Improvise,adapt and fail to overcome? Capacity building,culture and exogenous change in Sierra Leone

Military capacity building (MCB) is as problematic as it is ubiquitous, with the British experience in Sierra Leone providing a rare example of ostensible success. This article critiques the dominant conceptualisation of MCB as purely a principal–agent (PA) problem, using military change scholarship to examine the impact of wartime British intervention on the Sierra Leonean armed forces. Here, indigenous military change was both externally driven and fundamentally adaptive in nature, allowing MCB to bypass some of the difficulties predicted by PA models. However, this adaptive approach nonetheless failed to reconcile Western military values with prevailing Sierra Leonean culture, complicating post-war stabilisation efforts.     

Defence expenditures and economic growth: The externality effect

In a series of articles published in the Fall 1990 issue of Defence Economics Alexander (1990), Atesoglu and Mueller (1990) and Huang and Mintz (1990) have all specified and empirically estimated defence‐growth models based on a neoclassical production function. We now isolate the externality component in our model, re‐estimate its coefficients using data on the U.S. economy 1952–88 and compare specifications and results with Atesoglu and Mueller (1990) and Alexander (1990).     

Managing Withdrawal: Afghanistan as the Forgotten Example in Attempting Conflict Resolution and State Reconstruction

Perhaps surprisingly, given the availability of new Russian memoir material, some excellent individual monographs, and a large variety of declassified documents, a full operational–political account of the Soviet Union's withdrawal strategy from Afghanistan has yet to be written. This article, utilising openly published yet neglected sources, attempts to fill that gap. The final fate of the Najibullah regime, and the contradictory effect of the National Reconciliation Policy in Afghanistan itself, suggests four key lessons for international forces today as disengagement from both Iraq and Afghanistan again becomes a pressing issue, and as questions around re-creating stability within a failed state scenario again occupy the international community.     

Evaluation of effectiveness of polymer coatings in reducing blast-induced deformation of steel plates

Incorporating elastomers such as polymers in protective structures to withstand high energetic dynamic loads, has gained significant interest. The main objective of this study is to investigate the influence of a Polyurea coating towards the blast-induced response in steel plates. As such, Polyurea coated steel plates were tested under near-field blast loads, produced by the detonation of 1 kg of spherical nitromethane charges, at a standoff distance of 150 mm. Mild steel (XLERPLATE 350) and high-strength steel (BIS80) plates with thicknesses of 10 mm were Polyurea coated with thicknesses of 6 mm and 12 mm on either the front (facing the charge) or the back face. The deformation profiles were measured using 3D scanning. Numerical simulations were performed using the non-linear finite element code LS-DYNA. The strain-dependent behaviour of the steel and Polyurea were represented by Johnson-cook and Money-Rivlin constitutive models, respectively. The numerical models were validated by comparing the plate deflection results obtained from the experiments and were then used in the subsequent parametric study to investigate the optimum thickness of the Polyurea coating. The results indicate that back face coating contributes towards an approximately 20% reduction in the residual deformation as well as the absence of melting of the Polyurea layer, while the front-face coating can be used a means of providing additional standoff distance to the steel plates.