Tipping the scales: short-term interventions and counterinsurgency

Particularly in African operations, United Nations (UN) peacekeeping forces have faced significant problems in restoring stability. In at least a few situations, unilateral national military interventions have been launched in the same countries. In the cases of Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire, the British and French interventions respectively played a significant role in re-establishing stability. Lessons from these operations suggest that if effective coordination and liaison channels are established, such hybrid unilateral-UN missions can in fact be more successful than “pure” peace operations.     

Book reviews

Red Banner: the Soviet Military System in Peace and War. By Christopher Donnelly. Jane's Information Group, Coulsdon, UK (1988), 288 pp., £35.00

Images of T. E. Lawrence. By S. E. Tabachnick and C. Matheson. Jonathan Cape, London (1988); The Letters of T. E. Lawrence. Edited by Malcolm Brown. Dent, London (1988); T. E. Lawrence. By J. Wilson. National Portrait Gallery Publications, London (1988); Lawrence and the Arab Revolts. By D. Nicolle. Osprey, London (1989)

Liddell Hart and the Weight of History. By John Mearsheimer. Brassey's, London (1989), £15.95

Science and Mythology in the Making of Defence Policy. Edited by Margaret Blunden and Owen Greene. Brassey's, London (1989), £27.50/$44.00

Warfare in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Colin McInnes and G. D. Sheffield. Unwin Hyman, London (1988), 239 pp., £25.00     

Landmarks in defense literature

The Face of Battle: by John Keegan. Jonathan Cape, London, 1976; Viking Press, New York, 1976; Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1978, 1983, 1984.     

Untruthful probabilistic demand forecasts in vendor‐managed revenue‐sharing contracts: Coordinating the chain

Vendor‐managed revenue‐sharing arrangements are common in the newspaper and other industries. Under such arrangements, the supplier decides on the level of inventory while the retailer effectively operates under consignment, sharing the sales revenue with his supplier. We consider the case where the supplier is unable to predict demand, and must base her decisions on the retailer‐supplied probabilistic forecast for demand. We show that the retailer's best choice of a distribution to report to his supplier will not be the true demand distribution, but instead will be a degenerate distribution that surprisingly induces the supplier to provide the system‐optimal inventory quantity. (To maintain credibility, the retailer's reports of daily sales must then be consistent with his supplied forecast.) This result is robust under nonlinear production costs and nonlinear revenue‐sharing. However, if the retailer does not know the supplier's production cost, the forecast “improves” and could even be truthful. That, however, causes the supplier's order quantity to be suboptimal for the overall system. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007