, notes, biblio., index. NP. ISBN 1–86448–290–7.

Susan L Carruthers, The Media at War. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. Pp.321, biblio., index. £14.99 (paper). ISBN 0–333–69143–1, also available in hardback.

Edward J. Marolda and Robert J. Schneller Jr, Shield and Sword: The United States Navy and the Persian Gulf War. Washington DC: Naval Historical Center, 1998. Pp.xxi + 517, 120 illus., 14 maps, biblio., index. NP. ISBN 0–1604–9476–1.

Marvin Pokrant, Desert Shield at Sea: What the Navy Really Did and Desert Storm at Sea: What the Navy Really Did. Both Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Pp.xxiii + 265,9 illus., biblio., index. £44.95. ISBN 0–313–31023–8. Pp.xxiv + 329,12 illus., biblio., index. NP. ISBN 0–313–31024–6.

David Kaularich and Ronald C. Kramer, Crimes of the American Nuclear State: At Home and Abroad. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999. Pp.xviii + 195, biblio., index. £42.75. ISBN 1–55553–371‐X.

Stanley Hoffmann, World Disorders: Troubled Peace in the Post‐Cold War Era. Lanham, MD: Rowman &; Littlefield, 1998. Pp.viii+279, notes, index. $29.95. ISBN 0–8476–8574–8.

Lawrence Freedman (ed.), Strategic Coercion: Concepts and Cases. Oxford: Oxford‐University Press, 1998. Pp.400, index. £48. ISBN 0–19–829–349–6.

Stephen J. Cimbala, Coercive Military Strategy. College Station, TX: Texas A&;M University Press, 1998. Pp.229, biblio, index; $39.95. ISBN 0–89096–836–5     

Measures for Security in a Counterinsurgency

Quantitative measures to gauge progress in a counterinsurgency in use today include the number of enemy, friendly, and civilian casualties, and the level of violence. While common, each of these has drawbacks. With this and the sparseness of the literature on this topic in mind, we argue for a series of improved measures. These include the ratio of who is initiating incidents, an historical analysis of incidents and related variables, and an analysis of insurgent target sets. These measures are presented using data for Al Anbar province, Iraq, along with a discussion of their advantages over more common metrics.     

A branch‐and‐price algorithm for parallel machine scheduling with time windows and job priorities

This paper presents a branch‐and‐price algorithm for scheduling n jobs on m nonhomogeneous parallel machines with multiple time windows. An additional feature of the problem is that each job falls into one of ρ priority classes and may require two operations. The objective is to maximize the weighted number of jobs scheduled, where a job in a higher priority class has “infinitely” more weight or value than a job in a lower priority class. The methodology makes use of a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) to find feasible solutions during implicit enumeration and a two‐cycle elimination heuristic when solving the pricing subproblems. Extensive computational results are presented based on data from an application involving the use of communications relay satellites. Many 100‐job instances that were believed to be beyond the capability of exact methods, were solved within minutes. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2006     

Analysis of a new vehicle scheduling and location problem

We consider a container terminal discharging containers from a ship and locating them in the terminal yard. Each container has a number of potential locations in the yard where it can be stored. Containers are moved from the ship to the yard using a fleet of vehicles, each of which can carry one container at a time. The problem is to assign each container to a yard location and dispatch vehicles to the containers so as to minimize the time it takes to download all the containers from the ship. We show that the problem is NP‐hard and develop a heuristic algorithm based on formulating the problem as an assignment problem. The effectiveness of the heuristic is analyzed from both worst‐case and computational points of view. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 48: 363–385, 2001