以军事技术创新探索我军发展新模式

提出建立以军事技术创新为内在机制的新的军事发展模式,论述了这个发展模式的要点和特点以及为转向创新应注意解决的几个关键性问题.     

掠海地效翼船——21世纪的新型海上高速运输运载工具

介绍了一种新型海上高速运载工具——地效翼船的过去和现状,特别是其在俄罗斯的发展.分析了地效翼船的性能及技术特点,并讨论了它的商业用途和军事用途.     

A Nonlinear Model of Military Expenditure Convergence: Evidence From Estar Nonlinear Unit Root Test

The paper builds a model to empirically test military expenditure convergence in a nonlinear set up. We assert that country A chooses a military strategy of catching up with the military expenditure of its rivals, subject to public spending constraints on public investments, including health and education, leading to decrease in long-term economic welfare. This implies nonlinear convergence path: only when the military expenditure gap between countries reaches the threshold level, will it provide incentives to catch up with rival’s military expenditures. We test this nonlinear catching up hypothesis for 37 countries spanning from 1988 to 2012. Results from individual nonlinear cross-sectionally augmented Dickey–Fuller (NCADF) regression indicate that 53% of countries converge to world’s average military expenditure: where 39% of countries converge to Germany; 33% of countries converge to China; 22% of countries converge to the USA, and 11% of countries converge to Russia. Interestingly, USA does not exhibit nonlinear military expenditure convergence toward world’s average level. For panel NCADF regression, the result suggests that on average, there is evidence for countries converging to USA’s military expenditure at 10% significance level. For the convergence to the world’s average, the statistical significance is at the 1% significance level.     

The Limits to Learning in Military Operations: Bottom-up Adaptation in the Norwegian Army in Northern Afghanistan, 2007–2012

This article – based on interviews with Norwegian Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) commanders and the lessons-learned database of the Norwegian Armed Forces – argues that what appear to be an inability or unwillingness to learn and adapt in war may have other explanations. The ambiguity of experiences makes lessons contested, contradictory, and fluid interpretations of confusing events. Consequently, they do not provide unequivocal guidance for adaptation. Even when lessons learned are fairly clear and agreed upon, adaptation does not automatically follow, as force autonomy may be quite limited, at least for small states in coalition operations conducted in partnership with indigenous forces.     

Externalities in Military Spending and Growth: The Role of Natural Resources as a Channel through Conflict

This investigation re-examines the potential sources of positive externalities for the relationship between military spending and economic growth using recent advances in panel estimation methods and a large data-set on military expenditure. The investigation provides a new analysis on the relationship between conflict, corruption, natural resources and military expenditure and their direct and indirect effects on economic growth. The analysis finds that the impact of military expenditure on growth is generally negative as in the literature, but that it is not significantly detrimental for countries facing higher internal threats and for countries with large natural resource wealth once corruption levels are accounted for.     

The Regional Economic Effects of Military Base Realignments and Closures

This paper empirically investigates the impact of military base realignments and closures on regional economic activity in light of the 2005 round of Base Realignment and Closure actions. Baseline regressions with county-level data show employment multipliers comparable to those generated from conventional input–output models. However, controlling for possible endogeneity and other regional-specific factors, regressions indicate more tenuous results for spillover effects from the military to the private sector. Only the contractor type of base employment generated economically and statistically meaningful impacts on local employment. In addition, there is strong evidence of asymmetric effects between military buildups and drawdowns.     

The impact of military spending and income inequality on economic growth in Turkey

An extensive literature on the effect of military expenditures on economic growth yields conflicting results. However, a crucial issue that has not been investigated in this context is the possible effect of inequality. The impact of military expenditures on economic growth in Turkey has also received substantial attention. Yet, the majority of these studies are not constructed based on a structural model, but rather examine the causality between the variables in question. Considering these two shortcomings in the literature and the lack of consistent results, this study attempts to provide further evidence for the relationship between military expenditures and economic growth for the case of Turkey by considering income inequality within an augmented Solow growth model. Our findings for the 1963–2008 period show that while income inequality has a positive impact on economic growth, military expenditures have no significant effect.     

Thinking Globally and Acting Locally: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Modern Wars – A Reply to Jones and Smith

In light of present day calls for increased levels of cultural understanding on the part of Western forces engaged in conflict, this article assesses the utility of such knowledge in light of the British experience of the North-West Frontier of India 1901–1945. By using the British concept of the Political Officer as an example, it proposes that while cultural understanding is of genuine importance when operating in such a challenging environment, possession of it does not necessarily aid either the design or implementation of successful policy. As the British experience on the Frontier during this period illustrates, cultural awareness and understanding may be possessed in abundance, and the mechanisms for achieving such a state of understanding may be advanced, but traditional factors such as a cultural bias on the part of policy-makers, conservatism, underfunding, local resistance to unfamiliar concepts and a fractured civil-military relationship will dominate such awareness and overshadow the benefits that it may provide.     

Contracting Out Security

Private security companies (PSCs) currently receive a great deal of attention in the news media, in sensationalist reporting, and increasingly in scholarly books and articles. While the scholarly books and articles make significant contributions to our understanding of this global phenomenon, there are several impediments to analysis that must be recognized and overcome if analysis is to be improved. Three of these impediments are reviewed in this article. The author suggests that US government material is currently available to minimize impediments and offers a framework to make analytical sense of it. Since contracting out is based on contracts, and unless the complexities of awarding and managing contracts are understood, recommendations made to reform the process of contracting out security are unrealistic.     

China's Military Procurement and Its Operational Implications: A Response to Yoram Evron

This article is a response to Evron's argument, offering readers another perspective to assess China's military modernization and war fighting capabilities, using the same framework and methodology. It examines three topics: China's national security and military strategy, the PLA's procurement decision-making process, and China's military support and mobilization system. It concludes that, China's military modernization is to fight and win local wars under the conditions of informatization, but if required the PLA can reliably supply large numbers of sophisticated weapons and spare parts, to wage a complex and prolonged conflict.