America and public opinion in France: 1939–45

Julian G. Hurstfield, America and the French Nation, 1939–1945. London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Pp.309; £25.45.

John F. Sweets, Choices in Vichy France: The French under Nazi Occupation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Pp.306; £22.50.     

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.     

Optimal stocking policies for low usage items in multi-echelon inventory systems

Multi-echelon logistic systems are essential parts of the service support function of high technology firms. The combination of technological developments and competitive pressures has led to the development of services systems with a unique set of characteristics. These characteristics include (1) low demand probabilities: (2) high cost items; (3) complex echelon structures; (4) existence of pooling mechanisms among stocking locations at the same echelon level; (5) high priority for service, which is often expressed in terms of response time service levels for product groups of items: (6) scrapping of failed parts; and (7) recycling of issued stock due to diagnostic use. This article develops a comprehensive model of a stochastic, multi-echelon inventory system that takes account of the above characteristics. Solutions to the constrained optimization problem are found using a branch and bound procedure. The results of applying this procedure to a spare parts inventory system for a computer manufacturer have led to a number of important policy conclusions.     

Bounding methods for facilities location algorithms

Single- and multi-facility location problems are often solved with iterative computational procedures. Although these procedures have proven to converage, in practice it is desirable to be able to compute a lower bound on the objective function at each iteration. This enables the user to stop the iterative process when the objective function is within a prespecified tolerance of the optimum value. In this article we generalize a new bounding method to include multi-facility problems with l_p distances. A proof is given that for Euclidean distance problems the new bounding procedure is superior to two other known methods. Numerical results are given for the three methods.     

Book reviews

Managing International Conflict, From Theory to Practice: a Teaching Tool Using CASCON by Lincoln P. Bloomfield and Allen Moulton, New York: St Martin's Press, 1997, ISBN 0-312-13675-7 (pbk), £18.99.

The American Century: the Rise and Decline of the United States as a World Power by Donald W. White, London: Yale University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-300-05721-0 (hbk), £25.

Humanitarian Intervention in Contemporary Conflict by Oliver Ramsbotham and Tom Woodhouse, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996.

The US Military/NGO Relationship in Humanitarian Interventions by Chris Seiple, Peacekeeping Institute, Center for Strategic Leadership, US Army War College, 1996.

Uncivil Wars: International Security and the New Internal Conflicts by Donald M. Snow, London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1996, ISBN 1-55587-655-2 (pbk), £15.50, ISBN 1-55587-648-X (hbk), £33.50.

Intelligence Power in Peace and War by Michael Herman, Royal Institute for International Affairs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, ISBN 0-521-56231-7 (hbk), £50, ISBN 0-521-56636 (pbk), £16.95.

UK Eyes Alpha: Inside British Intelligence by Mark Urban, London: Faber and Faber, 1996, ISBN 0-571-17689-5 (hbk), £16.99.

New Cloak, Old Dagger by Michael Smith, London: Victor Gollancz, 1996, ISBN 0-575-06150-2 (hbk), £20.

Conversion Survey 1997: Global Disarmament and Disposal of Surplus Weapons by Bonn International Center for Conversion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium 1996: World Inventories, Capabilities and Policies by David Albright, Frans Berkhout and William Walker, Oxford: SIPRI and Oxford University Press, 1997.

The Wars of Eduard Shevardnadze by Carolyn McGiffert Ekedahl and Melvin A. Goodman, University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1997.     

Solving multifacility location problems involving euclidean distances

This paper considers the problem of locating multiple new facilities in order to minimize a total cost function consisting of the sum of weighted Euclidean distances among the new facilities and between the new and existing facilities, the locations of which are known. A new procedure is derived from a set of results pertaining to necessary conditions for a minimum of the objective function. The results from a number of sample problems which have been executed on a programmed version of this algorithm are used to illustrate the effectiveness of the new technique.     

Concise RLT forms of binary programs: A computational study of the quadratic knapsack problem

The reformulation‐linearization technique (RLT) is a methodology for constructing tight linear programming relaxations of mixed discrete problems. A key construct is the multiplication of “product factors” of the discrete variables with problem constraints to form polynomial restrictions, which are subsequently linearized. For special problem forms, the structure of these linearized constraints tends to suggest that certain classes may be more beneficial than others. We examine the usefulness of subsets of constraints for a family of 0–1 quadratic multidimensional knapsack programs and perform extensive computational tests on a classical special case known as the 0–1 quadratic knapsack problem. We consider RLT forms both with and without these inequalities, and their comparisons with linearizations derived from published methods. Interestingly, the computational results depend in part upon the commercial software used. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2010