Book Reviews

Strategic Views from the Second Tien The Nuclear Weapons Policies of France, Britain and China. Edited by J.C. Hopkins and W Hu, New Brunswick and London, Transaction Publishers, (1995) ISBN 1-56000-7907. $ 21.95

Multinational Military Forces: Problems and Prospects. By Roger H. Palin. Adelphi Paper 294, 11SS/Oxford University Press (1995) ISBN 0-19-828025-4 ISSN 0567 932X

South Africa in the Global Economy. Edited by Greg Mills, et al. South African Institute of International Affairs, Johannesburg, (1995) ISBN 1-874890-58-7. R. 45.60

The Limits of Air Powen The American Bombing of North Vietnam. By Mark Clodfelter, The Free Press. New York (1989). ISBN 0-02-905990-9. $22.95.

Guy Gibson. By Richard Morris with Colin Dobinson. Viking. London (1994). ISBN 0-670-82878-5. £18.00.

Dambuster: A Life of Guy Gibson VC. By Susan Ottway. Leo Cooper, London (1994). ISBN 0-85052-427. £16-95.     

Using a birth‐and‐death process to estimate the steady‐state distribution of a periodic queue

If the number of customers in a queueing system as a function of time has a proper limiting steady‐state distribution, then that steady‐state distribution can be estimated from system data by fitting a general stationary birth‐and‐death (BD) process model to the data and solving for its steady‐state distribution using the familiar local‐balance steady‐state equation for BD processes, even if the actual process is not a BD process. We show that this indirect way to estimate the steady‐state distribution can be effective for periodic queues, because the fitted birth and death rates often have special structure allowing them to be estimated efficiently by fitting parametric functions with only a few parameters, for example, 2. We focus on the multiserver M_t/GI/s queue with a nonhomogeneous Poisson arrival process having a periodic time‐varying rate function. We establish properties of its steady‐state distribution and fitted BD rates. We also show that the fitted BD rates can be a useful diagnostic tool to see if an M_t/GI/s model is appropriate for a complex queueing system. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 62: 664–685, 2015     

Country Survey I–Military Spending in India 1

After a brief survey of the Indian economy, we survey the supply and demand of military expenditures in India over the last four decades. The causes of military expenditures appear to include regional rivalries and protracted conflicts, but it has proven difficult to delineate these with empirical models. The effects of military spending in India on economic growth appear to be benign, despite much speculation to the contrary. However, the opportunity costs of defence spending are shown to be considerable. We conclude with speculation about the role of debt and debt servicing in retarding future economic growth in India. We also speculate about the potential for the creation of a war economy in India.     

Approximations for departure processes and queues in series

Methods are developed for approximately characterizing the departure process from a single-server queue and calculating approximate congestion measures for several single-server queues in series. These methods are modifications of the previously described asymptotic method and stationary-interval method for approximating a stochastic point process. The approximations are evaluated by comparing approximate congestion measures for queues in series with previous simulation results.