The effects of information on a queue with balking and phase‐type service times

This article generalizes the models in Guo and Zipkin, who focus on exponential service times, to systems with phase‐type service times. Each arriving customer decides whether to stay or balk based on his expected waiting cost, conditional on the information provided. We show how to compute the throughput and customers' average utility in each case. We then obtain some analytical and numerical results to assess the effect of more or less information. We also show that service‐time variability degrades the system's performance. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008     

Aerial intelligence during the Algerian war

Aviation had a highly significant role in supporting French military operations in Algeria. This was particularly true of aerial reconnaissance and intelligence gathering. Initially, however, the Air Force effort was handicapped by inappropriate approaches, too few army/air liaison officers and scepticism among army officers aware of the difficulties of earlier air operations against an insurgency in Indochina (1946–54). It also lacked sufficient suitable aircraft types. Gradually, improved aircraft and photographic techniques permitted systematic and detailed aerial mapping and intelligence work, as well as rapid provision of close air support during ground battles. Better integration of air and ground forces, along with more coordinated command and control, arrived from 1959 onwards when an air force general, Maurice Challe, became inter-service commander-in-chief in Algeria. This permitted an authentic and mostly effective combined-airms and joint service approach to the locating, tracking, engagement and destruction of Algerian nationalist bands.     

Interagency Coordination: The Other Side of CIMIC

All governments wrestle with the challenge of interagency coordination. Improving civil-military coordination, at the national level as well as in the field, can be a useful step in designing a more effective defense decision-making process. National-level organisations do not cooperate easily, but young military and civilian personnel with CIMIC experience can begin to open stovepipes. If vertically organized governments are ever to deal effectively with horizontally organized threats, they must become populated by those who have witnessed the power of horizontal thinking. CIMIC operations thus prepare future `bureaucrats' to create government networks capable of managing the triple threat of terrorism, insurgency and organized crime     

A1 Qaeda and the radical Islamic challenge to western strategy

The September 11 global crisis prompted by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon raises major questions concerning the nature and trajectory of terrorism in the post-Cold War global order. Hitherto, terrorism has been largely debated by analysts at the level of nation states. Terrorist and insurgent movements have also been largely anchored in nationalist and ethnic power bases even when they have sought to mobilise a transnational ideological appeal on religious or class grounds. There have been a few exceptions to this pattern such as the alliance between the German Baader-Meinhof group and the Japanese Red Army Faction, but even such international alliances as this did not, until at least the 1980s, presage anything like a global terrorist network necessitating a global strategic response. This study examines terrorism and global strategic responses.     

The March of the Lord's Resistance Army: Greed or Grievance in Northern Uganda?

This article addresses the form and nature of an insurgency in Northern Uganda that has been active since the mid-1980s. The insurgency movement itself grew out of an internal breakdown in security lasting over several years, during which ethnicity played a critical part in defining access to power and resources within Uganda. The recent explosion of literature relating to conflict inside Sub-Saharan Africa outlines several different analytical approaches to violence. One of the most recent and influential has been that of examining greed rather than grievance as the main driver behind conflict. This articl looks at the evolution of warfare in Northern Uganda over 15 years and puts the argument that greed and grievance are not mutually exclusive in this situation and it is the interaction between the two that provides the impetus for continued violence.