The art of meddling: a theoretical,strategic and historical analysis of non-official covers for clandestine Humint

The building of reliable covers has always been of the utmost importance for clandestine Humint. Using both primary and secondary sources, this study seeks to examine how classical authors and modern scholars have dealt with this topic, and which kind of covers have been the most used throughout history in different sociopolitical contexts, and what are the new perspectives for today’s challenges. Findings suggest that a careful reading of the political milieu in which intelligence officers are required to work, and a certain degree of creativity, are the essential premises for the construction of a plausible cover; that some apparently outdated disguises such as merchants, itinerant monks and philosophers should be understood more broadly today to include business people, humanitarian NGOs and academics; that undercover practices have been theoretically and historically recognized as necessary and convenient by a great number of societies, often with scant regard for ethical considerations.     

Minimizing makespan in a multimode multiprocessor shop scheduling problem

We study the problem of multimode scheduling tasks on dedicated processors, with the objective of minimizing the maximum completion time. Each task can be undertaken in one among a set of predefined alternative modes, where each mode specifies a required set of dedicated processors and a processing time. At any time each processor can be used by a single task at most. General precedence constraints exist among tasks, and task preemption is not allowed. The problem consists of assigning a mode and a starting time to each task, respecting processor and precedence constraints, to minimize the time required to complete all tasks. The problem is NP-hard in several particular cases. In previous works, we studied algorithms in which a solution was obtained by means of an iterative procedure that combines mode assignment and sequencing phases separately. In this paper, we present some new heuristics where the decision on the mode assignment is taken on the basis of a partial schedule. Then, for each task, the mode selection and the starting time are chosen simultaneously considering the current processor usage. Different lower bounds are derived from a mathematical formulation of the problem and from a graph representation of a particular relaxed version of the problem. Heuristic solutions and lower bounds are evaluated on randomly generated test problems. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 46: 893–911, 1999     

Controlling Novichoks after Salisbury: revising the Chemical Weapons Convention schedules

ABSTRACT

Novichok agents are a class of nerve agents developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In light of the use of a Novichok agent in Salisbury in March 2018, two sets of proposals to amend Schedule 1 of the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) have been put forth, one jointly by the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands, and the other by Russia. Both sets of proposals will be discussed and voted upon at the next Conference of States Parties of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in November 2019. If either set of proposals is approved, it will be the first time that the list of chemicals subject to verification under the CWC will have been modified. This viewpoint will discuss these proposals, and argue that, if adopted, the joint proposal and the portions of the Russian proposal upon which consensus can be reached would significantly strengthen the CWC by considerably expanding the coverage of its Schedule 1 and bringing Novichok agents firmly within the CWC’s verification system. We also argue that, since the OPCW Technical Secretariat did not deem the fifth group of chemicals proposed by Russia to meet the criteria for inclusion in Schedule 1, Russia should withdraw this part of its proposal from consideration. The proposals have also served an important purpose in clarifying the identity of the chemical agent used in the Salisbury incident, squarely placing it within one of the two families of Novichok agents described by the Russian chemical-weapons scientist and whistleblower Vil Mirzayanov. If either proposal is approved in November, it will be important to conduct a thorough assessment of key precursors for the synthesis of Novichok agents and assess the need to amend CWC schedules and national and multinational export-control lists accordingly.     

Pragmatism over principle: US intervention and burden shifting in Somalia, 1992–1993

ABSTRACT

The conventional wisdom about the 1992 US intervention in Somalia is that it was a quintessentially humanitarian mission pushed by President George H. W. Bush. This article challenges that interpretation, drawing on newly declassified documents. The Somalia intervention, I argue, was largely a pragmatic response to concerns held by the US military. In late 1992, as the small UN mission in Somalia was collapsing, senior American generals worried about being drawn into the resulting vacuum. Hence they reluctantly recommended a robust US intervention, in the expectation that this would allow the UN to assemble a larger peacekeeping force that would take over within months. The intervention ultimately failed, but the military learned useful lessons from this experience on how to achieve smoother UN handoffs in the future and thus effectively shift longer-term stabilisation burdens to the international community.