From the Editors

For the first four years of the Algerian War British ministers and officials claimed that while supporting the French position in North Africa they did not support their policies. Successive Conservative governments sought to sustain France in North Africa because of the impact that long term insurgency in Algeria would have on Western defence by draining French human and material resources. They also feared that Western influence in North Africa could decline, opening the way for the spread of Communism, and that further humiliation for France, coming on the heels of Indochina, could lead to a ‘neutralist’ government in Paris, which would politically weeaken the Western alliance. Yet Britain's own foreign interests led it to wish to limit the spread of Arab nationalism and to avoid being tarred with the colonialist brush. The ambiguity of Britain's position led to shifting policies, which made the job of HM Ambassador in Paris, Gladwyn Jebb, particularly difficult.     

Chinese Theater and Strategic Missile Force Modernization and its Implications for the United States

The People's Republic of China (PRC), no longer content with its longstanding ‘minimalist’ nuclear posture and strategy, is enhancing the striking power and survivability of its theater and strategic missile forces and rethinking its nuclear doctrine in ways that may pose serious challenges for the United States. Although the modernization of Chinese nuclear and missile forces may ultimately result in greater strategic deterrence stability, this change will not come about immediately or automatically. Indeed, it is entirely possible that China's growing missile capabilities could decrease crisis stability under certain circumstances, especially in the event of a US–China conflict over Taiwan.     

Bush path to self-destruction: Charles Taylor and the Revolutionary United Front

This article explains the demise of Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebellion. It argues that the main cause of this fate was the group's relationship with its primary sponsor, Charles Taylor. The RUF's dependency on Taylor's patronage, coupled with the rebellion's weak organisational endowments harmed the group's prospects of success. Based on original research, the article shows how Taylor used the RUF as a strategic instrument for his own regional interests, which led to the group's unravelling. More broadly, the article speaks about proxy warfare in Africa and how the relationship between resource flows and rebellion are not always beneficial to rebels as one might expect.     

Book reviews

Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military. By Stephen Peter Rosen. Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, Cornell University Press, New York (1991), ISBN 0-8014-2566-5. Price £40.00

Post-Military Society. By Martin Shaw. Polity Press, Cambridge (1991), ISBN 0-7456-01987 (hardback) £35.00,0-7456-01995 (paperback) £11.95

Big Boys' Rules—The Secret War Against the IRA. By Mark Urban. Faber and Faber, London (1992), ISBN 0-571-16112-X, £14.99     

Think again – supplying war: reappraising military logistics and its centrality to strategy and war

This article argues that logistics constrains strategic opportunity while itself being heavily circumscribed by strategic and operational planning. With the academic literature all but ignoring the centrality of logistics to strategy and war, this article argues for a reappraisal of the critical role of military logistics, and posits that the study and conduct of war and strategy are incomplete at best or false at worst when they ignore this crucial component of the art of war. The article conceptualises the logistics–strategy nexus in a novel way, explores its contemporary manifestation in an age of uncertainty, and applies it to a detailed case study of UK operations in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.     

The 22 September 1979 Vela Incident: Radionuclide and Hydroacoustic Evidence for a Nuclear Explosion

This article offers a new analysis of radionuclide and hydroacoustic data to support a low-yield nuclear weapon test as a plausible explanation for the still contentious 22 September 1979 Vela Incident, in which U.S. satellite Vela 6911 detected an optical signal characteristic of an atmospheric nuclear explosion over the Southern Indian or Atlantic Ocean. Based on documents not previously widely available, as well as recently declassified papers and letters, this article concludes that iodine-131 found in the thyroids of some Australian sheep would be consistent with them having grazed in the path of a potential radioactive fallout plume from a 22 September low-yield nuclear test in the Southern Indian Ocean. Further, several declassified letters and reports which describe aspects of still classified hydroacoustic reports and data favor the test scenario. The radionuclide and hydroacoustic data taken together with the analysis of the double-flash optical signal picked up by Vela 6911 that was described in a companion 2017 article (“The 22 September 1979 Vela Incident: The Detected Double-Flash”) can be traced back to sources with similar spatial and temporal origins and serve as a strong indicator for a nuclear explosion being responsible for the 22 September 1979 Vela Incident.     

From rivals to partners: AirSea Battle and the US air force–navy relationship

AirSea Battle (ASB) has generated significant publicity, controversy, and debate among scholars, analysts, commentators, and observers of US defense strategy. However, a research gap exists concerning formal analysis of the impact of the operational concept on the relationship between the US Air Force (USAF) and the US Navy (USN). The impact of the ASB operational concept on the USAF–USN relationship is examined across the issue areas of strategy, budgets, weapons procurement, and training. These four issue areas represent important areas of historical conflict and competition between the Air Force and Navy. The conclusion is that ASB is ushering in a new era of Air Force–Navy partnership that advances the inter-service dynamic from “jointness” toward integration. The emergent USAF–USN partnership therefore represents a significant development in US defense politics and defense strategy.     

Balancing stability and efficiency in team formation as a generalized roommate problem

The assignment of personnel to teams is a fundamental managerial function typically involving several objectives and a variety of idiosyncratic practical constraints. Despite the prevalence of this task in practice, the process is seldom approached as an optimization problem over the reported preferences of all agents. This is due in part to the underlying computational complexity that occurs when intra-team interpersonal interactions are taken into consideration, and also due to game-theoretic considerations, when those taking part in the process are self-interested agents. Variants of this fundamental decision problem arise in a number of settings, including, for example, human resources and project management, military platooning, ride sharing, data clustering, and in assigning students to group projects. In this article, we study an analytical approach to “team formation” focused on the interplay between two of the most common objectives considered in the related literature: economic efficiency (i.e., the maximization of social welfare) and game-theoretic stability (e.g., finding a core solution when one exists). With a weighted objective across these two goals, the problem is modeled as a bi-level binary optimization problem, and transformed into a single-level, exponentially sized binary integer program. We then devise a branch-cut-and-price algorithm and demonstrate its efficacy through an extensive set of simulations, with favorable comparisons to other algorithms from the literature.