Deterrence Beyond Downunder: Australia and US Security Guarantees since 1955

ABSTRACT

From 1944 to 1973 Australia attempted to acquire atomic weaponry. This ambition was driven by the desire to contribute to defending British interests in Asia, fears of invasion by China, Indonesia, and Japan, great-power war, and the belief that nuclear weapons were merely bigger and better conventional weapons, that they would proliferate, and that US security assurances lacked credibility. Although the pursuit of the bomb was eventually abandoned, this was not the result of US assurances. Rather, geopolitical changes in Australia’s environment meant that a major attack on the continent was unlikely to occur outside the context of a confrontation between the US, China, and the Soviet Union. This article argues that Australia may soon have to rethink its policies towards US extended deterrence and instead focus on developing its own deterrent.     

A replacement schedule for multicomponent life-limited parts

In previous papers [1], [2] the authors developed a maintenance policy for a single life-limited part. Using an opportunistic replacement approach a scheme was devised which utilized early replacement of equipment to offset more costly future expenditures. This paper will extend the results to the multicomponent case. Examples are given illustrating the benefits of this new technique.     

A modified block replacement policy

A well known preventive replacement policy is the block replacement policy (BRP). In such a policy the item undergoes a planned replacement at a sequence of equally spaced time points independent of failure history. The main advantage of a BRP is its simplicity, because under this policy it is unnecessary to keep detailed records about times of failures or ages of items. The main drawback of a BRP is that at planned replacement times we may be replacing practically new items. In this paper we study a modified BRP which is free of this drawback. We calculate the expected cost of following a modified BRP for lifetime distributions possessing a special structure and illustrate it for the case of an Erlang distribution. A numerical comparison is made between a modified BRP and a standard BRP for the special case of a two stage Erlang distribution.     

Missile Strategy in a Post-Nuclear Age

While the arrival of nuclear weapons coincided roughly with the development of short, medium, intermediate, and eventually intercontinental missiles, the contribution of missile technology to the deterrence equation is often lost. If nuclear weapons were eliminated, even new generation missiles with conventional payloads could struggle to render effective deterrence. But some of the physical and psychological effects commonly ascribed to nuclear weapons could still be in play. And in a world without nuclear weapons, thinking about the use and control of force from the nuclear age would also deserve renewed attention.     

WHO IS THE ENEMY?

We examine who benefits when there is a strong leader in place, and who benefits when a situation lacks a proper leader. There are fractious terrorist groups who seek to serve the same people in common cause against a common enemy. The groups compete for rents obtained from the public by engaging in actions against the common enemy. We determine the leadership structure under which each group is better off, as well as the circumstance that the common enemy prefers. We are able to state simple and general conditions for each group and the common enemy to benefit.     

A note on a modified block replacement policy for units with increasing marginal running costs

The model for a modified block replacement policy (MBRP) is extended to include running costs. An illustrative example is worked out for the case when item life is exponentially distributed and marginal running cost per unit time increases linearly with the age of the item.     

Multiple common due dates

Common due date problems have been extensively discussed in the scheduling literature. Initially, these problems discussed finding a common due date for a set of jobs on a single machine. These single machine problems were later extended to finding the common due date on a set of parallel machines. This paper further extends the single machine problem to finding multiple common due dates on a single machine. For a basic and important class of penalty functions, we show that this problem is comparable to the parallel machine problem. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 48: 293–298, 2001     

On online bin packing with LIB constraints

In many applications of packing, the location of small items below large items, inside the packed boxes, is forbidden. We consider a variant of the classic online one‐dimensional bin packing, in which items allocated to each bin are packed there in the order of arrival, satisfying the condition above. This variant is called online bin packing problem with LIB (larger item in the bottom) constraints. We give an improved analysis of First Fit showing that its competitive ratio is at most , and design a lower bound of 2 on the competitive ratio of any online algorithm. In addition, we study the competitive ratio of First Fit as a function of an upper bound (where d is a positive integer) on the item sizes. Our upper bound on the competitive ratio of First Fit tends to 2 as d grows, whereas the lower bound of two holds for any value of d. Finally, we consider several natural and well known algorithms, namely, Best Fit, Worst Fit, Almost Worst Fit, and Harmonic, and show that none of them has a finite competitive ratio for the problem. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2009