Book reviews

John Lawrence Tone, The Fatal Knot: The Guerrilla War in Navarre and the Defeat of Napoleon in Spain. Chapel Hill and London; The University of North Carolina Press 1994. Pp.vii + 239, 1 map, biblio., index. $34.95 (cloth). ISBN 0–8078–2169–1.

Robert Holland (ed), Emergencies and Disorder in the European Empires after 1945. London: Frank Cass, 1994. Pp.x + 256; index. £32 (cloth); £15 (paper). ISBN 0–7146–4516–8 and 4109 X

Deborah L. Norden, Military Rebellion in Argentina: Between Coups and Consolidation. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Pp.242, index, $35/$17.50 (paper). ISBN 0–8032–8369–5.

William M. Minter, Apartheid's Contras: An Inquiry into the Roots of War in Angola and Mozambique. London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books Ltd; Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994. Pp. xii +308, 3 maps, biblio., index. $69.95/£39.95 (cloth); $29.95/£16.95(paper). ISBN 1–85649–266–4 and 266–4.     

‘A Particularly exacting operation’: British Forces and the Battle of Surabaya,November 1945

In 1945, the Dutch government was not in a position to re‐impose its control upon its colonies in the East Indies after the surrender of Japan. In their stead, Allied forces were to take control of the islands, disarm Japanese troops and to maintain stability until the Dutch could return. The declaration of an independent Indonesia by nationalists left the British and Indian troops sent to re‐occupy the islands facing a complex situation. Increasing violence culminated in the murder of Brigadier A.W. S. Mallaby in Surabaya, which was followed by a major action by British forces to regain control. In extremely difficult circumstances, the British troops conducted a successful operation which held many lessons for the conduct of counter‐insurgency operations in the years that followed.     

United States special operations forces and the war on terrorism

Those leading the war on terrorism have emphasized from the beginning that this war would be unlike other wars. Special Operations Forces (SOF) are military forces unlike other military forces. The implication is that SOF and the war on terrorism are thus made for each other. This contribution examines this assumption, the war on terrorism and SOF in greater detail.     

Comparison between constant‐stress and step‐stress accelerated life tests under Time Constraint

By running life tests at higher stress levels than normal operating conditions, accelerated life testing (ALT) quickly yields information on the lifetime distribution of a test unit. The lifetime at the design stress is then estimated through extrapolation using a regression model. In constant‐stress testing, a unit is tested at a fixed stress level until failure or the termination time point of test, whereas step‐stress testing allows the experimenter to gradually increase the stress levels at some prefixed time points during the test. In this work, the optimal k‐level constant‐stress and step‐stress ALTs are compared for the exponential failure data under complete sampling and Type‐I censoring. The objective is to quantify the advantage of using the step‐stress testing relative to the constant‐stress one. Assuming a log‐linear life–stress relationship with the cumulative exposure model for the effect of changing stress in step‐stress testing, the optimal design points are determined under C/D/A‐optimality criteria. The efficiency of step‐stress testing to constant‐stress one is then discussed in terms of the ratio of optimal objective functions based on the information matrix. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 00: 000–000, 2013     

Myth and the small war tradition: Reassessing the discourse of British counter-insurgency

In recent years a number of commentators have posited that the British reputation for conducting small wars has suffered in the wake of setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan. The argument here contests whether such a tradition can be truly said to have ever existed. A close examination of this supposed tradition reveals it to be a myth. In fact, rarely have the British armed forces claimed a facility for counter-insurgency or small war. Invariably, commentators outside the Army have ascribed the tradition to them. Most notably, commentators in the United States keen to discern practices of minimum force or rapid institutional learning generated the narrative of British COIN expertise. Ultimately, what this myth reveals is that, when deconstructed, it is political will, not an ingrained understanding of fighting insurgencies, that has determined Britain's success, or otherwise, in so-called small wars.     

Bounding methods for facilities location algorithms

Single- and multi-facility location problems are often solved with iterative computational procedures. Although these procedures have proven to converage, in practice it is desirable to be able to compute a lower bound on the objective function at each iteration. This enables the user to stop the iterative process when the objective function is within a prespecified tolerance of the optimum value. In this article we generalize a new bounding method to include multi-facility problems with l_p distances. A proof is given that for Euclidean distance problems the new bounding procedure is superior to two other known methods. Numerical results are given for the three methods.     

Test for the extreme value and weibull distributions based on normalized spacings

Discussed in this article are tests for the extreme-value distribution, or, equivalently, for the two-parameter Weibull distribution when parameters are unknown and the sample may be censored. The three tests investigated are based on the median, the mean, and the Anderson-Darling A² statistic calculated from a set zⁱ of values derived from the spacings of the sample. The median and the mean have previously been discussed by Mann, Scheuer, and Fertig [10] and by Tiku and Singh [14]. Asymptotic distributions and points are given for the test statistics, based on recently developed theory, and power studies are conducted to compare them with each other and with two other statistics suitable for the test. Of the normalized spacings tests, A² is recommended overall; the mean also gives good power in many situations, but can be nonconsistent.