Special Air Service Books to Choose From

Barry Davies, Joining the SAS: How to Get In and What It's Like.Miami: Lewis International Inc., 1998. Pp.214, photos, index. $22.95. ISBN 0–966771–4–2.

Peter McAleese and John Avery, McAleese's Fighting Manual: The Definitive Soldier's Handbook.London: Orion, 1998. Pp.179, illus. £18.95. ISBN 0–75280–063–9.

Steve Crawford et al.The SAS Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the World's Crack Regiment.Miami: Lewis International Inc., 1998. Pp.288, photos, maps, index. $29.95. ISBN 0–9666771–0–2.

Barry Davies et al.The Complete Encyclopedia of the SAS.London: Virgin Publishing Ltd, 1998. Pp.288, photos, maps, no index. $39.95. ISBN 1–85227–707–6.     

List of contributors

This article examines Edward Lansdale's return to South Vietnam during the Johnson administration. Lansdale offered a persuasive critique of the mistakes the American policy in Vietnam, but his potential influence was severely limited by a combination of bureaucratic infighting in Saigon and a general indifference to the political aspects of the conflict in Washington. While Lansdale was unable to signiflcantly influence the policies of the Johnson administration, his experience in Saigon during 1965–68 offers historians a unique perspective on many facets of American and South Vietnamese policymaking during a crucial period of the Vietnam War.     

Institutionalizing supreme command: explaining political–military integration in the Vietnam War, 1964–1968

Under what conditions can leaders achieve wartime political–military integration? In the Vietnam War, political–military integration exhibited dramatic variation: in the air war, the US was able to tightly integrate its political objectives and military conduct, but in the ground war, the American military prosecuted a strategy that was both divorced from broader political objectives and was immune from Washington's influence. I argue that the nature of information management between the military and civilian leadership explains the pattern of political–military integration in the Vietnam War more completely than do explanations that focus on the organizational cultures of professional militaries.     

Why did Sudan Lose a small war in Southern Sudan?

ABSTRACT

When on the wrong end of an asymmetry in the projection of hard power, weaker sides countenance the grim arithmetic of avoiding direct and massed confrontations. Invariably, insurgents have over the ages tended to employ indirect tactical methods to render their stronger opponents ineffective. Ultimately – interest asymmetry, regime type, asymmetries of strategy, and external intervention – combine in a complex interplay and pattern, to militate against a strong side. In Sudan, these factors interacted throughout the civil wars to produce regional autonomy and finally an independent South Sudan in 2011. Similar strategic logic had confronted many large African states battling insurgencies in Ethiopia, Angola, Nigeria, Zaire, and apartheid-era South Africa. Oftentimes, weakening public resolve has caused these governments to accommodate, capitulate or withdraw even if they try not to blink. Notwithstanding the regime type, it can be concluded that the majority of strong actors are prone to fail in a protracted, asymmetric conflict. Hence, the notion of linking victory in counterinsurgency to the degree of openness (democratic polyarchies); or closeness (totalitarianism) – is still valid but highly contestable in the case of Africa’s large dysfunctional states.     

An exact algorithm for the maximal covering problem

This article develops a robust, exact algorithm for the maximal covering problem (MCP) using dual-based solution methods and greedy heuristics in branch and bound. Based on tests using randomly generated problems with problem parameters similar to those in the existing literature, the hybrid approach developed in this work appears to be effective over a wide range of MCP model parameters. The method is further validated on problems constructed from three real-world data sets. The extensive computational study compares the new method with other existing exact methods using problems that are as big, or larger than, those used in previous work on MCP. The results show that the proposed method is effective in most instances of MCP. In particular, it is shown that bounding schemes using Lagrangian relaxation are effective on MCP as a method of obtaining both exact and heuristic solutions. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

紧凑型Tesla变压器的参数测量

对设计加工研制的Tesla变压器,根据Smith建议的测量方法,解决了对紧凑Teala变压器耦合系数进行比较准确地测量的问题,实测耦合系数高达0.9,并对耦合系数稍低于理论设计值的原因进行了探讨,同时分析给出了物理原因.此外,根据Teala变压器电路在初次级初、次级短路和低电压充电情形下的实测电压波形,估算出Tesla变压器电路各参数数值.这些数值与理论计算值吻合,并能满足实际高压充电的要求.     

混合尺寸目标电磁计算的时域伪谱/有限体积混合方法

针对单一算法对混合尺寸目标进行时域电磁分析的困难,提出一种时域伪谱(PSTD)同时域有限体积(FVTD)混合方法。FVTD可方便地分析复杂的几何结构和材料,但是难以计算电大尺寸的目标,PSTD则特别适合计算电大尺寸的规则结构,但在模拟复杂的几何结构尤其是带有曲边结构以及电大、电小共存结构时存在困难。混合方法克服了单独算法的缺点,融合各自的优势,提高了算法的求解能力和应用范围。为了减小两种算法连接边界带来的反射,采用了FVTD计算面均值的二次函数重构方法,给出了交叠网格和非交叠网格两种混合方案。数值试验表明,混合方法有较高的精度,具有时域分析混合尺寸目标电磁问题的能力。     

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.     

Estimating the accuracy of the coverages of outer β-content tolerance intervals,which control both tails of the normal distribution

Tolerance limits which control both tails of the normal distribution so that there is no more than a proportion β₁ in one tail and no more than β₂ in the other tail with probability γ may be computed for any size sample. They are computed from X? - k₁S and X? - k₂S, where X? and S are the usual sample mean and standard deviation and k₁ and k₂ are constants previously tabulated in Odeh and Owen [3]. The question addressed is, “Just how accurate are the coverages of these intervals (– Infin;, X? – k₁S) and (X? + k₂S, ∞) for various size samples?” The question is answered in terms of how widely the coverage of each tail interval differs from the corresponding required content with a given confidence γ′.