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.     

Maintaining systems with heterogeneous spare parts

We consider the problem of optimally maintaining a stochastically degrading, single‐unit system using heterogeneous spares of varying quality. The system's failures are unannounced; therefore, it is inspected periodically to determine its status (functioning or failed). The system continues in operation until it is either preventively or correctively maintained. The available maintenance options include perfect repair, which restores the system to an as‐good‐as‐new condition, and replacement with a randomly selected unit from the supply of heterogeneous spares. The objective is to minimize the total expected discounted maintenance costs over an infinite time horizon. We formulate the problem using a mixed observability Markov decision process (MOMDP) model in which the system's age is observable but its quality must be inferred. We show, under suitable conditions, the monotonicity of the optimal value function in the belief about the system quality and establish conditions under which finite preventive maintenance thresholds exist. A detailed computational study reveals that the optimal policy encourages exploration when the system's quality is uncertain; the policy is more exploitive when the quality is highly certain. The study also demonstrates that substantial cost savings are achieved by utilizing our MOMDP‐based method as compared to more naïve methods of accounting for heterogeneous spares.     

Bourdieu’s capital and insurgent group resilience:a field-theoretic approach to the polisario front

The conflict between the rebel group, the Polisario Front, and the Kingdom of Morocco is nearing its 43rd year. Though under-reported, the conflict itself garners attention for the resilience – some would say tenacity – of the ethnically Sahrawi Polisario Front. Despite shifting regional and international politics and the nearly 150,000 Sahrawi refugees waiting in nearby Algerian camps, the rebel group has survived. What explains its resilience? This article uses Bourdieu’s ‘forms of capital’ to understand the Polisario Front’s persistence. Based on field research in Algeria, Western Sahara, and the United States, it finds that social, cultural, symbolic, and economic capital may provide an explanation.     

New sources of military change – armed forces as normal organizations

The literature on how European states have adapted to the post-cold war security environment ffocuses invariably on different understandings of military transformation, a process which is seen as inherently different from other forms of organizational change. However, as this paper argues, new management practices, going back to the introduction of so-called New Public Management (NPM) reforms throughout Europe in the 1980s, have eventually penetrated also the last bastion of the old state – the defense sector. Taking a critical approach to the idea of military transformation and existing theories of military change, the paper demonstrates how other international developments have pushed towards what may be seen as a “normalization” of Europe’s defense sectors. This has important implications for how we approach and understand change in contemporary defense organizations.     

The First Carlist War (1833–40), insurgency,Ramón Cabrera,and expeditionary warfare

ABSTRACT

The period 1833 to 1840 witnessed a brutal civil war in Spain waged between insurgent Carlists and the government Cristinos. The Carlists managed to secure reliable territorial control only over one part of Spain (upland Navarra and rural parts of the neighbouring Basque provinces). Although pockets of armed Carlism flourished elsewhere in Spain, especially in Catalonia, Aragón and Galicia, these insurgents were ineffective at coordinating actions. The Carlist court in the Basque country tried to break its strategic blockade by launching a series of expeditions into Cristino-held territory in the hope of destabilising the Madrid regime and consolidating distant insurrections. This article explains how and why these expeditions scored tactical victories but strategic failures. In particular it argues that Carlist raiding strategy was a failure, for its use of violence against real and imagined enemies in marginal and Cristino areas of control alienated civilian support.     

Sharing the load: factors in supporting local armed groups in insurgencies

Most counterinsurgency campaigns have featured the use of some form of local defense forces. Such forces have had a somewhat mixed record, both in their usefulness in actually countering insurgents and in their longer-term impact on internal security. This article focuses on historical cases that provide lessons for the best operational and strategic uses of local defense forces and measures to control their activities.     

From the ESS to the EU Global Strategy: external policy,internal purpose

Security strategies are important sites for narrating the EU into existence as a security actor. The unveiling of a new global strategy on foreign and security policy for the EU immediately post-Brexit could be conceived as a pledge to remain together as a Union for the purposes of contributing to global security in a particular way. This paper offers a brief stock-taking of the EU’s way of writing security from the European Security Strategy (2003) to the EU Global Strategy (2016). A concise exegesis of these documents exposes an interesting dynamic: as exercises in ordering the world, both strategic guidelines have turned out to be major exercises in ordering the self. The comparative snapshot shows the EU as increasingly anxious to prove its relevance for its own citizens, yet notably less confident about its actual convincingness as an ontological security framework for the EU’s constituent members over time.     

An Opportunity Structure for Terrorism: Moderate Leadership Departures in Nationalist Movements

Why does terrorist violence escalate from some ethnic groups but not others? According to theoretical insights, many groups endure conditions that should spur on terrorist campaigns, but in reality only some carry them out. In contrast to studies emphasising motivations, this article constructs a framework centred on opportunity structures that contributes to our understanding of the rise of terrorism waged along ethnic lines. It argues that beyond grievances or other motivations, terrorist campaigns develop from communities when moderate political leaders depart from their positions in nationalist movements, causing terrorists to fill the subsequent power vacuum, while little terrorism occurs when leaders do not relinquish the nationalist agenda. This argument is evaluated with evidence from the Tamil and Muslim cases in the context of the Sri Lankan Civil War. Tamil United Liberation Front leaders left the Tamil nationalist movement in the early 1980s, enabling the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’s rise to dominate the nationalist agenda for three decades, while the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress did not relinquish the Muslim cause, which in part precluded the normalisation of violence in the community.