Iraq's role in the 1973 Arab‐Israeli War

The events of the 1973 Arab‐Israeli War serve as an early indicator of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's willingness to use military power to address foreign policy concerns. In that war, Iraq intervened on the Syrian front with an armored division, other supporting units, and over 100 aircraft. This intervention, which occurred despite severe political and military difficulties, was larger than any previous Iraqi contribution to the anti‐Israeli struggle. Baghdad later asserted that Iraqi forces had saved Damascus from possible Israeli occupation, and these claims have been widely repeated by a variety of authors of different nationalities with various degrees of agreement or skepticism. Nevertheless, Iraqi claims to have saved Damascus from Israeli capture are false since the Israelis did not view the seizure of the city as important to their strategy for victory. Rather, the Iraqi presence on the Golan Heights was useful to the Arab war effort as one of many factors helping to delay the Israeli advance and prevent some important Syrian targets from being placed within artillery range of the Israeli force. Iraqi military shortcomings were well highlighted in this conflict, and many were repeated in the early stages of the war with Iran.     

Unnecessary or unsung? The utilisation of airpower in Britain's colonial counterinsurgencies

Making extensive use of primary archival documents, this article seeks to explore whether airpower in three of Britain's most significant post-war colonial counterinsurgency campaigns, Malaya, Kenya and South Arabia, was an unnecessary part of British strategy, offering little useful military force due to the futility and strategic damage rendered by offensive bombardment, or whether airpower was indeed an unsung factor that provided operational flexibility through its effectiveness in a supply context, as well as its intelligence role in providing valuable aerial reconnaissance. In all three case studies the role played by the RAF in medical evacuations, in troop drops, in crop spraying during food-denial initiatives, and in providing ‘Voice Aircraft’ for the propaganda campaign, provide insights into an under-explored component of Britain's politico-military efforts in counterinsurgency in the 1950s and 1960s and suggests that the main strategic value of airpower in counterinsurgency, then and now, lies in its non-kinetic functions.     

Friend or foe? The Cyprus Police Force and the EOKA insurgency

This article examines the ambiguous role played by the Cyprus Police Force during the Greek Cypriot insurgency against Britain between 1955 and 1959. A multiethnic force policing a multiethnic society, the CPF struggled to fulfill its duties. Greek Cypriot officers became ineffective as sympathy for, or fear of insurgents undermined their ability to function. Some collaborated, others resigned. Those who stayed became targets of their own people. Turkish Cypriot officers, recruited in greater numbers to compensate for a reduction in Greek Cypriot officers, worked to enforce the law, but exacerbated intercommunal relations in doing so. In spite of the peculiar conditions present in Cyprus, the case has valuable implications for contemporary policymakers on the vulnerabilities inherent in the use of local police forces to restore law and order in ethnically divided societies.     

Nuclear ‐ and missile‐related trade and developments for selected countries,November 1996‐February 1997

The material in this overview is drawn from selected abstracts that appear in the Center for Nonproliferation Studies’ nuclear and missile databases. Transactions of nuclear and missile technologies, parts, and materials are listed according to the recipient country. Other developments are listed according to the country where the event or development took place. The new, streamlined format of this section indicates a decision by the Monitoring Proliferation Threats Project to focus on only key information in the overview and to offer more in‐depth analysis in the “Reports” section of the journal.     

A m‐parallel crane scheduling problem with a non‐crossing constraint

In this paper, we study a m‐parallel machine scheduling problem with a non‐crossing constraint motivated by crane scheduling in ports. We decompose the problem to allow time allocations to be determined once crane assignments are known and construct a backtracking search scheme that manipulates domain reduction and pruning strategies. Simple approximation heuristics are developed, one of which guarantees solutions to be at most two times the optimum. For large‐scale problems, a simulated annealing heuristic that uses random neighborhood generation is provided. Computational experiments are conducted to test the algorithms. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007.     

Does Spoiling Work? Assessing the Impact of Spoilers on Civil War Peace Agreements

Scholars and policymakers argue that violent actors – termed ‘spoilers’ – pose a significant threat to civil war peace agreements. Yet existing research, which is overly reliant on single-case studies, has not effectively determined how prevalent spoiling is, or thoroughly examined what its ultimate effects are on peace agreements. This article draws on a newly constructed cross-national dataset of spoiling following 241 civil war peace agreements in the post-Cold War era to analyze spoiling. It finds that spoiling intended to terminate an agreement is not as common as typically assumed, but still plagues a sizeable number of peace agreements. Moreover, most actors who resort to this strategy typically fail in their goals and the agreement is not at risk, despite the high publicity and attention given to these threats. Yet particular types of actors, most notably paramilitaries and state security forces excluded from the agreement, can pose a significant threat to peace.     

Principles of Minimum Force and the Parachute Regiment in Northern Ireland, 1969–1972

Developing literature on Operation Banner, the codename for the British military operation in Northern Ireland, has indicated that the conduct of soldiers deployed was not always in line with principles of minimum force. Adherence to these principles would seem to have been essential to the success of the operation given the initial deployment of the soldiers was in the role of military aid to the civil power. This article will examine the role of one of the British Army’s most aggressive units, the Parachute Regiment, and will show how the responses of the regiment to the demands of the operation in Northern Ireland were frequently in contravention of minimum force principles.     

From management crisis to crisis management? Japan’s post-2012 institutional reforms and Sino-Japanese crisis (In)stability

Since 2012, China’s assertion of its sovereignty claim to the contested Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands has significantly raised the risk of a potentially escalatory political-military crisis with Japan. As circumstances worsen, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has championed major institutional reforms aimed at centralizing Japanese security policy decision-making and vastly improving crisis management. This article assesses these reforms’ significance for ameliorating Japan’s long-standing internal crisis management weaknesses, and enhancing its ability to communicate with Beijing promptly under challenging conditions. While significant issues remain, recent developments – especially the establishment of Japan’s first-ever National Security Council – demonstrate significant progress. Bilaterally, however, important firebreaks remain conspicuously absent.