STRATEGY FOR A NEW NUCLEAR AGE

Current U.S. nuclear weapons strategy, force structure, and doctrine contribute to the threat of nuclear terrorism in several ways. First, the U.S. nuclear stockpile presents opportunities for nuclear terrorists to seize the materials they need. Second, U.S. nuclear forces remain a key justification for Russia's maintenance of similar nuclear forces that are less well protected. Third, America's continued embrace of nuclear weapons encourages and legitimizes other states to seek nuclear weapons that they will have difficulty securing from terrorists. The national security interests of the United States would be better served by a strategy to shrink the global footprint of nuclear weapons and provide the highest possible levels of security for the most minimal possible deterrent forces. Given the inability to secure nuclear weapons and materials perfectly or to eliminate terrorism in the foreseeable future, reducing the global inventory of nuclear weapons and materials is the most reliable way to reduce the chances of nuclear terrorism.     

Learning in counterinsurgency: what do we really know?

Since the publication in 2002 of John Nagl's Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, organizational learning has been widely presumed an important ingredient for success in counterinsurgency. But sampling the literature from before and after this time shows remarkably little analytical treatment of the issue of learning and even confusion over what it may mean. This article considers the theories, hypotheses, research strategies, threats to validity, methods of measurement, treatments of time, and general lack of statistical analysis in the work to date and recommends a course for future research.     

How and why Boko Haram blossomed: examining the fatal consequences of treating a purposive terrorist organisation as less so

Boko Haram (BH) is an insurgent group that operates mainly in northeastern Nigeria. Its stated aim is to establish an Islamic state, and it employs terrorism as its strategy. Earlier interests of security analysts centred on the drivers of BH uprising and the possibility of its internationalisation. Today's concerns relate more to why the rebellion has lasted this long. In toeing the same line, this article demonstrates that BH is a purposive terror group against which the government has evolved no viable strategy. It examines some gains of BH over the past six years and how it benefitted from the government's underestimation of its capacity and determination. It concludes that to effectively engage BH, the Nigerian government must revaluate its threat and sincerely pursue an expanded strategy beyond the current military-centric approach. To be effective, government's response must be packaged in such a way as to enhance human security in the region.     

A branch and bound algorithm for computing optimal replacement policies in consecutive k‐out‐of‐n‐systems

This paper presents a branch and bound algorithm for computing optimal replacement policies in a discrete‐time, infinite‐horizon, dynamic programming model of a binary coherent system with n statistically independent components, and then specializes the algorithm to consecutive k‐out‐of‐n systems. The objective is to minimize the long‐run expected average undiscounted cost per period. (Costs arise when the system fails and when failed components are replaced.) An earlier paper established the optimality of following a critical component policy (CCP), i.e., a policy specified by a critical component set and the rule: Replace a component if and only if it is failed and in the critical component set. Computing an optimal CCP is a optimization problem with n binary variables and a nonlinear objective function. Our branch and bound algorithm for solving this problem has memory storage requirement O(n) for consecutive k‐out‐of‐n systems. Extensive computational experiments on such systems involving over 350,000 test problems with n ranging from 10 to 150 find this algorithm to be effective when n ≤ 40 or k is near n. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 49: 288–302, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/nav.10017