Military autonomy: its origins,limits, and the politico-military dialectic of war

Military officers often oppose political interference in the conduct of war. Political leaders respond by citing Clausewitz’s contention that “war is the continuation of politics with the addition of other means.” Scholarship in security studies and civil-military relations argues that civilians are right to oppose military autonomy because it serves the parochial interests of the military. However, through the dialectical relationship between the violent essence of war and its political nature, Clausewitz provides an alternative explanation for military demands for autonomy. He shows that military and political leaders are prone to an incomplete understanding of war that can undermine strategy and policy.     

New product introduction against a predator: A bilevel mixed‐integer programming approach

We consider a scenario with two firms determining which products to develop and introduce to the market. In this problem, there exists a finite set of potential products and market segments. Each market segment has a preference list of products and will buy its most preferred product among those available. The firms play a Stackelberg game in which the leader firm first introduces a set of products, and the follower responds with its own set of products. The leader's goal is to maximize its profit subject to a product introduction budget, assuming that the follower will attempt to minimize the leader's profit using a budget of its own. We formulate this problem as a multistage integer program amenable to decomposition techniques. Using this formulation, we develop three variations of an exact mathematical programming method for solving the multistage problem, along with a family of heuristic procedures for estimating the follower solution. The efficacy of our approaches is demonstrated on randomly generated test instances. This article contributes to the operations research literature a multistage algorithm that directly addresses difficulties posed by degeneracy, and contributes to the product variety literature an exact optimization algorithm for a novel competitive product introduction problem. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2009     

The Imperfect Peace: Explaining Paramilitary Violence in Northern Ireland

This article examines why paramilitary campaigns in Northern Ireland have continued despite the current peace process. In advancing three instrumental explanations of paramilitary violence, the author provides a useful analytical framework which shows that while organizational interpretations are dominating the public discourse, republicans and loyalists continue to use paramilitary violence as a strategic means of threat and coercion. Furthermore, even though policy implications are not discussed in detail, it will be demonstrated that the dominance of organizational imperatives has resulted in excessive leniency by the state, which - in turn - has contributed to the fragility of the peace process.     

Technical note: Traffic intensity estimation

This note examines estimation of the traffic intensity in an M/G/1 queue. We show that the ratio of sample mean service times to the sample mean interarrival times has undesirable sampling properties. To remedy this, two alternative estimators are introduced. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 2009     

Governance through brokerage: informal governance in post-civil war societies

There is currently a lack of knowledge about how elites rule post-civil war societies without strong state institutions. This paper argues that elites oftentimes overcome such institutional deficiencies by engaging in governance through brokerage. According to this perspective, elites outsource central state functions to influential broker figures. This is particularly true when dealing with war-affected groups that possess much violent agency. By functioning as social membranes, brokers can help elites and war-affected groups to redefine a new social contract. Liberia is employed as an example to illustrate the paper’s central arguments.     

Optimal search for a moving target with the option to wait

We investigate the problem in which an agent has to find an object that moves between two locations according to a discrete Markov process (Pollock, Operat Res 18 (1970) 883–903). At every period, the agent has three options: searching left, searching right, and waiting. We assume that waiting is costless whereas searching is costly. Moreover, when the agent searches the location that contains the object, he finds it with probability 1 (i.e. there is no overlooking). Waiting can be useful because it could induce a more favorable probability distribution over the two locations next period. We find an essentially unique (nearly) optimal strategy, and prove that it is characterized by two thresholds (as conjectured by Weber, J Appl Probab 23 (1986) 708–717). We show, moreover, that it can never be optimal to search the location with the lower probability of containing the object. The latter result is far from obvious and is in clear contrast with the example in Ross (1983) for the model without waiting. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 2009     

Disrupt and restraint: The evolution of cyber conflict and the implications for collective security

In the last decade, cyber conflict has become a main feature of international politics and a growing concern for strategic stability and collective security. Unfortunately, cyber conflict suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity about its impact on collective security and a lack of consensus among international actors on how to interpret it. This article proposes to understand cyber conflict as an evolving process driven by two factors: the way in which digital space is configured and the way in which tactical, organizational, strategic, and doctrinal characteristics related to cyber have been included in the field of national and international security. Both tend to encourage offensive behavior but also demonstrate features pointing to restraint.     

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.     

What U.S. Navy strategists and defense planners should think about in the era of maritime great power competition

ABSTRACT

For the first time in a generation, the US Navy finds itself in an era of great power competition. As US naval strategists and defense planners begin to organise materially and conceptually to confront the strategic and operational-level challenges posed by China and Russia, what should they keep in mind? What should frame their thinking? Absorbed with the day-to-day tasks associated with managing how the fleet is being built, operated, and rationalised, these busy officers and civilians seldom can step back and gain some perspective on fundamental aspects of the security environment and relate those to naval purpose. To that end, this article provides a primer on what to keep in mind and how to think in an era of maritime great power competition.     

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.