How should modeling and simulation be used to support defense acquisition?

This paper investigates the potential for modeling and simulation to contribute to new defense system development, by increasing the productivity of traditional R&D in developing system‐specific technology. Building on a previous optimal control model of defense system R&D, it shows that (1) the optimal use of modeling is related in a natural way to that of traditional R&D, and (2) both have similar optimal profiles over time. Simulated results based on limited historical data suggest that optimal use of modeling could increase the rate of growth in system‐specific technology significantly.     

Defense Firms Adapting to Major Changes in the French R&D Funding System

The structural changes inside the French innovation system have impacted the role of defense firms since the late 1980s. Major changes have affected the defense budget and public R&D funding system in particular. The aim of this article is to understand French defense firms’ repositioning within the National Innovation System (NIS) based on an analysis of their R&D behavior over a long period of time (1987–2010). We show that French defense firms remain major players in the NIS and faced up to these major changes by adapting the funding of their R&D and their research priorities and rolling out new innovation capabilities. Additionally, they developed new innovation models to take advantage of new collaborative partnerships developed for civil and military markets.     

THE EFFECTS OF THE WORLD DEFENSE INDUSTRY AND US MILITARY AID TO ISRAEL ON THE ISRAELI DEFENSE INDUSTRY: A DIFFERENTIATED PRODUCTS MODEL

This paper models the interactions between the defense industry market structure and the defense needs of Israel, the USA and Western Europe, which produce several heterogeneous defense goods. The model specifies that the defense industries of the US and Europe are ‘large’ while that of Israel is ‘small’. The US military aid to Israel is also an integral part of the model. The results show that net defense costs of Israel are minimal when the number of its defense firms is one. The model predicts that an increase in US military aid reduces Israel’s government expenditure, its defense industry’s profits and its net defense costs.     

海边防阵地弹药储存包装防护初探

本文以海边防弹药的阵地储存为研究对象,在分析海边防环境特点的基础上,针对环境因素对弹药质量变化的影响,提出海边防弹药储存包装防护的技术措施和方案。     

THEORY AND APPLICATION TO THE US MILITARY

An ever‐growing share of defence R&D expenditures is being dedicated to the development and fielding of integrative technologies that enable separate individual systems to work in a coordinated and synergistic fashion as a single system. This study explores the optimal defence budget allocation to the development and acquisition of weapon systems and to the development of integrative technologies. We develop a suitable optimization framework, and then use it to derive the optimal budget allocation and analyse its properties. Finally, we use US defence budget data to calibrate the parameters of the model and provide a quantitative measure for the apparent US military supremacy.     

Balancing and optimizing a portfolio of R&D projects

A mathematical formulation of an optimization model designed to select projects for inclusion in an R&D portfolio, subject to a wide variety of constraints (e.g., capital, headcount, strategic intent, etc.), is presented. The model is similar to others that have previously appeared in the literature and is in the form of a mixed integer programming (MIP) problem known as the multidimensional knapsack problem. Exact solution of such problems is generally difficult, but can be accomplished in reasonable time using specialized algorithms. The main contribution of this paper is an examination of two important issues related to formulation of project selection models such as the one presented here. If partial funding and implementation of projects is allowed, the resulting formulation is a linear programming (LP) problem which can be solved quite easily. Several plausible assumptions about how partial funding impacts project value are presented. In general, our examples suggest that the problem might best be formulated as a nonlinear programming (NLP) problem, but that there is a need for further research to determine an appropriate expression for the value of a partially funded project. In light of that gap in the current body of knowledge and for practical reasons, the LP relaxation of this model is preferred. The LP relaxation can be implemented in a spreadsheet (even for relatively large problems) and gives reasonable results when applied to a test problem based on GM's R&D project selection process. There has been much discussion in the literature on the topic of assigning a quantitative measure of value to each project. Although many alternatives are suggested, no one way is universally accepted as the preferred way. There does seem to be general agreement that all of the proposed methods are subject to considerable uncertainty. A systematic way to examine the sensitivity of project selection decisions to variations in the measure of value is developed. It is shown that the solution for the illustrative problem is reasonably robust to rather large variations in the measure of value. We cannot, however, conclude that this would be the case in general. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 48: 18–40, 2001     

Defence R&D expenditure: The crowding-out hypothesis

The impact of defence expenditure on the economy has been widely studied through different types of models. However, the results from these studies have not reached definitive conclusions, and have left a gap in the analysis of the impact of defence R&D expenditure at the economy level. Defence R&D has specific characteristics, which lead to market failures: public good, high risk and uncertainty, national security. Also, defence R&D creates two types of externalities: negative (crowding-out), and positive (spin-off). Crowding-out is the major economic debate about defence R&D. This paper analyses the crowding-out hypothesis by applying three types of models for the UK case: supply, demand, and demand-supply models. From these three models the most reliable is chosen and applied to the individual cases of France, Germany, Japan and USA. The paper also reports the results for the pooled data of these five countries, and for four error component models. The results from estimating such models shed light on the defence R&D crowding-out hypothesis.     

What Is Known About Defence Research And Development Spill-Overs?

This article surveys the body of available evidence regarding the spill-over effects of defence R&D. It reviews the routes through which defence R&D spills over to the economy with positive externalities – in terms of new products, technologies or processes; the barriers that impede or block such a process; potential negative repercussions, and the measure of such effects. The main conclusion is that the uncertainty of these effects, and the inaccurate appraisal of their value, hardly supports informed decisions concerning defence R&D policies.     

DETERMINING THE DEFENCE INDUSTRIAL BASE

This paper models the determination of the defence industrial base – the number of different military systems a country decides to maintain. High R&D costs means that few countries can afford to produce major weapons systems and the producers also import systems. Non‐producers rely on imports and we assume their demand is driven by regional arms races. Military capability is determined by the number of systems and the quantity and quality of each. We examine how the defence industrial base is influenced by military expenditures, R&D costs, export controls, the nature of regional arms races and a variety of other factors.     

Benders decomposition with alternative multiple cuts for a multi‐product closed‐loop supply chain network design model

In this article, we consider a multi‐product closed‐loop supply chain network design problem where we locate collection centers and remanufacturing facilities while coordinating the forward and reverse flows in the network so as to minimize the processing, transportation, and fixed location costs. The problem of interest is motivated by the practice of an original equipment manufacturer in the automotive industry that provides service parts for vehicle maintenance and repair. We provide an effective problem formulation that is amenable to efficient Benders reformulation and an exact solution approach. More specifically, we develop an efficient dual solution approach to generate strong Benders cuts, and, in addition to the classical single Benders cut approach, we propose three different approaches for adding multiple Benders cuts. These cuts are obtained via dual problem disaggregation based either on the forward and reverse flows, or the products, or both. We present computational results which illustrate the superior performance of the proposed solution methodology with multiple Benders cuts in comparison to the branch‐and‐cut approach as well as the traditional Benders decomposition approach with a single cut. In particular, we observe that the use of multiple Benders cuts generates stronger lower bounds and promotes faster convergence to optimality. We also observe that if the model parameters are such that the different costs are not balanced, but, rather, are biased towards one of the major cost categories (processing, transportation or fixed location costs), the time required to obtain the optimal solution decreases considerably when using the proposed solution methodology as well as the branch‐and‐cut approach. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007     

STRATEGIC DEFENSE AND ATTACK FOR SERIES AND PARALLEL RELIABILITY SYSTEMS: COMMENT

The contest-theoretic literature on the attack and defense of networks of targets focuses primarily on pure-strategy Nash equilibria. Hausken's 2008 European Journal of Operational Research article typifies this approach, and many of the models in this literature either build upon this model or utilize similar techniques. We show that Hausken's characterization of Nash equilibrium is invalid for much of the parameter space examined and provides necessary conditions for his solution to hold. The complete characterization of mixed-strategy equilibria remains an open problem, although there exist solutions in the literature for special prominent cases.     

战术弹道导弹的性能推测及仿真实现

在弹道导弹防御系统性能分析中,战术弹道导弹进攻的威胁特性分析是一个比较重要的环节。为了对战术弹道导弹的威胁特性进行有效地分析,开展战术弹道导弹的性能推测和仿真是十分必要的。讨论了战术弹道导弹性能推测及导弹仿真的实现方法。     

Economic Espionage

We explore the efficacy of counterespionage measures in the realm of Economic Espionage. Although it is possible that increasing counterespionage measures has the desired effect of increasing domestic research and development (R&D) and reducing espionage by foreign entities, it is also possible that these increased measures actually do just the opposite: domestic R&D suffers and foreign stealing increases. We identify the appropriate settings for increased counterespionage measures and provide some policy advice.     

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.     

Resource allocation in an asymmetric technology race with temporary advantages

We consider two opponents that compete in developing asymmetric technologies where each party's technology is aimed at damaging (or neutralizing) the other's technology. The situation we consider is different than the classical problem of commercial R&D races in two ways: First, while in commercial R&D races the competitors compete over the control of market share, in our case the competition is about the effectiveness of technologies with respect to certain capabilities. Second, in contrast with the “winner‐takes‐all” assumption that characterizes much of the literature on this field in the commercial world, we assume that the party that wins the race gains a temporary advantage that expires when the other party develops a superior technology. We formulate a variety of models that apply to a one‐sided situation, where one of the two parties has to determine how much to invest in developing a technology to counter another technology employed by the other party. The decision problems are expressed as (convex) nonlinear optimization problems. We present an application that provides some operational insights regarding optimal resource allocation. We also consider a two‐sided situation and develop a Nash equilibrium solution that sets investment values, so that both parties have no incentive to change their investments. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 59: 128–145, 2012     

野战防空C~3I与防空兵作战指挥控制

陆军防空兵自动化指挥系统已作为防空作战效能“倍增器”列入国家军装武器发展规划,并在近期可能交付防空部队使用。这一新装备、新技术的出现和发展必然会引起防空作战指挥的变化。在分析防空兵指挥自动化对防空作战指挥影响的基础上,对如何发挥防空兵自动化指挥的防空作战效能和防空兵指挥自动化需迫切解决的一些问题加以探讨。     

Incomplete contracting and target‐cost pricing

Procurement of advanced technology defence equipment requires appropriate contractual arrangements to achieve efficient R&D investments. This paper analyses the optimality of target‐cost and fixed price contracts and shows that target‐cost pricing can achieve a first best where both fixed‐price contracts and cost reimbursement fail to do so. The main message of this paper is that in incomplete contracting optimality may sometimes be achieved by arrangements which combine several formulae which, individually, would fail to achieve efficiency.     

美军语言智能处理技术的发展策略与启示

发展语言智能处理技术是全球新军事科技研发的重要趋势。美军在几十年的发展过程中,不遗余力地推进新的语言智能技术的研发与应用。在人工智能宏观政策和举措的带动下,美国政府与军方在语言智能领域采取了较为清晰的战略路线:明确需求方向,注重长远规划;重视军民融合,调动地方研发活力;创新技术研发资金的管理模式,提高发展效率;推动技术在关键领域的应用,加快美军战斗力的形成。本文认为,面对这一趋势,我们需要深度布局国防语言智能处理技术战略,重视面向未来需求的长远规划;充分调动语言智能处理技术研发的"民间力量",注重军产学研的协同创新;建立科学适度的项目研发机制,加快颠覆性技术的战斗力转化。     

An error components model of cost overruns and schedule slip on army R&D programs

What has been causing cost overruns and schedule slippages in Army major weapon-system R&D programs during the past ten years? This article addresses this question with emphasis on the effectiveness of an Army acquisition strategy entitled Total Risk Assessing Cost Estimating (TRACE). An empirical study employed a questionnaire and interviews with key personnel from all of the major Army Program Management Offices involved with R&D. The major research question was the following: What explanatory variables have been affecting R&D cost overruns and development time? This includes an evaluation of TRACE as a potential explanatory variable. Data was collected and analyzed using an error components multiple regression model. The major explanatory variables that appeared to explain cost overruns were technological risk of the program, education and experience of key program management office personnel, and the degree of “buy in” by the prime contractor. Strong statistical results indicate that TRACE is having little or no effect on cost overruns. In the case of development time, the major explanatory variables were seen to be technological risk of the program, testing, TRACE, education, and length of the R&D contract.     

用于任务规划的航母编队防空威胁建模

建立正确的航母编队防空威胁模型是反航母任务规划成功的前提,在分析网络化条件下航母编队综合防空反导体系作战特点基础上,综合考虑反舰导弹性能、防空雷达网和编队防空火力威胁等因素,利用加权指数方法建立了网络化条件下航母编队综合防空网络威胁模型。仿真结果表明该模型能够体现航母网络化防空体系的真实情况,可以用于反航母任务规划。