Norms,Military Utility,and the Use/Non-use of Weapons: The Case of Anti-plant and Irritant Agents in the Vietnam War

The role of norms and military utility in the use of weapons is disputed by constructivist and realist scholars. Through an examination of US decision-making regarding anti-plant and irritant agents in the Vietnam War, I advance this debate in three key ways. First, I develop structural realism’s expectations regarding the role of military utility. Second, I demonstrate that social and material factors are at play in our understandings of both ‘norms’ and ‘military utility’, and that both played a role in US decisions. Third, I find that the dominant role – as structural realism expects – was played by military utility.     

Resequencing with parallel queues to minimize the maximum number of items in the overflow area

This article treats an elementary optimization problem, where an inbound stream of successive items is to be resequenced with the help of multiple parallel queues in order to restore an intended target sequence. Whenever early items block the one item to be currently released into the target sequence, they are withdrawn from their queue and intermediately stored in an overflow area until their actual release is reached. We aim to minimize the maximum number of items simultaneously stored in the overflow area during the complete resequencing process. We met this problem in industry practice at a large German automobile producer, who has to resequence containers with car seats prior to the assembly process. We formalize the resulting resequencing problem and provide suited exact and heuristic solution algorithms. In our computational study, we also address managerial aspects such as how to properly avoid the negative effects of sequence alterations. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 63: 401–415, 2016     

Stolen trauma: why some veterans elaborate their psychological experience of military service

The embellishment of a warrior biography has a long history but examples of veteran elaboration of traumatic experience have become increasingly apparent. Although legislative change in the UK has removed the penalties for fabrication and a progressive decline in the military footprint may have increased the likelihood of such false trauma narratives, a paradigm shift in explanations for mental illness underpins this phenomenon. The recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in 1980, followed by studies to identify risk factors, led to a greater appreciation of psychological vulnerability. As a result, the use of shame to discourage acts formerly labelled as “cowardly” or “lacking in morale fibre” is no longer considered appropriate. Recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan generated popular sympathy for service personnel, whilst media focus on PTSD has led the UK public to believe that most veterans have been traumatised by their tours of duty.     

The cyber conceptual framework for developing military doctrine

Militaries rely on secure communications. Despite the permeation of cyber-systems throughout the operational environment, there is little readily available doctrine on cyber-warfare. Doctrine that does exist has not been coherently integrated. This paper introduces a Cyber Conceptual Framework, consisting of five questions pertinent to the future use of cyberspace. The authors enunciate a definition of cyberspace, expand on existing military doctrine to reject the conceptualisation of cyberspace as a domain, define cyber-conflict, define cyber-attack and describe the four components and five levels of a cyber-attack. This work develops a common framework from available doctrine and a lexicon for future discussion.