Landmarks in defense literature

Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis 1911-1918, 4 Vols, The Unknown War, The Aftermath. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York (1923-1931) and Marlborough, His Life and Times, 6 Vols. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York (1933-1938).     

Book reviews

America's Secret Power: the CIA in a Democratic Society. By Loch K. Johnson. Oxford University Press, New York (1989), ISBN 0–19–505490–3, $24.95

The Bundeswehr and Western Security. Edited by Stephen F. Szabo. Houndmills, Basingstoke, and Macmillan, London (1990), ISBN 0–333–49880–1, £45.00

Symbolic Defense: the Cultural Significance of the Strategic Defense Initiative. By Edward Tabor Linenthal. University of Illinois Press, Chicago, IL (1989), ISBN 0–252–01619‐X, $19.95

Rethinking European Security. Edited by Furio Cerutti and Rodolfo Ragionieri. Crane Russak, New York (1990), £29.00

Alternative Conventional Defense Postures in the European Theater, Vol. 1: The Military Balance and Domestic Constraints. Edited by Hans Günter Brauch and Robert Kennedy, Crane Russak, New York (1990), £32.00

The Gulf War. Edited by Hanns Maull and Otto Pick. Pinter, London (1989), ISBN 0–86187–763–2, £36.00     

Evaluation of commonly used rules for detecting “steady state” in computer simulation

A definition of the problem of the initial transient with respect to the steady-state mean value has been formulated. A set of criteria has been set forth by which the efficaacy of any proposed rule may be assessed. Within this framework, five heuristic rules for predicting the approximate end of transiency, four of which have been quoted extensively in the simulation literature, have been evaluated in the M/M/1 situation. All performed poorly and are not suitable for their intended use.     

A mathematical programming approach to the scheduling of sorting operations

In this paper we describe an approach to the scheduling and/or real-time control of sorting operations in the presence of deadlines. The problem arises in the postal service where mail has to be sorted by zip codes, and in the banking system where checks have to be sorted according to the bank on which they are drawn. In both applications losses are incurred if items miss their clearing deadlines. For example, in check-sorting an extremely important objective of the control system is to reduce the “float” i.e., the total dollar value of the checks which miss their deadlines. The proposed real-time control system utilizes a linear program which chooses between alternative sort-patterns and assigns the various processing steps to the time periods between deadlines.