The Gaullists,the French army and Algeria before 1958: Common cause or marriage of convenience?

Though the Gaullists and the officer class shared a common view of France's military, diplomatic and operational weaknesses during the Algerian War they did not always share ideas on solutions to the problem. The Gaullists were fixated on France's declining world status and were prepared to act opportunistically to halt it, thereby making a French Algeria expendable. The military, on the other hand, believed that keeping Algeria French was axiomatic in avoiding further national humiliation. The coming together of Gaullists and the Army in May 1958 was therefore only a shortterm alliance, which quickly crumbled.     

Airpower in the Mau Mau conflict: the government's chief weapon

Strategists are currently debating the efficacy airpower provides in counterinsurgency operations. Through the lens of Colonel John Warden's theory of systemic paralysis, this essay reveals the truth about how airpower was employed in the Mau Mau conflict – a subject that has, until now, been both shrouded in mystery and inaccurately reported. It reveals that the use of airpower in a conflict occurring almost 60 years ago proffers a number of lessons for its use in counterinsurgencies today. Moreover, it discovers that although useful in many respects, Warden's model is somewhat limited for analysing the true use of airpower in counterinsurgencies today and consequently, a more appropriate model is offered for airpower strategists to use in such conflicts.     

CONFLICT RESOLUTION PROCESSES,UNCERTAINTY AND INVESTMENT DYNAMICS: EVIDENCE FOR THE BASQUE COUNTRY

The Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps is a high school program that combines classroom teaching with extracurricular activities. The program is located primarily in inner city schools and serves at‐risk students. Its goals are multidimensional and include military preparation and improving academic achievement. Using High School and Beyond data we find that the program’s effects depend on the timing and intensity of involvement. Test scores, graduation rates, and enlistments are higher for students who participate early in high school and for those who persist in the program. Conversely, we find few effects for students participating in the last two years of high school.     

Rent‐seeking models of international competition: An experimental investigation*

This paper experimentally tests a number of hypotheses that follow from models of international competition that are based on Tullock style rent‐seeking models. Specifically, we designed and performed experiments to see how variations in the degree of publicness in the prize as well as changes in the values assigned to the prize affect alliances in terms of individual nation contributions, total contributions, burden sharing, and the likelihood of winning the prize. While there was substantial variation in individual behavior, the results of the experiments generally conform to the theoretical predictions of the rent‐seeking model of international competition and alliances.     

The strategic effects of a merger upon supplier interactions

We consider how a merger between two naturally differentiated dealers affects their interactions with a common supplier and identify conditions under which the merger can increase or decrease the combined net worth of the two firms. Among other things, we find that the attractiveness of merging depends upon the extent to which end demand can be stimulated by either an upstream supplier or the dealers. Specifically, the greater the supplier's ability to invest in stimulating end demand, the more likely it is that the naturally differentiated firms will be better off operating independently than merging. On the other hand, if the greatest opportunities for stimulating demand are through the service that is provided by the dealers, then merging their operations will be more attractive. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007     

A methodology for studying the dynamics of extended logistic systems

An extended logistic system is a well-defined configuration of equipment, modules, inventories, and repair and replacement facilities modeling a complex, repairable system with on-going repair. The design of such systems has been based largely on the static tools of inventory theory and reliability theory, i.e., on steady-state distributions and on associated means and variances. Such static tools suppress the scale of real lime and ignore system persistence time in up-states and persistence time in down-states. A reasonably simple dynamic methodology is presented, focusing on system failure time as a more meaningful objective function for system-design tradeoff studies. In the presence of good reliability, it is shown that different candidates for system failure time effectively merge to yield an unambiguous, single system failure time. Examples illustrating the importance of dynamic information for system design are given.