DEFENSIVE COUNTERTERRORISM MEASURES AND DOMESTIC POLITICS

Unlike most of the literature, this paper includes domestic political considerations in which two countries must decide defensive countermeasures against a common terrorist threat. A delegation problem arises as voters strategically choose a policymaker whose preferences differ from their own. As a consequence, countries limit the presumed oversupply of defensive countermeasures. Thus, the inclusion of domestic politics gives a new perspective on counterterrorism. The timing of elections is also shown to make a difference.     

Outsourcing warranty repairs: Dynamic allocation

In this paper we consider the problem of minimizing the costs of outsourcing warranty repairs when failed items are dynamically routed to one of several service vendors. In our model, the manufacturer incurs a repair cost each time an item needs repair and also incurs a goodwill cost while an item is awaiting and undergoing repair. For a large manufacturer with annual warranty costs in the tens of millions of dollars, even a small relative cost reduction from the use of dynamic (rather than static) allocation may be practically significant. However, due to the size of the state space, the resulting dynamic programming problem is not exactly solvable in practice. Furthermore, standard routing heuristics, such as join‐the‐shortest‐queue, are simply not good enough to identify potential cost savings of any significance. We use two different approaches to develop effective, simply structured index policies for the dynamic allocation problem. The first uses dynamic programming policy improvement while the second deploys Whittle's proposal for restless bandits. The closed form indices concerned are new and the policies sufficiently close to optimal to provide cost savings over static allocation. All results of this paper are demonstrated using a simulation study. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005     

Setting military reenlistment bonuses

The United States military frequently has difficulty retaining enlisted personnel beyond their initial enlistment. A bonus program within each service, called a Selective Reenlistment Bonus (SRB) program, seeks to enhance reenlistments and thus reduce personnel shortages in critical military occupational specialties (MOSs). The amount of bonus is set by assigning “SRB multipliers” to each MOS. We develop a nonlinear integer program to select multipliers which minimize a function of deviations from desired reenlistment targets. A Lagrangian relaxation of a linearized version of the integer program is used to obtain lower bounds and feasible solutions. The best feasible solution, discovered in a coordinate search of the Lagrangian function, is heuristically improved by apportioning unexpended funds. For large problems a heuristic variable reduction is employed to speed model solution. U.S. Army data and requirements for FY87 yield a 0-1 integer program with 12,992 binary variables and 273 constraints, which is solved within 0.00002% of optimality on an IBM 3033AP in less than 1.7 seconds. More general models with up to 463,000 binary variables are solved, on average, to within 0.009% of optimality in less than 1.8 minutes. The U.S. Marine Corps has used a simpler version of this model since 1986. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

General models for the supplier's all-unit quantity discount policy

The purpose of this article is to investigate some managerial insights related to using the all-unit quantity discount policies under various conditions. The models developed here are general treatments that deal with four major issues: (a) one buyer or multiple buyers, (b) constant or price-elastic demand, (c) the relationship between the supplier's production schedule or ordering policy and the buyers' ordering sizes, and (d) the supplier either purchasing or manufacturing the item. The models are developed with two objectives: the supplier's profit improvement or the supplier's increased profit share analysis. Algorithms are developed to find optimal decision policies. Our analysis provides the supplier with both the optimal all-unit quantity discount policy and the optimal production (or ordering) strategy. Numerical examples are provided. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons. Inc.     

Global counterinsurgency and US army expansion: the case for recruiting foreign troops

Given the nature of global counterinsurgency operations, the demands of military expansion, and the need for cultural, linguistic, and regional expertise, the United States Army should evaluate the establishment of US-led foreign troop units for its evolving force structure. This article proposes the creation of an American foreign legion based upon the recruitment of US-led, ethnically homogeneous tribal force units to meet the grist mill of counterinsurgency operations. This structured approach would be more beneficial than the current reliance on a de facto American Foreign Legion, represented by private military contractors (PMCs), many of them comprised of foreigners. These PMCs carry a number of oversight, accountability, and legal risks not found in a fully integrated, and US-officered foreign legion. The British Brigade of Gurkhas, the South-West African Police Counter-Insurgency Unit (Koevoet), and the Kit Carson Scouts serve as relevant historical examples where foreign troops were used to supplement national manpower resources.     

Information age,terrorism and warfare

This essay will discuss two of the key pillars of asymmetry: notably Information Operations and terrorism, including the links between the two. While a great deal changed on 11 September 2001, one thing that has not changed in substance is the challenge of protecting the Information Society, notably from cyber-threats. Although the immediate threat to Western societies is from the physical and possibly bio-weapons favoured by Al Qaeda and its associates, it is time now to prepare for future threats to the information society, including cyber-threats.     

Conflict and third-party intervention

The paper looks at various scenarios of possible concern for intervening third parties when two factions are engaged in a conflict and act strategically against one another. A standard conflict model is used to determine appropriate intervention strategies in order to lower the overall level of conflict. Choosing a suitable strategy in such a setting, the third party must not only take into account the direct impact of its efforts but also the indirect impacts that result from the strategic interaction among the parties involved.     

“Leading from behind”: neoclassical realism and operation Odyssey Dawn

In March 2011, President Barack Obama ordered US air and naval forces to commence Operation Odyssey Dawn in Libya to impose a no-fly zone. The decision by the Obama Administration to intervene in a limited and supporting role in Libya is an important development in US foreign policy. Operation Odyssey Dawn presents scholars with a valuable opportunity to analyze and explore how US foreign policy is made and what roles domestic politics and elite perceptions play in decisions to use force. The author argues that neoclassical realism is a useful and compelling theoretic framework with which to analyze Operation Odyssey Dawn. While the Administration intervened in response to perceived external-level threats to US national interests, salient intervening domestic-level variables and elite perceptions shaped and guided the tenor and scope of the operation.     

Optimal patrol to uncover threats in time when detection is imperfect

Consider a patrol problem, where a patroller traverses a graph through edges to detect potential attacks at nodes. An attack takes a random amount of time to complete. The patroller takes one time unit to move to and inspect an adjacent node, and will detect an ongoing attack with some probability. If an attack completes before it is detected, a cost is incurred. The attack time distribution, the cost due to a successful attack, and the detection probability all depend on the attack node. The patroller seeks a patrol policy that minimizes the expected cost incurred when, and if, an attack eventually happens. We consider two cases. A random attacker chooses where to attack according to predetermined probabilities, while a strategic attacker chooses where to attack to incur the maximal expected cost. In each case, computing the optimal solution, although possible, quickly becomes intractable for problems of practical sizes. Our main contribution is to develop efficient index policies—based on Lagrangian relaxation methodology, and also on approximate dynamic programming—which typically achieve within 1% of optimality with computation time orders of magnitude less than what is required to compute the optimal policy for problems of practical sizes. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 61: 557–576, 2014     

An approximate dynamic programing approach to the development of heuristics for the scheduling of impatient jobs in a clearing system

A single server is faced with a collection of jobs of varying duration and urgency. Each job has a random lifetime during which it is available for nonpreemptive service. Should a job's lifetime expire before its service begins then it is lost from the system unserved. The goal is to schedule the jobs for service to maximize the expected number served to completion. Two heuristics have been proposed in the literature. One (labeled π^S) operates a static priority among the job classes and works well in a “no premature job loss” limit, whereas the second (π^M) is a myopic heuristic which works well when lifetimes are short. Both can exhibit poor performance for problems at some distance from the regimes for which they were designed. We develop a robustly good heuristic by an approximative approach to the application of a policy improvement step to the asymptotically optimal heuristic π^S, in which we use a fluid model to obtain an approximation for the value function of π^S. The performance of the proposed heuristic is investigated in an extensive numerical study. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 2010