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.     

Striking a deal on the F-35: multinational politics and US defence acquisition

Why does joint defence production of advanced weapons systems, which appears like a logical choice at first, become harder for both the primary production state and its allies to manage and justify as the acquisition process runs its course? To answer this question, we analyze the multinational politics of the F-35 JSF with a focus on how secondary states who have bought into the program are affected by domestic politics within the primary production state. We find that US congressional and bureaucratic politics, cuts to US defence spending, and a desire to retain tight control over the program has locked allies into a program with which they have little leverage. Potentially losing the ability to fight along side the US if they don’t follow through, coupled with inter-Alliance pressures, leaves secondary states who are involved with the F-35 program, vulnerable to the whims of US domestic politics.     

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.     

French Arms Exports and Intrastate Conflicts: An Empirical Investigation

The aim of this article is to evaluate how French Major Conventional Weapons (MCW) exports impact on the conflict intensity of recipient countries. The recent increase in French arms exports seems to contradict the French political discourse on the promotion of regional stability. We run zero-inflated ordered probit model in order to analyze the role of the arms trade on the intensity of civil conflicts in 144 countries from 1992 to 2014, using SIPRI and UCDP/PRIO data. Our results suggest that French MCW exports tended not to exacerbate intrastate conflicts during this period. This finding is robust to changes in the empirical framework. We propose two lines of explanations: France seems to be prone to choosing partners that respect human rights and selling more ‘defense-oriented’ MCW than the rest of the world.     

Planning gamma accelerated degradation tests with two accelerating variables

Gamma accelerated degradation tests (ADT) are widely used to assess timely lifetime information of highly reliable products with degradation paths that follow a gamma process. In the existing literature, there is interest in addressing the problem of deciding how to conduct an efficient, ADT that includes determinations of higher stress‐testing levels and their corresponding sample‐size allocations. The existing results mainly focused on the case of a single accelerating variable. However, this may not be practical when the quality characteristics of the product have slow degradation rates. To overcome this difficulty, we propose an analytical approach to address this decision‐making problem using the case of two accelerating variables. Specifically, based on the criterion of minimizing the asymptotic variance of the estimated q quantile of lifetime distribution of the product, we analytically show that the optimal stress levels and sample‐size allocations can be simultaneously obtained via a general equivalence theorem. In addition, we use a practical example to illustrate the proposed procedure.     

Ideology,ballots, and alliances: Canadian participation in multinational military operations

The decision to employ force abroad is often a contentious political decision, where partisanship plays a crucial role. Prior to military intervention, political parties usually make their ideologically distinctive preferences clear and seek to implement them once in power. What remains unclear, however, is how ideology affects the decision to use military force. This article contends that alliance and electoral calculations constrain the ability of political parties to implement their ideological preferences with regards to the use of force. It examines a “most likely” case for the partisan theory of military intervention, namely Canada’s refusal to take part in the invasion of Iraq and its decision to commit forces to the war against the Islamic State. It finds that only in combination with alliance and electoral calculations does executive ideology offer valuable insights into Canada’s military support to U.S.-led coalition operations, which contributes to our understanding of allied decision-making.     

Moral Aspects of “Moral Injury”: Analyzing Conceptualizations on the Role of Morality in Military Trauma

In clinical circles, the concept of “moral injury” has rapidly gained traction. Yet, from a moral philosophical point of view the concept is less clear than is suggested. That is, in current conceptualizations of moral injury, trauma’s moral dimension seems to be understood in a rather mechanistic and individualized manner. This article makes a start in developing an adequately founded conceptualization of the role of morality in deployment-related distress. It does so by reviewing and synthesizing insights from different disciplines into morality and trauma. This discussion will lead to three positions: (1) values and norms are by definition characterized by conflict, (2) moral conflict may entail important social dimensions, and (3) moral conflict may lead to altered beliefs about previously held values. These insights provide important steps in further developing conceptions of the role of morality in deployment-related suffering.     

To free or not to free (ride): a comparative analysis of the NATO burden-sharing in the Czech Republic and Lithuania

ABSTRACT

The recent rise in the defence budgets among the NATO members reawakens the free-riding dilemma. This article provides an analysis of the defence spending of two new member states, the Czech Republic and Lithuania. Based on the free-riding theory, we explain why some of the new NATO members decide to increase their defence budgets (Lithuania), and others do not (Czech Republic). In contrast to the majority of works which focus either on the US as the biggest spender or on the “old” members of the Alliance, we explain under what circumstances some of the small European states who became new NATO members started to increase their defence budgets even though they do not have to, and the literature suggests that free-riding is easier. In the process, we identify three crucial factors that in?uence the decision-making process in this regard: the level of threat perception, economic situation, and the US pressure.     

The assignment of storage locations to containers for a container stack

Assigning storage locations to incoming or reshuffled containers is a fundamental problem essential to the operations efficiency of container terminals. The problem is notoriously hard for its combinatorial and dynamic nature. In this article, we minimize the number of reshuffles in assigning storage locations for incoming and reshuffled export containers. For the static problem to empty a given stack without any new container arrival, the optimum reshuffle sequence is identified by an integer program (IP). The integer program captures the evolution of stack configurations as a function of decisions and is of interest by itself. Heuristics based on the integer program are then derived. Their competitiveness in accuracy and time are established by extensive numerical runs comparing them with existing heuristics in literature and in practice as well as with extensions of the existing heuristics. Variants of the IP‐based heuristics are then applied to the dynamic problem with continual retrievals and arrivals of containers. Again, numerical runs confirm that the IP‐based heuristic is competitive. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2009