Reviews

Douglas S. Derrer, We Are All the Target: A Handbook of Terrorism Avoidance and Hostage Survival. Annapolis, MD: US Naval Institute Press, 1992. Pp. x+135, notes, index. $14.95. ISBN 01–55750–150–5

Ian Knight, Zulu: Isandlwana and Rorke's Drift, 22–23 January 1879. London: Windrow & Greene, 1992. Pp.136, 150 illus., incl 8 colour plates, maps, biblio. £35. ISBN 1–872004–23–7

Ian Knight, By the Orders of the Great White Queen: Campaigning in Zululand through the Eyes of the British Soldiers, 1879. London: Greenhill Books and Novato: Presidio Press, 1992. Pp. 272, 17 illus., 1 map. £18.95. ISBN 1–85367–122–3

Manfried Rauchensteiner and Erwin A. Schmidl (eds.), Formen des Krieges: vom Mittelalter zum ‘Low‐intensity’ Conflict’. Graz : Verlag Styria, 1991. Pp.208. DM35. ISBN 3–22–12139–7

Harold J. Kearsley, Maritime Power and the Twenty‐First Century. Dartmouth: Dartmouth Publishing Company, Limited, 1992. Pp.xv + 203, 13 diagrams, index. £32.50. ISBN 1–85521–288–9     

The Evolution and Significance of the 1972 Incidents at Sea Agreement

As a consequence of the rapid growth of Soviet maritime power during the 1960s, hazardous incidents at sea and in the air became a regular part of the Cold War. Eventually, both Washington and Moscow came to recognize the importance of an agreement limiting this perilous set of interactions, resulting in the Incidents at Sea Agreement that was signed in May 1972. The set of rules and procedures agreed upon helped to calm tensions in subsequent crises and provides ample lessons for placing reasonable limits on other tense maritime rivalries.     

Contents and Author Index,Volume 19, 2012

The U.S. Congress, charged with overseeing U.S. nuclear weapons policy and programs, usually addresses such policies and programs through the annual authorization and appropriations process, focusing mostly on questions of how many and what types of weapons the United States should deploy, with little attention paid to questions about nuclear weapons strategy, doctrine, and policy. The oversight process has brought about some significant changes in the plans for U.S. nuclear weapons, including the elimination of funding for the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator study and the shift of that funding into a study of the Reliable Replacement Warhead. But with the focus on authorizations and appropriations, along with the divided jurisdiction over nuclear weapons policy and programs in congressional committees, Congress has not, either recently or during the Cold War and post–Cold War eras, conducted a more comprehensive review of U.S. nuclear weapons strategy, policy, or force structure. Changes in committee jurisdictions could affect the oversight process, but as long as nuclear weapons policy and programs remain a relatively low priority for most members of Congress, and the country at large, it is unlikely that Congress will pursue such a comprehensive debate.     

ON ETHNIC CONFLICT AND THE ORIGINS OF TRANSNATIONAL TERRORISM

Using the ITERATE dataset, we explore the origins of transnational terrorist activity, from 1982 through 1997, in 118 countries. We model terrorism, not as a function of a nation’s ethnic, religious or linguistic fractionalization, but as an independent measure of perceived ethnic tensions. When we control for institutional quality, evidence that political rights and civil liberties mitigate the terrorism‐producing effects of ethnic tensions exists only since 1990. Economic freedoms, on the other hand, robustly reduce the number of terrorist attacks originating in ethnically tense societies.     

Service design at diagnostic service centers

We study a service design problem in diagnostic service centers, call centers that provide medical advice to patients over the phone about what the appropriate course of action is, based on the caller's symptoms. Due to the tension between increased diagnostic accuracy and the increase in waiting times more in‐depth service requires, managers face a difficult decision in determining the optimal service depth to guide the diagnostic process. The specific problem we consider models the situation when the capacity (staffing level) at the center is fixed, and when the callers have both congestion‐ and noncongestion‐related costs relating to their call. We develop a queueing model incorporating these features and find that the optimal service depth can take one of two different structures, depending on factors such as the nurses' skill level and the maximum potential demand. Sensitivity analyses of the two optimal structures show that they are quite different. In some situations, it may (or may not) be optimal for the manager to try to expand the demand at the center, and increasing skill level may (or may not) increase congestion. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2012     

Approximations and empirics for stochastic war equations

The article develops a theorem which shows that the Lanchester linear war equations are not in general equal to the Kolmogorov linear war equations. The latter are time‐consuming to solve, and speed is important when a large number of simulations must be run to examine a large parameter space. Run times are provided, where time is a scarce factor in warfare. Four time efficient approximations are presented in the form of ordinary differential equations for the expected sizes and variances of each group, and the covariance, accounting for reinforcement and withdrawal of forces. The approximations are compared with “exact” Monte Carlo simulations and empirics from the WWII Ardennes campaign. The band spanned out by plus versus minus the incremented standard deviations captures some of the scatter in the empirics, but not all. With stochastically varying combat effectiveness coefficients, a substantial part of the scatter in the empirics is contained. The model is used to forecast possible futures. The implications of increasing the combat effectiveness coefficient governing the size of the Allied force, and injecting reinforcement to the German force during the Campaign, are evaluated, with variance assessments. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005.