Problems in life cycle support cost estimation

Although industry is expected to design hardware to fit into a general support system and to be capable of arguing life-cycle system costs, adequate information has not been available on the support system in terms of policies and operating decision rules. Policies and operating decisions by users dominate engineering design decisions in determining life-cycle support costs. The relative effect of each of these decision areas on support costs has yet to be resolved empirically. Without an understanding of the sensitivity of support costs to alternative designs, capability is limited in design improvement and support of end items. Life-cycle costing of analysis under cost-effectiveness and the maintainability of integrated logistics support is open to question.     

Resourcing for defense: Solving the roles and missions puzzle

One of the most important issues facing the post‐Cold War U.S. defense establishment concerns the future allocation of combat tasks and responsibilities among different branches of the armed forces. The challenge is to reduce unnecessary redundancy across roles and missions when resources are highly constrained, without compromising military effectiveness. Defining the policy problem as one of resource allocation rather than operational effectiveness, we develop a methodology for allocating roles and missions. Our methodology focuses at the highest level of force aggregation and uses a mathematical programming model to produce cross‐service cross‐mission trade‐offs that will yield the best total force combat and non‐combat potential within resource consumption constraints.     

Do Democracies Support Violent Non-governmental Organizations Less Than Autocracies Do?

This study draws attention to the question: Do democracies fight indirectly through material support to violent non-governmental organizations (VNGOs) which wage intrastate war against other states in general and against democracies in particular, or are democracies less warlike by proxy? The main conclusions are: democracies are less warlike by proxy than non-democratic states, and the more democratic the regime the lower the probability that it will support VNGOs waging war against other states, both in general and against other democracies in particular. The results do not unequivocally support both the monadic or dyadic argument of democratic peaceful behaviour     

Democracy for the rescue—of dictators? The role of regime type in civil war interventions

Intrastate conflicts, long eclipsing interstate conflicts, are often internationalized. This paper examines internationalized intrastate conflicts through the types of both the intervening and the embattled regimes. Do democracies, more or less than autocracies, support autocratic governments in their fights against rebels? This paper tests three hypotheses: (1) democracies support autocrats fighting rebels less than autocracies do. (2) Democracies support democratic governments fighting against rebels more than autocracies do. (3) The more democratic two states are, the higher the probability one would support the other’s fight against rebels. Covering all documented external support in intrastate wars (1975–2000), our findings support hypothesis one and two only partly and confirm hypothesis three. However, comparing the two major accounts of the Democratic Peace theory (DPT)—the normative and the structural—our findings corroborate only the former robustly. The paper thus helps enriching the insights of the DPT beyond interstate conflicts.