A trajectory for homeland ballistic missile defense

The Ground-based Midcourse Defense system is intended to protect the US homeland against limited attacks from intermediate- and long-range ballistic missiles. It has succeeded in intercepting target missiles and can engage a threat launched from North Korea or the Middle East, targeting any point in the USA. Nevertheless, high-profile struggles and program changes related to homeland ballistic missile defense (BMD) continue to make headlines. The most significant struggle has been a string of three straight intercept test failures over five years, followed by the recent successful intercept test in June 2014. This article first briefly reviews the current threats of concern. It then examines homeland BMD policy objectives, followed by the current major technical issues in supporting these objectives and, then, the likelihood of negating a warhead. Finally, it highlights major considerations that should be part of the trajectory the US government takes moving forward.     

Scheduling combat logistics force replenishments at sea for the US Navy

The Replenishment at Sea Planner (RASP) is saving the U.S. Navy millions of dollars a year by reducing fuel consumption of its Combat Logistics Force (CLF). CLF shuttle supply ships deploy from ports to rendezvous with underway U.S. combatants and those of coalition partners. The overwhelming commodity transferred is fuel, ship‐to‐ship by hoses, while other important packaged goods and spare parts are high‐lined, or helicoptered between ships. The U.S. Navy is organized in large areas of responsibility called numbered fleets, and within each of these a scheduler must promulgate a daily forecast of CLF shuttle operations. The operational planning horizon extends out several weeks, or as far into the future as we can forecast demand. We solve RASP with integer linear optimization and a purpose‐built heuristic. RASP plans Replenishment‐at‐Sea (RAS) events with 4‐hour (Navy watch) time fidelity. For five years, RASP has served two purposes: (1) it helps schedulers generate a daily schedule and animates it using Google Earth, and (2) it automates reports command‐to‐ship messages that are essential to keep this complex logistics system operating.     

Insurgency and Violent Extremism in Pakistan

Pakistan has an uneven history of dealing with insurgencies and extremism. This article identifies the various campaigns and policies employed to defeat militants and deal with violent extremism. It describes the major anti-state groups and how Pakistan’s military and civilian leaders, relying on the related strategies of selectivity, gradualism and containment, have allowed militancy and terrorism to thrive. This article finds that while the elites and the public may have belatedly come to appreciate the existential internal threats these groups pose to the country, there are strong reasons to doubt the state’s full commitment to its promises to take meaningful action.     

Detecting Problems in Military Expenditure Data Using Digital Analysis

The UN asks governments to report key figures of their annual military budgets with the aim of creating trust among member states. This goal can only be achieved if the data reported is accurate. However, although there are many reasons for governments to falsify data, the UN does not check for manipulation. In this paper, we apply Benford’s law to the military expenditure data of 27 states taken from the UN register. Our analysis of the first digits shows that the states with the greatest deviations from the expected Benford distribution and therefore the lowest data quality are the USA and the UK.     

POWER,INFLUENCE, AND HIERARCHY: DEFENSE INDUSTRIES IN A UNIPOLAR WORLD

The global defense‐industrial sector reflects the hierarchy of power in the post‐Cold War world. As in the larger international system, the United States plays the dominant role in the defense sector as well. It is a comparative advantage often used by US policymakers to influence the foreign policy behavior of other states. Curiously, the radical concentration of the world’s defense industrial sector, as described here, has received relatively little scrutiny from either academia or the media, even though it not only reflects the international order but provides the United States with considerable leverage in it.     

Financial versus human resources in the Greek‐Turkish arms race: A forecasting investigation using artificial neural networks

This paper aims at forecasting the burden on the Greek economy resulting from the arms race against Turkey and at concentrating on the leading determinants of this burden. The military debt and the defence share of GDP are employed alternatively in order to approximate the measurement of the arms race pressure on Greece, and the method used is that of artificial neural networks. The use of a wide variety of explanatory variables in combination with the promising results derived, suggest that the impact on the Greek economy resulting from this arms race is determined, to a large, extent, by demographic factors which strongly favour the Turkish side. Prediction on both miltary debt and defence expenditure exhibited highly satisfactory accuracy, while the estimation of input significance, indicates that variables describing the Turkish side are often dominant over the corresponding Greek ones.     

A rent‐seeking model of international competition and alliances∗

This paper presents an alternative approach for analyzing international competition and alliances as rent‐seeking contests that are able to capture the impure public good nature of defense spending. Two‐country Cournot and Stackelberg games are considered and comparative static results derived. A three‐country model is investigated, and alliance behavior is explored in the context of this rent‐seeking model. The conjecture that an alliance may become less effective if the allies’ interests become more closely aligned is verified. Finally, the model is generalized, and a Nash‐Cournot equilibrium is computed.     

PEACE PROCESSES AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION IN THE HORN OF AFRICA

Conflict resolution processes must meet certain prerequisites and conditions. Unless the warring parties or the mediators meet, it will be difficult to find lasting and just solutions to the conflicts in the Horn (Djibouti, Eritrea and Ethiopia, and Somalia). Most of these conflicts have ethnic or religious components and also have a lot do with the nature of the government institutions and the power distribution among the communities within these states. Identifying the main causes of the conflict and the issues involved in each country is a very necessary first step toward peace. Secondly, conditions have to be identified that would make the current peace agreements work. This includes identifying the specific problems faced by the parties involved; ascertaining the validity of the mechanisms through which the problems will be overcome; and planning how the agreements will be maintained. The knowledge that mediators have about the conflict is often as important as the actual meeting of parties at the negotiation table. This article also evaluates the peace initiatives underway in the Horn and attempts to identify the apparent reasons that prevented their implementation.