Why do they serve? Changes and differences in motives of Danish soldiers deployed to peace-keeping and peace-enforcing missions

This paper investigates what motivates young people to volunteer for peace-keeping or peace-enforcing missions and how their motives change between pre- and post-deployment. Data include information about social and military background, and motives for more than 600 soldiers, 444 of whom answered the survey both before and after deployment. Soldiers are deployed to different missions under the same circumstances. To conceptualize motives among soldiers, we use factor analysis and find three factors: challenge, self-benefit, and fidelity. Challenge represents an occupational orientation; fidelity, an institutional orientation; and self-benefit, a desire for adventure. Exploiting the within-subject design of our data, we find that pre- and post-deployment motives vary significantly according to the type of mission and soldiers’ previous experiences (first-timers or experienced soldiers). Our results suggest that after the mission, peace-keepers are generally more disappointed than peace-enforcers. Our results also show that self-benefit motives are important for younger soldiers with only a high school education, and that this group usually serves as peace-enforcers during their gap year.     

Using Lagrangean relaxation to minimize the weighted number of late jobs on a single machine

This paper tackles the general single machine scheduling problem, where jobs have different release and due dates and the objective is to minimize the weighted number of late jobs. The notion of master sequence is first introduced, i.e., a sequence that contains at least an optimal sequence of jobs on time. This master sequence is used to derive an original mixed‐integer linear programming formulation. By relaxing some constraints, a Lagrangean relaxation algorithm is designed which gives both lower and upper bounds. The special case where jobs have equal weights is analyzed. Computational results are presented and, although the duality gap becomes larger with the number of jobs, it is possible to solve problems of more than 100 jobs. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 50: 2003     

Ideology,ballots, and alliances: Canadian participation in multinational military operations

The decision to employ force abroad is often a contentious political decision, where partisanship plays a crucial role. Prior to military intervention, political parties usually make their ideologically distinctive preferences clear and seek to implement them once in power. What remains unclear, however, is how ideology affects the decision to use military force. This article contends that alliance and electoral calculations constrain the ability of political parties to implement their ideological preferences with regards to the use of force. It examines a “most likely” case for the partisan theory of military intervention, namely Canada’s refusal to take part in the invasion of Iraq and its decision to commit forces to the war against the Islamic State. It finds that only in combination with alliance and electoral calculations does executive ideology offer valuable insights into Canada’s military support to U.S.-led coalition operations, which contributes to our understanding of allied decision-making.     

French Arms Exports and Intrastate Conflicts: An Empirical Investigation

The aim of this article is to evaluate how French Major Conventional Weapons (MCW) exports impact on the conflict intensity of recipient countries. The recent increase in French arms exports seems to contradict the French political discourse on the promotion of regional stability. We run zero-inflated ordered probit model in order to analyze the role of the arms trade on the intensity of civil conflicts in 144 countries from 1992 to 2014, using SIPRI and UCDP/PRIO data. Our results suggest that French MCW exports tended not to exacerbate intrastate conflicts during this period. This finding is robust to changes in the empirical framework. We propose two lines of explanations: France seems to be prone to choosing partners that respect human rights and selling more ‘defense-oriented’ MCW than the rest of the world.     

Striking a deal on the F-35: multinational politics and US defence acquisition

Why does joint defence production of advanced weapons systems, which appears like a logical choice at first, become harder for both the primary production state and its allies to manage and justify as the acquisition process runs its course? To answer this question, we analyze the multinational politics of the F-35 JSF with a focus on how secondary states who have bought into the program are affected by domestic politics within the primary production state. We find that US congressional and bureaucratic politics, cuts to US defence spending, and a desire to retain tight control over the program has locked allies into a program with which they have little leverage. Potentially losing the ability to fight along side the US if they don’t follow through, coupled with inter-Alliance pressures, leaves secondary states who are involved with the F-35 program, vulnerable to the whims of US domestic politics.     

Optimal search for a moving target with the option to wait

We investigate the problem in which an agent has to find an object that moves between two locations according to a discrete Markov process (Pollock, Operat Res 18 (1970) 883–903). At every period, the agent has three options: searching left, searching right, and waiting. We assume that waiting is costless whereas searching is costly. Moreover, when the agent searches the location that contains the object, he finds it with probability 1 (i.e. there is no overlooking). Waiting can be useful because it could induce a more favorable probability distribution over the two locations next period. We find an essentially unique (nearly) optimal strategy, and prove that it is characterized by two thresholds (as conjectured by Weber, J Appl Probab 23 (1986) 708–717). We show, moreover, that it can never be optimal to search the location with the lower probability of containing the object. The latter result is far from obvious and is in clear contrast with the example in Ross (1983) for the model without waiting. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 2009     

Technical note: Characterization of binomial semivalues through delegation games

Semivalues are allocation rules for cooperative games that assign to each player in a given game a weighted sum of his marginal contributions to all coalitions he belongs to, where the weighting coefficients depend only on the coalition size. Binomial semivalues are a special class of semivalues whose weighting coefficients are obtained by means of a unique parameter. In particular, the Banzhaf value is a binomial semivalue. In this article, we provide an axiomatic characterization for each binomial semivalue. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007     

A periodic maintenance model with used equipment and random minimal repair

The maintenance strategy considered in this article is in the class of block replacement policies. The working unit is replaced by new ones at instants T,2T,3T,… independently of the age and state of the unit. If a failure occurs between these instants, the random repair cost is evaluated. If it is smaller than a predetermined control limit then a minimal repair is carried out. Otherwise the unit is replaced by a used unit. The performance of this maintenance strategy is evaluated in terms of average total cost per time unit over an infinite time span. The mathematical model is defined and several analytical results are obtained. A computer program has been written, which solves the mathematical problem, and some examples are given for the cases where the underlying life distribution is gamma, Weibull or truncated normal.