“Effing” the military: a political misunderstanding of management

The use of commercial business management techniques is widespread in all government departments, including the Ministry of Defence. This article examines the use of popular management techniques in the Armed Forces and argues that their application is misplaced. It looks at what the “effs” – “efficiency” and “effectiveness” – mean in the business world and to the Armed Forces. It compares the definitions both in business and the Armed Forces and finds that there are few, if any, situations where the same measurements can be applied. Whilst many management techniques are suited for business, the function of the Armed Forces and its output cannot be measured in the same way, complicated by the different metrics of “efficiency” in peace and in war. This difference may not be clearly understood by some politicians, or indeed by some senior military personnel. Using examples from some of the most popular management techniques such as “Lean” and “Agile” it is possible to see that their use might actually diminish the capabilities of the Armed Forces when it comes to performing their principal role – the use of force to achieve political objectives.     

Defence and firm performance in the UK

The UK Ministry of Defence is British industry's largest single customer and a number of firms and industries are highly dependent on defence sales. Various hypotheses have been proposed about the impact of defence procurement on firms and these are investigated using four performance indicators: financial structure, investment, productivity and profitability. With regard to the borrowing ratio, capital investment and the rate of return, there is no statistically significant difference between the mean financial ratios for low and high dependence firms. However, non‐dependents appear to have a higher level and rate of growth of labour productivity than dependents.     

Command and Control of India's Nuclear Forces

The Indian government has not made a public comment about the status of its nuclear weapon program since approving a nuclear doctrine in 2003. However, there is now enough information in the public domain to determine that the command-and-control system for the nuclear program has steadily matured in accordance with the intent of the approved nuclear doctrine. The Indian government has successfully mitigated many of the issues that plague the conventional military. The result is a basic command-and-control system that is focused only on the delivery, if ordered by the prime minister, of nuclear weapons. The system is not as robust as those of the United States and Russia, but is in place and ready as new Indian nuclear weapons enter into operation. The command-and-control system is developing to meet India's needs and political compulsions, but not necessarily as part of a more assertive nuclear policy.     

Probabilistic formulations of the multifacility weber problem

The problem considered is to locate one or more new facilities relative to a number of existing facilities when both the locations of the existing facilities, the weights between new facilities, and the weights between new and existing facilities are random variables. The new facilities are to be located such that expected distance traveled is minimized. Euclidean distance measure is considered; both unconstrained and chance-constrained formulations are treated.     

Bounds on optimal cost for a replacement problem with partial observations

This paper characterizes the structure of optimal strategies for a replacement problem for two special cases of observation quality. It is shown that when the state of the system is either completely observed or completely unobserved at every decision epoch by the controller, reasonable assumptions are sufficient for the existence of optimal replacement strategies composed of policies having a generalized, control-limit form. These structural results are of particular interest since the optimal cost functions for the two special cases represent bounds on the optimal cost function for the general partially observed case, significant computational simplification can result for the two special cases due to their optimal strategy structure, and optimal strategies possessing a control-limit structure do not necessarily exist for the general partially observed case.     

Another manifestation of cyber conflict: attaining military objectives through cyber avenues of approach

Cyberspace is an avenue of approach through which a military force can attain objectives of value. Through these cyber avenues of approach, military forces can engage, vet, organize, and direct human agents to accomplish specific activities. Although the objectives of these activities could differ from traditional military objectives, they still have military relevance. This particular manifestation of cyber conflict is neither a new domain of war nor something outside of warfare. Rather, it can be viewed as an emerging avenue of approach in the larger context of military operations, auguring benefits in the integration of cyber activities with operations.