Atomic intelligence in Norway during the Cold War

Thanks to its geographical location and close military ties to the US and Britain, Norway took substantial part in the Western intelligence effort against the Soviet nuclear weapons programme during the Cold War. Norway's relative proximity to the nuclear weapons test sites on Novaya Zemlya and the nuclear submarine bases on the Kola Peninsula was of particular importance in this regard. Whereas the tasks of surveying the development, deployment and possible employment of Soviet nuclear forces always had first priority, Western atomic intelligence conducted from Norwegian soil and waters was occasionally aimed even at gathering information about the geophysical and possible long-term medical and environmental implications of high-yield nuclear explosions in the atmosphere.     

Delusion of Defeat: The United States and Iraq, 1990–1998

This article challenges the widely held belief that that the United States ‘won the war but lost the peace’ following the war with Iraq in 1991. Fears of a resurgent Iraq grew throughout the decade, despite abundant evidence that Iraq was becoming desperately weak and was no longer a threat to regional security. In fact, the United States won the war as well as the peace by any meaningful definition of the term. The article also discusses the reasons why US policymakers and observers convinced themselves that they had lost. The final section considers implications for strategy and policy in wars of limited objectives.     

Sadat as Supreme Commander

Extant literature explains Egyptian successes and failures in the October 1973 War by Sadat’s restoration or abolition of ‘objective control’: when restoring ‘objective control’, Sadat succeeded; when abolishing it, he failed. However, Samuel Huntington’s theory cannot account for Sadat’s command performance, not because Sadat zigzagged between this theory’s extremes, but because he never thought or acted according to its recipe. I employ Eliot Cohen’s Supreme Command concepts to argue that Sadat’s command constituted an eccentric combination of military romanticism and politicization of war, whose paradox was reflected in the initial military successes and the achievement of Egypt’s strategic objectives despite the military failures by the war’s final stage.     

Reform,democratization, and counter-insurgency: evaluating the US experience in Cold War-era Latin America

Current debate on US counter-insurgency doctrine is dominated by the notion that promoting ‘legitimacy’ and ‘good governance’ constitutes a central strategic imperative. This idea is hardly new; during the Cold War US officials often sought to encourage democratization and socio-economic reform as antidotes to revolution in Latin America. This article reviews four such cases – Venezuela during the first half of the 1960s, Guatemala throughout the 1960s, Nicaragua during the late 1970s, and El Salvador during the 1980s. The purpose is to bring a historical perspective to bear on current debates about the feasibility of US counter-insurgency strategy by evaluating the effectiveness of previous campaigns to promote improved governance in developing societies wracked by guerrilla violence.     

从孙子兵法角度审视目标中心战的制胜机制

基于体系对抗的战争特点和我军作战实际情况,提出的目标中心战是现代作战思想的一次凝练及升华。它的制胜机制表现为三个层面：通过选择关键作战目标,提升体系对抗效能;通过影响目标系统功能,谋求局部对抗优势;通过融合体系要素,提高整体对抗能力。     

Escalation in Irregular War: Using Strategic Theory to Examine from First Principles

Abstract

If all violence is intended to achieve political effects, what is distinctive about escalation in irregular war? Indeed, what is irregular war? To answer such fundamental questions this analysis employs the principles of strategic theory in an attempt to offer a theoretical and practical framework that will facilitate an appreciation of the subsequent contributions to this special issue. The assessment seeks to articulate how the escalation process in conditions of so-called irregular war might be conceptualized and, via examples, illustrate how certain broad observations may be held to be true. Ultimately, though, the argument emphasizes that the process of escalation cannot be distinctive or follow predictable patterns given that all wars are unique to their time and place and will be affected in their conduct by the contingent forces of passion, chance and reason.     

Attrition models of the Ardennes campaign

This paper revisits the modeling by Bracken [3] of the Ardennes campaign of World War II using the Lanchester equations. It revises and extends that analysis in a number of ways: (1) It more accurately fits the model parameters using linear regression; (2) it considers the data from the entire campaign; and (3) it adds in air sortie data. In contrast to previous results, it concludes by showing that neither the Lanchester linear or Lanchester square laws fit the data. A new form of the Lanchester equations emerges with a physical interpretation. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 45: 1–22, 1998     

MAD,not Marx: Khrushchev and the nuclear revolution

The revival of nuclear strategy in US policy and scholarship has been strengthened by arguments that the ‘nuclear revolution’ – the assumption that thermonuclear bombs and missiles had made major war too dangerous to wage – does not affect international behaviour as much as nuclear revolution advocates claim. This article shows that the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev indeed regarded nuclear war as too dangerous to wage, a decision which manifested itself not so much in foreign policy or military doctrine but in his determination to avoid war when the possibility arose. We argue that Khrushchev’s experience provides us with a more useful way to characterise the nuclear revolution and suggest some implications of this argument for contemporary debates about nuclear weaponry.     

The financial performance of aircraft manufacturers during world war II: the vicissitudes of war

Controversy has long surrounded the role and profitability of US defense contractors. From a financial perspective the question becomes whether defense contractors earn greater profits and investor returns than other companies during military conflicts. We explore this question by examining the accounting profitability and investor returns of US aircraft manufacturers before, during, and after World War II and compare them to a sample of non-defense firms. We also examine the reactions of aircraft stock prices to important political and military events of the time. We find that (1) aircraft stocks exhibited positive abnormal returns around events associated with defense buildups and outbreaks of hostile action and negative returns around events signaling an end to hostilities, (2) the company’s accounting returns improved during the war but these higher accounting returns did not translate into higher stock returns for the shareholders, and (3) investors could have earned higher stock returns had they switched out of aircraft stocks after Pearl Harbor and reinvested the proceeds in the overall market.     

试论孙子兵法对消防工作的指导

近年来,全国各级公安消防部门为有效防控重特大火灾事故、确保火灾形势稳定,发起了治理火灾隐患的战役。打好战役,必须讲方法、讲韬略。《孙子兵法》是一部伟大的军事著作,共分13篇,在其中选取部分精辟的观点,试述其对加强和改进消防工作的指导作用。