Cover for Thor: Divine Deception Planning for Cold War Missiles

In the late 1950s, as intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) replaced bombers, the development of Soviet ICBMs prompted fears of strategic vulnerability in the West. The Eisenhower administration's decision to deploy Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs) on the territory of NATO allies sought to redress the perceived vulnerability until American ICBMs were ready. British deception planners considered how to enhance the threat posed by the IRBMs. An outline plan codenamed ‘Celestial’ was intended to persuade the Soviets that the otherwise vulnerable missiles could not be readily neutralised. This article explores this deception and how such planning also sought to convey accurate information alongside disinformation. It also suggests that deception planners appear to have given little heed to the potentially counterproductive consequences of such an operation.     

Increased Chinese and American defence involvement in Africa

There is often a perception put forth of a fight for supremacy between China and the USA. This is often the case when discussing the continent of Africa. Both countries have recently increased their involvement in Africa for a variety of reasons. In 2011, China surpassed the USA as Africa's largest trading partner, with Africa predicted to be Beijing's largest trading partner by 2017. As expected, their bilateral and multilateral defence cooperation with strategic countries and organisations has matured and expanded along with it. Washington's own economic interests, al-Qa'ida and threats to maritime security are some of the crucial elements behind the US's presence on the continent. This article analyses both the USA and China's rising defence involvement in Africa. It compares and contrasts their similarities and differences, and argues that cooperation in certain areas can prove beneficial for all parties involved.     

Social capital and terrorism

Many studies of terrorism explain the use of violence against civilians with political or economic forces, often relegating social variables to the margins. Social factors, specifically societal-level social capital, play a far more important role in explaining patterns of terrorist activity than previously recognized. Social capital can exert pressures that act as both restraint and catalyst for terrorism, making explicit exposition of these differential effects critical. Analysis shows that higher stocks of social capital positively correlate with the number of terrorist groups, but the average attack activity of those groups increase as measures of social capital decline. The complex relationship makes it difficult to draw simple policy implications, but it does offer insight into the role that social dynamics play in terrorist activity.     

Predators and Peace: Explaining the Failure of the Pakistani Conflict Settlement Process in 2013-4

ABSTRACT

Did US drone strikes cause the unravelling of the Pakistani conflict settlement process between the government and the TTP in 2013-14? In answering this question, we present strong, fieldwork-based evidence that the effects of leadership decapitation, civilian casualties, and loss of legitimacy and credibility as a negotiation partner by both the government and the TTP interacted in the context of specific social, political and cultural characteristics of a tribal society. We find that drone strikes ‘produced’ some of these factors, but not all, which allows us to conclude with four concrete policy recommendations for rethinking the use of drones.     

Using real options analysis to value reoptimization options in the shifting bottleneck heuristic

The reoptimization procedure within the shifting bottleneck (SB) involves reevaluation of all previously scheduled toolgroup subproblems at each iteration of the SB heuristic. A real options analysis (ROA) model is developed to value the option to reoptimize in the SB heuristic, such that reoptimization only occurs when it is most likely to lead to a schedule with a lower objective function. To date, all ROA models have sought to value options financially (i.e., in terms of monetary value). The ROA model developed in this paper is completely original in that it has absolutely no monetary basis. The ROA methodologies presented are shown to greatly outperform both full and no reoptimization approaches with respect to both computation time and total weighted tardiness. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2006     

A queueing process with varying degree of service

This article describes and presents some results of the analysis of a queueing process where the degree of service given to a customer is subject to control by the management. The control doctrine used is based on the queue length and also on the recent history of the system.     

Scheduling prowler training

The U.S. Navy Prowler aircraft is designed for electronic surveillance and countermeasures. In this paper, we describe the problem of scheduling Prowler crew training, and we present two integer programming models to solve it. The first model maximizes the number of aviators trained above 75% in each mission area, subject to the available number of flights, over a single month. The second model distinguishes peacetime from mobilization, and minimizes the number of flights done in mobilization subject to the available number of flights in peacetime. Our models distinguish different types of crew and allow more than one qualification to be earned on a given flight. We give numerical results using real data, comparing our results to the actual readiness of a squadron. We found that crew readiness of Prowler squadrons can be increased by 10%, simply by better scheduling. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 50: 289–305, 2003.