The politics of multinational military operations

Today, few countries fight alone; most fight as allies or partners in multilateral campaigns. The end of the Cold War opened a window of opportunity for multinational military operations (MMOs). These have seen varying degrees of participation, enthusiasm, and success. This special forum is devoted to the politics of multilateral warfare including their formation, maintenance, and durability. The introduction sketches past research and derives some key questions of continuing relevance. The contributions shed light on the domestic and international politics of MMOs, focusing on the implementation of national restrictions and their repercussions for MMOs, party politics of military intervention, the conditions under which states decide to defect from military operations, and the role of junior partners in MMOs. In sum, this forum offers a fresh look at the politics of MMOs, including conceptual contributions to the study of national restrictions, domestic constraints, and coalition warfare.     

Keeping an eye on South Asian skies: America’s pivotal deterrence in nuclearized India–Pakistan crises

Since declaring their nuclear weapons capabilities in 1998, India and Pakistan have engaged in three major crises that each threatened to escalate into war. In each crisis, the USA engaged in active diplomacy to dissuade the South Asian rivals from taking escalatory actions. Previous literature on the crises has described the American role, but has not theorized third-party involvement in a nuclearized regional rivalry. We apply Timothy Crawford’s pivotal deterrence theory to the nuclearized India–Pakistan conflict, and extend the original theory to cover the novel condition of a non-superpower nuclear dyad, in the context of a single-superpower international system. We find that America’s pivotal deterrence generally enhanced stability in the India–Pakistan crises, and unlike in pre-nuclear South Asia, other great powers supported American diplomacy. However, we suggest that future regional crises between nuclear rivals, in South Asia or elsewhere, may present greater challenges for pivotal deterrence.     

Information security: Designing a stochastic‐network for throughput and reliability

Todas information and communication network requires a design that is secure to tampering. Traditional performance measures of reliability and throughput must be supplemented with measures of security. Recognition of an adversary who can inflict damage leads toward a game‐theoretic model. Through such a formulation, guidelines for network designs and improvements are derived. We opt for a design that is most robust to withstand both natural degradation and adversarial attacks. Extensive computational experience with such a model suggests that a Nash‐equilibrium design exists that can withstand the worst possible damage. Most important, the equilibrium is value‐free in that it is stable irrespective of the unit costs associated with reliability vs. capacity improvement and how one wishes to trade between throughput and reliability. This finding helps to pinpoint the most critical components in network design. From a policy standpoint, the model also allows the monetary value of information‐security to be imputed. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2009     

Fire truck relocation during major incidents

The effectiveness of a fire department is largely determined by its ability to respond to incidents in a timely manner. To do so, fire departments typically have fire stations spread evenly across the region, and dispatch the closest truck(s) whenever a new incident occurs. However, large gaps in coverage may arise in the case of a major incident that requires many nearby fire trucks over a long period of time, substantially increasing response times for emergencies that occur subsequently. We propose a heuristic for relocating idle trucks during a major incident in order to retain good coverage. This is done by solving a mathematical program that takes into account the location of the available fire trucks and the historic spatial distribution of incidents. This heuristic allows the user to balance the coverage and the number of truck movements. Using extensive simulation experiments we test the heuristic for the operations of the Fire Department of Amsterdam‐Amstelland, and compare it against three other benchmark strategies in a simulation fitted using 10 years of historical data. We demonstrate substantial improvement over the current relocation policy, and show that not relocating during major incidents may lead to a significant decrease in performance.     

National restrictions in multinational military operations: A conceptual framework

Recent scholarship in security studies has started to explore the causes and consequences of various forms of national restrictions in multinational military operations (MMOs). This article makes a conceptual contribution to this literature by developing a theoretical framework of national restrictions in MMOs that distinguishes between structural, procedural, and operational restrictions. I argue that these types of restrictions are governed by different causal mechanisms. Structural restrictions are relatively stable over time and effect deployment decisions irrespective of other factors. Procedural restrictions, on the other hand, can constitute veto points against deployment only in combination with distinct political preferences. Finally, operational restrictions directly affect the rules of engagement of troop contributing countries. The article illustrates the three types of restrictions and their interaction with empirical examples from a range of countries and sketches their impact on MMO deployment decisions and mandates.     

The Mexican War: frontier expansion and selective incursion

ABSTRACT

Mexico’s defeat in the war that (in the U.S.) takes the country’s name resulted as much from the strategic context created by unrealized nation-building that followed independence as it did from American tactical supremacy. Three centuries of Spanish empire did not translate into national military excellence due to the decades of revolutionary upheaval that followed the sudden decapitation occasioned by Napoleon’s ouster of the monarchy in Madrid. That the occupation which followed major combat provided salutary lessons learned in dealing with guerrillas rather than a Vietnam-like litany of quagmire eventuated from the conscious designs of military leadership steeped in the same Napoleonic dynamic that had produced our opponent. The United States wisely chose to leave issues of state-building and governance to the Mexicans themselves, while annexing the sparsely populated northern remnant of Spanish empire.