The practice of strategy: South African defence in stasis

The article concerns the strategy development processes of the South African Department of Defence in South Africa. It intends to identify the probable causes of the observed failure of the South African National Defence Force to develop appropriate departmental policy and military strategy. Military strategy comprises force development, force employment, force deployment and the coordination of these elements in pursuit of national, grand-strategic objectives. (See Dennis M. Drew and Donald M. Snow, Making Twenty-first Century Strategy: An Introduction to Modern National Security Processes and Problems Montgomery, AL: Air University Press, Maxwell Air Force Base, November 2006, 103). Of these four constructs, the article concerns itself only with the first two. The article analyses two complementary approaches to strategy formation: a resource-driven, inside-out model and an interests-driven, outside-in method. The article concludes that the Department is preoccupied with the inside-out method to the lasting detriment of the declared strategic intent of the defence policy.     

The winds of change: the transition from armed forces for peace to new missions for the Bundeswehr and its impact on civil–military relations

The debate on the civil–military gap and especially the TISS findings are viewed with a focus on Germany. After outlining the historical development of civil–military relations, the question of a civil–military gap is explored with data from 2001. The study finds similarities and differences in the attitudes of the civilian and the military population on several issues. Overall, there is a broad overlap of attitudes, yet differences do exist, especially on issues of foreign policy and things military. It is argued that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, civil–military relations in Germany are largely uncontested, but will become more strained.     

Exponential size neighborhoods for makespan minimization scheduling

We investigate the quality of local search heuristics for the scheduling problem of minimizing the makespan on identical parallel machines. We study exponential size neighborhoods (whose size grows exponentially with the input length) that can be searched in polynomial time, and we derive worst‐case approximation guarantees for the local optima of such neighborhoods. The so‐called split neighborhood splits a feasible schedule into two layers, and then recombines the two layers by finding a perfect matching. We show that the makespan of every local optimum for split is at most a factor of 2 away from the globally optimal makespan. We then combine the split neighborhood with two neighborhoods from the literature. The combination of split with the jump neighborhood only marginally improves the approximation guarantee, whereas the combination with the lexicographic‐jump neighborhood decreases the approximation guarantee from 2 to 3/2. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2011     

Distribution of number of point targets killed and higher moments of coverage of area targets

The coverage C of area targets by salvos of weapons generally varies randomly, because of random target location and weapon impact point fluctuations. A third source of variation appears when, instead of an area target, a multiple-element target is considered, consisting of m point targets distributed randomly and independently of one another around the target center. A multiple-integral expression is derived for the probability p_k of killing exactly k target elements. It is shown that p_k is a linear function of the higher moments, of the order k to m, of the area coverage C. More explicit expressions are derived for the case of two weapons and for circular-symmetric functions. Similar to well-known results for the expectation and variance of coverage of area targets, these expressions can be evaluated by numerical quadrature. Furthermore, the coverage problem in which all underlying functions are Gaussian can be completely solved in closed form. For such a problem, with two weapons, numerical results are presented. They show that the distribution of k can be approximated by a binomial distribution only if the target center and weapon impact point fluctuations are small.     

A non‐linear defence‐growth nexus? evidence from the US economy

The defense‐growth nexus is investigated empirically using time series data for the US and allowing the effect of defense spending on growth to be non‐linear. Using recently developed econometric methods involving threshold regressions, evidence of a level‐dependent effect of military expenditure on GDP growth is found: the positive externality effect of defense spending prevails for relatively lower levels of defense spending (with respect to the history of defense spending in the US) and reverts its influence for higher levels.     

The variance of the coverage of a randomly located area target by a salvo of weapons

We derive formulas for the variance of that proportion of the value of a randomly located, circularly symmetric area target that is destroyed by N independently fired weapons of identical type whose damage functions are circularly symmetric about the respective impact points. The probability density functions of the target center location and of the weapon impact points are also circularly symmetric. The general results are specialized to uniform and Gaussian functions. In the latter case a closed-form solution (triple integral) for the variance of the coverage is derived. Similar to some well-known results on expected coverage, this expression for the variance of the coverage can be easily evaluated by numerical quadrature. Numerical results are given which indicate the target coverage variability caused by the combined effects of random target-locating errors and weapon impact point fluctuations.