Israel's Northern eyes and shield: The strategic value of the Golan Heights revisited

According to common wisdom, the Golan provides Israel with an ideal platform for its warning stations as well as the best available defense line against a massive Syrian ground attack. Challenging this belief, this article compares the present situation with an alternative defined by (a) a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Golan, (b) a complete demilitarization of the evacuated territory, and (c) considerable limitations on Syrian military presence in the area between the Golan and Damascus. The article reaches two conclusions. First, that a combination of means, primarily airborne and space‐based platforms, can effectively answer Israel's northern intelligence needs. Second, the security arrangements set above, combined with recent revolutionary military technologies and its relative advantage in this domain, offer Israel an effective ‐ in some respects even a better ‐ alternative, to the present defense line.     

Technical and proliferation‐related aspects of the dismantlement of Russian Alfa‐Class nuclear submarines

When does a state become a “nuclear weapon state”? How we choose to answer this question has significant implications for proliferation assessment, analysis, and policy. Traditionally, the standard demarcation line has been a state's first nuclear test, but in recent years analysts have increasingly focused instead on the accumulation of a significant quantity (SQ) of fissile material. The article argues that although the test/no-test indicator clearly has problems, its replacement by the SQ/no-SQ indicator would be highly counterproductive. The article instead proposes supplementing the traditional test/no-test indicator with a theory-driven approach that focuses on the incentives and disincentives to test.     

非战争与战争军事行动装备保障能力融合与转化构想

加强非战争与战争军事行动装备保障能力相互融合与转化研究是促进装备保障能力建设的重要举措.首先阐述了非战争与战争军事行动装备保障能力相互融合与转化的内涵,进而明确了非战争与战争军事行动装备保障能力相互融合与转化的目标,最后制定了非战争与战争军事行动装备保障能力相互融合与转化的战略规划,为新时期军队遂行多样化军事任务的装备保障能力建设奠定了理论基础.     

水面舰艇编队空中威胁扇面角预测模型

针对水面舰艇编队空中威胁扇面角的预测问题,分析了影响空中威胁扇面角大小的主要因素。以具有航路规划能力的远程反舰导弹为对象,从航空兵及远程反舰导弹的作战使用特点和装备性能限制着手,建立了计算威胁扇面角的数学模型。通过仿真分析,得出了主要参数对威胁扇面角的影响规律,为水面舰艇编队对空防御兵力的配置提供了依据。     

Book review

This paper investigates the economic roots of separatist terrorism in Turkey. The political conventional wisdom is that poverty in highly Kurdish‐populated, south‐eastern Turkey is one of the most important causes of separatist terrorism and Turkish–Kurdish conflict in Turkey. Therefore, many economic policies have been implemented to improve the economic conditions in the south‐eastern part of the country. Using the Global Terrorism Database and Vector Autoregression (VAR) methodology, I find that there is no causal relationship between economic conditions in south‐eastern Turkey and separatist terrorism. Therefore policy‐makers should be cautious in using economic measures to prevent separatist terrorism in Turkey.     

NON‐LINEARITY IN THE DEFENCE EXPENDITURE – ECONOMIC GROWTH RELATIONSHIP IN TAIWAN

As we enter the 21st Century, technologies originally developed for defense purposes such as computers and satellite communications appear to have become a driving force behind economic growth in the United States. Paradoxically, almost all previous econometric models suggest that the largely defense‐oriented federal industrial R&;D funding that helped create these technologies had no discernible effect on U.S. industrial productivity growth. This paper addresses this paradox by stressing that defense procurement as well as federal R&;D expenditures were targeted to a few narrowly defined manufacturing sub‐sectors that produced high tech weaponry. Analysis employing data from the NBER Manufacturing Productivity Database and the BEA’ s Input Output tables then demonstrates that defense procurement policies did have significant effects on the productivity performance of disaggregated manufacturing industries because of a process of procurement‐driven technological change.     

SOCIAL PREFERENCES FOR NATIONAL DEFENCE AND POLICE ENFORCEMENT IN WESTERN EUROPE

We study the determinants of social preferences for national defence and for police and law enforcement. For this task, we estimate a bivariate ordered probit model for a set of European countries (France, Finland, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden) in 2006. Determinants of spending decisions for defence and police are found to be linked but are of significantly different magnitudes. Besides, measures against terrorist threats are positively linked to police and defence spending increases, while the subjective perception of fiscal pressure has no influence. Finally, no significant differences are found between Northern and Southern Europe.