Special Air Service Books to Choose From

Barry Davies, Joining the SAS: How to Get In and What It's Like.Miami: Lewis International Inc., 1998. Pp.214, photos, index. $22.95. ISBN 0–966771–4–2.

Peter McAleese and John Avery, McAleese's Fighting Manual: The Definitive Soldier's Handbook.London: Orion, 1998. Pp.179, illus. £18.95. ISBN 0–75280–063–9.

Steve Crawford et al.The SAS Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the World's Crack Regiment.Miami: Lewis International Inc., 1998. Pp.288, photos, maps, index. $29.95. ISBN 0–9666771–0–2.

Barry Davies et al.The Complete Encyclopedia of the SAS.London: Virgin Publishing Ltd, 1998. Pp.288, photos, maps, no index. $39.95. ISBN 1–85227–707–6.     

List of contributors

This article examines Edward Lansdale's return to South Vietnam during the Johnson administration. Lansdale offered a persuasive critique of the mistakes the American policy in Vietnam, but his potential influence was severely limited by a combination of bureaucratic infighting in Saigon and a general indifference to the political aspects of the conflict in Washington. While Lansdale was unable to signiflcantly influence the policies of the Johnson administration, his experience in Saigon during 1965–68 offers historians a unique perspective on many facets of American and South Vietnamese policymaking during a crucial period of the Vietnam War.     

Baixa do Cassang: Ending the abuse of Portuguese Africans

On 4 January 1961 in Baixa do Cassange, in the north of Angola, the blacks who worked in the cotton fields began a strike. The army with air support was called to quell the rebellion, and the article emphasizes the importance of air support tethered to the ground forces, particularly in a remote and vast area of operations in the tropical rainy season. In this case, the support originally came in the form a squadron of Lockheed PV-2 Harpoons from Luanda, some 300 kilometers away. These open-ocean reconnaissance aircraft and their crews were ill-suited for the task. When this became apparent, four small Auster D5/160s were relocated from Negage to Malange, among the ground forces. The Austers flew reconnaissance missions over the troubled zones, dropped provisions and messages to the advancing ground forces, and served as a backup communications link. When the strike ceased after three weeks, the Austers assumed a humanitarian role in support of the starving population. The conclusion is that air support to ground forces is indispensable, must be properly tailored to the job, and must operate as an integral part of the ground forces.     

Institutionalizing supreme command: explaining political–military integration in the Vietnam War, 1964–1968

Under what conditions can leaders achieve wartime political–military integration? In the Vietnam War, political–military integration exhibited dramatic variation: in the air war, the US was able to tightly integrate its political objectives and military conduct, but in the ground war, the American military prosecuted a strategy that was both divorced from broader political objectives and was immune from Washington's influence. I argue that the nature of information management between the military and civilian leadership explains the pattern of political–military integration in the Vietnam War more completely than do explanations that focus on the organizational cultures of professional militaries.     

‘The only good jihadist is a dead jihadist’:Boko Haram and de-radicalization around Lake Chad

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the shortcomings of the “de-radicalization doctrine” in sub-Saharan Africa. The issues raised are illustrated by the war against Boko Haram, which involves Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon. Relying on interviews with security officers, insurgents, civil servants, displaced people, humanitarian workers and Muslim and Christian clerics in Nigeria, Niger and Chad since 2005, the investigation shows that the four states focused on repression rather than demobilisation programs in prison or outdoors. The Boko Haram crisis is mainly a story of mismanagement. The article thus challenges the assumptions of the “de-radicalization doctrine” in Muslim Africa South of the Sahara. First, attempts to de-radicalize jihadi terrorists tend to focus too much on religious fanaticism and the exegesis of the Quran. Secondly, they are neither feasible nor efficient. Finally, they obscure priorities that are more important to counter extremism and demobilize insurgents.     

Why did Sudan Lose a small war in Southern Sudan?

ABSTRACT

When on the wrong end of an asymmetry in the projection of hard power, weaker sides countenance the grim arithmetic of avoiding direct and massed confrontations. Invariably, insurgents have over the ages tended to employ indirect tactical methods to render their stronger opponents ineffective. Ultimately – interest asymmetry, regime type, asymmetries of strategy, and external intervention – combine in a complex interplay and pattern, to militate against a strong side. In Sudan, these factors interacted throughout the civil wars to produce regional autonomy and finally an independent South Sudan in 2011. Similar strategic logic had confronted many large African states battling insurgencies in Ethiopia, Angola, Nigeria, Zaire, and apartheid-era South Africa. Oftentimes, weakening public resolve has caused these governments to accommodate, capitulate or withdraw even if they try not to blink. Notwithstanding the regime type, it can be concluded that the majority of strong actors are prone to fail in a protracted, asymmetric conflict. Hence, the notion of linking victory in counterinsurgency to the degree of openness (democratic polyarchies); or closeness (totalitarianism) – is still valid but highly contestable in the case of Africa’s large dysfunctional states.     

A lost sales (S — 1, S) perishable inventory system with renewal demand

This article analyzes a one-to-one ordering perishable inventory model with renewal demands and exponential lifetimes. The leadtimes are independently and exponentially distributed and the demands that occur during stock out periods are lost. Although the items are assumed to decay at a constant rate, the output process is not renewal and the Markov renewal techniques are successfully employed to obtain the operating characteristics. The problem of minimizing the long run expected cost rate is discussed and numerical values of optimal stock level are also provided. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

An exact algorithm for the maximal covering problem

This article develops a robust, exact algorithm for the maximal covering problem (MCP) using dual-based solution methods and greedy heuristics in branch and bound. Based on tests using randomly generated problems with problem parameters similar to those in the existing literature, the hybrid approach developed in this work appears to be effective over a wide range of MCP model parameters. The method is further validated on problems constructed from three real-world data sets. The extensive computational study compares the new method with other existing exact methods using problems that are as big, or larger than, those used in previous work on MCP. The results show that the proposed method is effective in most instances of MCP. In particular, it is shown that bounding schemes using Lagrangian relaxation are effective on MCP as a method of obtaining both exact and heuristic solutions. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Criteria and approximate methods for path-constrained moving-target search problems

A search is conducted for a target moving in discrete time among a finite number of cells according to a known Markov process. The searcher must choose one cell in which to search in each time period. The set of cells available for search depends upon the cell chosen in the last time period. The problem is to find a search path, i.e., a sequence of search cells, that either maximizes the probability of detection or minimizes the mean number of time periods required for detection. The search problem is modelled as a partially observable Markov decision process and several approximate solutions procedures are proposed. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.