Counterinsurgency Challenge in Post-2001 Afghanistan

Although the Taliban insurgency was internally divided and unable to coordinate its activities in 2014–2015, the Afghan security forces were not able to contain it and steadily lost ground throughout 2015. Until 2015, there had been little effort to develop an indigenous Afghan counterinsurgency strategy, but a sense of urgency emerged after a string of Taliban victories. At the beginning of 2016, it was still not clear if and when the National Unity Government would be able to produce a counterinsurgency strategy and, in any case, the need for a coherent counterinsurgency approach became questionable as the Taliban appeared to be transitioning towards conventional warfare.     

Auxiliary Force or National Army? Afghanistan's ‘ANA’ and the Counter-Insurgency Effort, 2002–2006

Afghanistan's fifth effort to form a central army started in 2002, following the fall of the Taleban regime. Mainly run by the US armed forces, the formation of the so-called ‘Afghan National Army’ run into several difficulties, ranging from initially slow recruitment, low educational level of troops and officers, high attrition rates. As the new army began to take shape, it lacked many of the characteristics which had been associated by the promoters with a ‘national’ army. It also showed a low level of commitment and a lax discipline. As of 2006, it looked more like an auxiliary force at the service of the US army and its allies than like a ‘national’ army.     

Transformations of node‐balanced routing problems

This article describes a polynomial transformation for a class of unit‐demand vehicle routing problems, named node‐balanced routing problems (BRP), where the number of nodes on each route is restricted to be in an interval such that the workload across the routes is balanced. The transformation is general in that it can be applied to single or multiple depot, homogeneous or heterogeneous fleet BRPs, and any combination thereof. At the heart of the procedure lies transforming the BRP into a generalized traveling salesman problem (TSP), which can then be transformed into a TSP. The transformed graph exhibits special properties which can be exploited to significantly reduce the number of arcs, and used to construct a formulation for the resulting TSP that amounts to no more than that of a constrained assignment problem. Computational results on a number of instances are presented. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 62: 370–387, 2015     

The Taliban's ‘military courts’

The Taliban's ‘code of conduct’, which lists rules of discipline for the fighters, has been widely discussed, but do the Taliban try to implement it? This article discusses the structures that the Taliban have put in place for this purpose and their evolution over the years. It assesses that while the Taliban's ‘military justice’ system is still work in progress, the fact that it has attracted a significant investment in human resources bears witness to a serious intent of the leadership. However, the Taliban's concern with the behaviour of their fighting force is driven by their own political calculus, not by any sympathy for the international law of conflict.     

Improving series and parallel systems through mixtures of duplicated dependent components

We discuss suitable conditions such that the lifetime of a series or of a parallel system formed by two components having nonindependent lifetimes may be stochastically improved by replacing the lifetimes of each of the components by an independent mixture of the individual components' lifetimes. We also characterize the classes of bivariate distributions where this phenomenon arises through a new weak dependence notion. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2011     

EFFECTS OF MILITARY SPENDING ON THE PROFITABILITY OF SPANISH DEFENCE CONTRACTORS

The traditional view of the defence industry obtaining large profits from contracts with the Ministry of Defence relies on several assumptions. Among these are the use of such arrangements as an instrument of industrial policy, the strong market power enjoyed by prime contractors, and the inefficiency encouraged by the sector. The findings show that defence contracts have a positive effect on profits, as well as the prizes for innovation and the market power enjoyed by some defence subsectors.     

A PRODUCTIVITY AND EFFICIENCY ANALYSIS OF THE SECURITY AND DEFENCE TECHNOLOGICAL AND INDUSTRIAL BASE IN SPAIN

This study analyses the performance of the productivity of the main industrial subsectors composing the security and defence technological and industrial base (SDTIB) in Spain from 1996 to 2009. Accordingly, we have used the non-parametric data envelopment analysis and bootstrapping techniques to compute Malmquist productivity indexes that allow us to split productivity growth into efficiency change and technical progress. The results obtained show productivity improvement in the SDTIB as a whole due mainly to advances in technology and to a lesser extent to the contribution of technical efficiency. The bootstrap approach yields further evidence, as for many cases, productivity growth or decline, is not statistically significant. This is the first time a study of this kind has been carried out on the production process of this sector in Spain.     

Dynamic necking of a near α titanium alloy at high strain rates:Experiments and modelling

The tensile behaviour of near α Ti3Al2.5 V alloy, conceived for applications in aerospace and automotive engineering, is characterized from quasi-static to high strain rates. The material is found to present noticeable strain rate sensitivity. The dynamic true strain rate in the necking cross-section reaches values up to ten times higher than the nominal strain rate. It is also observed that beyond necking the dynamic true stress-strain curves present limited rate dependence. The experimental results at different strain rates are used to determine a suitable constitutive model for finite element simulations of the dynamic tensile tests. The model predicts the experimentally macroscopic force-time response, true stress-strain response and effective strain rate evolution with good agreement.