信息化条件下的军备控制

军备控制的目的是维护国家的安全和减少国家安全威胁.随着现代科学技术的发展和世界经济一体化进程的加快,国家安全威胁的因素与国家军事能力同步增长.尤其是现代信息技术的快速渗透和发展,不仅带来了安全隐患的增加,也加速了武器装备的更新换代,对国际军备控制产生了广泛的影响.     

Boko Haram’s increasingly sophisticated military threat

ABSTRACT

This paper evaluates Boko Haram’s military capabilities and details the process of how its standing army, driven by these capabilities, came to pose a phased threat between 2013 and 2015 in particular. This was a period when military fighting dominated the insurgency in north-east Nigeria. Whereas there is an abundance of literature on Boko Haram’s histories and the impact of its insurgency on north-east Nigeria, analysis of Boko Haram’s military campaigning is still deficient. Attempting to fill this gap, this paper uses field findings and battlefield case studies from north-east Nigeria to highlight how Boko Haram’s overt front – its standing army – came to supplant its guerrilla operations as the main security threat to the frontier area.

This pivot towards military fighting, for a group initially composed of a few ragtag combatants, on the surface might seem surprising. Yet, whereas Boko Haram may lack the popular support required for ‘people’s war’, classic insurgency theories nevertheless hold some explanatory power for this deliberate shift: away from guerrilla warfare as the expedient of the weaker side, and towards the use of a large standing army of locals to swarm, and sometimes successfully overrun, state forces.     

Arming China: Major powers’ arms transfers to the People’s Republic of China

The rise of China has been fuelled by a massive military modernisation programme relying, in large part, on the acquisition of foreign military equipment. The question of how the world’s major powers define their arms transfer policies towards China is therefore crucially important. This article makes two original contributions. First, drawing on neoclassical realism, it proposes an explanatory framework integrating international and domestic factors to explain variations in major powers’ arms transfers. Second, based on a large body of elite interviews and diplomatic cables, it offers the first comprehensive comparison of American, British, French and Russian arms transfer policies towards China since the end of the Cold War.     

枪械产品故障树的模糊分析

事件发生概率的获取是故障树分析(FTA)中的重要环节,然而在一些故障发生频率很低的场合,要获得大量的故障数据几乎是不可能的,传统的故障树分析把事件发生的概率处理成精确值,忽略了数据的不完备性及环境的模糊性.针对这一问题,在枪械产品的可靠性研究中提出了模糊故障树分析方法,将现有统计数据和工程技术人员的经验结合起来,在容许误差范围内,求解出了事件发生概率的取值空间,使结果更接近实际情况.     

Musket,Rank and File for Foot Guards,Lovell’s Pattern of 1838. Ne’er a Shot Fired in Anger?

The Pattern 1838 Musket was initially designed for the rank and file of the British army, it was instead issued to the elite Foot Guards. With arguably the lowest survival rate of any 19th Century British military firearm it is one of the rarest muskets to encounter today. This is its story …     

“It would be impossible to estimate the value of these works...” Mass Production at Springfield Armory during the American Civil War

The U.S. Armory in Springfield, Massachusetts, rarely appears in Civil War histories except perhaps as an unexplained statistical wonder. By late 1863, the Armory was the largest single supplier of rifles to Union forces. Springfield Armory workers out-produced over thirty American contractors, making more Army rifles at less cost while providing contractors with gauges, inspectors, and models, even though there were significant wartime private-sector mechanical innovations. This article identifies and explains the factors in the Armory’s success, provides context on contemporary American arms production and rifle models, and argues that the Armory’s methods and performance were among the first if not the first example of mass production in American small arms manufacture. The relative brevity of the Civil War episode, and the fact that it was not repeated in any comparable way at the Armory until World War II, has obscured its significance in American manufacturing history.     

Analysis of the effect of bore centerline on projectile exit conditions in small arms

Most finite element models of small arms focus on an idealized barrel, typically one with a perfectly straight bore centerline. Using five different experimentally measured bore centerlines, this investigation analyzes the effect centerline nonlinearity has on projectile exit conditions. This includes the effect of rotating a centerline through several orientations. Modeled using Abaqus/Explicit, this dynamic analysis simulates a single firing cycle for each centerline. Projectile jump is calculated for each model as a measure of the effects of warped centerlines. The warped centerlines have a small effect on barrel dynamics.     

SPARRING ON THE SUBCONTINENT

South Asian Security and International Nuclear Order: Creating a Robust Indo-Pakistani Nuclear Arms Control Regime, by Mario Esteban Carranza. Ashgate, 2009. 208 pages, $99.95.     

US–Russia relations and the future of arms control: how the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty could restore engagement on nuclear issues

ABSTRACT

Relations between the United States and Russia are in a prolonged downward spiral. Under these circumstances, cooperation on nuclear issues—once a reliable area of engagement even in difficult political environments—has all but completely halted. There are urgent reasons to find a way out of this situation, particularly the expiration of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in 2021. However, seemingly intractable disagreements about noncompliance with the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty and US ballistic-missile defense, compounded by the Ukraine crisis, the conflict in Syria, and the accusations of Russian interference in the US election of 2016, threaten the future of arms control. Against this backdrop, policy makers and practitioners should identify ways to re-engage on nuclear issues now so they can be ready to implement them as soon as feasible. This article considers how the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) could serve as a platform for US–Russia cooperation on nuclear issues when circumstances permit. Taking into account the challenges posed by ongoing US non-ratification, it identifies a menu of CTBT-related activities short of ratification that the two countries could undertake together. It explores how joint work on this issue would advance shared US and Russian interests while helping to create the circumstances necessary for further arms-control work.     

The end of the “INF Treaty” and the US-China military balance

ABSTRACT

Whereas much of the debate about the demise of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty has focused on the European context and Russia’s alleged treaty violations, Asia looms large in the minds of proponents of the United States’s immediate withdrawal from the treaty. For many proponents, the fast-changing military balance in Asia and China's conventionally armed missiles constitute a sufficient cause for withdrawal. What does the end of the INF Treaty bode for the US-China military balance? This article argues that, although there are some near-term benefits for the US position in the conventional military balance with China, the advantages offered by prohibited missiles are minor and can be readily substituted by extant capabilities that are compliant with the treaty. Given the negative implications of the end of the INF Treaty for the future of arms control, the costs and benefits of withdrawing from the treaty require further examination; the military balance in Asia is an unpersuasive rationale for withdrawing from an important part of the arms-control architecture.