Emulating US Counterinsurgency Doctrine: Barriers for Developing Country Forces,Evidence from Peru

ABSTRACT

Recent US advances in counterinsurgency doctrine have been adopted by developing country armed forces. Nevertheless, no systematic study has examined the barriers they face to implementing highly involved counterinsurgency strategy. Tracing the evolution of Peruvian doctrine demonstrates that Peru was able to quickly improve the unity of effort, intelligence capacity, and military basing to meet the demands of a population-centric hearts-and-minds approach to counterinsurgency. Nevertheless, the limited tactical initiative and flexibility of Peruvian forces remains a challenge. The Peruvian experience is instructive for other militaries undergoing similar transitions. However, given the diversity of insurgent conflicts, this doctrine is not universally appropriate.     

The impact of Syrian refugees on the labor market in neighboring countries: empirical evidence from Jordan

This paper analyzes time-sensitive data on a humanitarian crisis in the Middle East. It aims to assess the impact of the steep influx of Syrian refugees into Jordan on the country’s labor market since the onset of the conflict in Syria (March 2011). As of August 2014, nearly three million registered Syrians have sought refuge in neighboring countries (Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Turkey), according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Jordan and Lebanon are hosting the majority of them. This paper utilizes data regarding unemployment rates, employment rates, labor force participation, the number of refugees, and economic activity at the level of governorates. The vector autoregressive methodology is used to examine time series data from the most affected governorates in Jordan. The empirical results of Granger causality tests and impulse response functions show that there is no relationship between the influx of Syrian refugees and the Jordanian labor market. Our results are verified through a set of robustness checks.     

Network reliability assessment in a random environment

In this paper we consider networks that consist of components operating under a randomly changing common environment. Our work is motivated by power system networks that are subject to fluctuating weather conditions over time that affect the performance of the network. We develop a general setup for any network that is subject to such environment and present results for network reliability assessment under two repair scenarios. We also present Bayesian analysis of network failure data and illustrate how reliability predictions can be obtained for the network. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 50: 574–591, 2003     

Two‐stage component test plans for testing the reliability of a series system

A system reliability is often evaluated by individual tests of components that constitute the system. These component test plans have advantages over complete system based tests in terms of time and cost. In this paper, we consider the series system with n components, where the lifetime of the i‐th component follows exponential distribution with parameter λ_i. Assuming test costs for the components are different, we develop an efficient algorithm to design a two‐stage component test plan that satisfies the usual probability requirements on the system reliability and in addition minimizes the maximum expected cost. For the case of prior information in the form of upper bounds on λ_i's, we use the genetic algorithm to solve the associated optimization problems which are otherwise difficult to solve using mathematical programming techniques. The two‐stage component test plans are cost effective compared to single‐stage plans developed by Rajgopal and Mazumdar. We demonstrate through several numerical examples that our approach has the potential to reduce the overall testing costs significantly. © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 49: 95–116, 2002; DOI 10.1002/nav.1051     

The Joint Chiefs of Staff,the atom bomb,the American Military Mind and the end of the Second World War

ABSTRACT

The decision by the US government to drop the atomic bombs on Japan is one of the most heavily debated questions in history. This article examines one element of that debate, in many ways the most surprising. That was the different views of the top of the military hierarchy in the USA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). The JCS was on the whole more sceptical about using atomic weaponry than the USA’s civilian leadership, for ethical and strategic reasons. As such they were willing to consider very different ways of ending the war.     

Nobody wins the victory taboo in just war theory

ABSTRACT

This article examines how scholars of the just war tradition think about the ethical dilemmas that arise in the endgame phase of modern warfare. In particular, it focuses upon their reticence to engage the idiom of ‘victory’. Why, it asks, have scholars been so reluctant to talk about what it means to ‘win’ a just war? It contends that, while just war scholars may have good reason to be sceptical about ‘victory’, engaging it would grant them a more direct view of the critical potentialities, but also the limitations, of just war reasoning.     

A branch and bound algorithm for solving a class of nonlinear integer programming problems

This article presents a branch and bound method for solving the problem of minimizing a separable concave function over a convex polyhedral set where the variables are restricted to be integer valued. Computational results are reported.     

Warranty design under buyer and seller risk aversion

This paper provides a framework in which warranty policies for non-repairable items can be evaluated according to risk preferences of both buyers and sellers. In particular, a warranty price schedule is established such that sellers are indifferent among the policies. Given this schedule, a buyer's response is expressed by selecting the price-warranty combination that minimizes disutility. Within this framework, a warranty can be viewed as an instrumet of risk management that can induce more sales and greater profitability. For given utility functions, analytical results for the development of a price schedule are developed. Numerical results illustrate the substitution effects between warranty terms, prices, and risk parameters.     

Successive approximation in separable programming: An improved procedure for convex separable programs

We implement a solution procedure for general convex separable programs where a series of relatively small piecewise linear programs are solved as opposed to a single large one, and where, based on bound calculations developed in [13] and [14], the ranges of linearization are systematically reduced for successive programs. The procedure inherits ε-convergence to the global optimum in a finite number of steps, but perhaps its most distinct feature is the rigorous way in which ranges containing an optimal solution are reduced from iteration to iteration. This paper describes the procedure, called successive approximation, discusses its convergence, tightness of the bounds, bound-calculation overhead, and its robustness. It presents a computer implementation to demonstrate its effectiveness for general problems and compares it (1) with the more standard separable programming approach and (2) with one of the recent augmented Lagrangian methods [10] included in a comprehensive study of nonlinear programming codes [12]. It seems clear from over 130 cases resulting from 80 distinct problems studied here that significant savings in terms of computational effort can be realized by a judicious use of the procedure, and the ease with which it can be used is appreciably increased by the robustness it shows. Moreover, for most of these problems, the advantage increases as the size, nonlinearity, and the degree of desired accuracy increase. Other important benefits include significantly smaller storage requirements, the ability to estimate the error in the current solution, and to terminate the algorithm as soon as the acceptable level of accuracy has been achieved. Problems requiring up to about 10,000 nonzero elements in their specification and about 45,000 nonzero elements in the generated separable programs resulting from up to 70 original nonlinear variables and 70 nonlinear constraints are included in the computations.     

The interactive fixed charge linear programming problem

In many decision-making situations, each activity that can be undertaken may have associated with it both a fixed and a variable cost. Recently, we have encountered serveral practical problems in which the fixed cost of undertaking an activity depends upon which other activities are also undertaken. To our knowledge, no existing optimization model can accomodate such a fixed cost structure. To do so, we have therefore developed a new model called the interactive fixed charge linear programming problem (IFCLP). In this paper we present and motivate problem (IFCLP), study some of its characteristics, and present a finite branch and bound algorithm for solving it. We also discuss the main properties of this algorithm.