Decommissioning and paramilitary strategy in Northern Ireland: A problem compared

This study examines the problems of paramilitary decommissioning in Northern Ireland. It analyses why decommissioning has become so contentious in the Northern Ireland peace process. Decommissioning, though, is not a unique or intrinsically insurmountable problem. This is demonstrated by highlighting the issue in international context. Three examples of decommissioning in conflict resolution processes are assessed: the Lebanon, El Salvador and Mozambique. These varied examples do supply some limited lessons for Northern Ireland. This study argues that the explanation for the intractability of decommissioning in Northern Ireland resides, to a greater extent, in the tactical and strategic reasoning of the main paramilitary groupings in Northern Ireland. The factors that condition their thinking, however, can be found in the nature of the peace process itself which provides the paramilitiaries with every incentive to retain possession of their weapons.     

Whose Hearts and Whose Minds? The Curious Case of Global Counter-Insurgency

Traditionally regarded as a secondary activity in military thinking and practice, the notion of counter-insurgency (COIN) has undergone a remarkable renaissance. This analysis traces the origins of this renaissance to two distinctive schools: a neo-classical school and a global insurgency school. The global insurgency school critiques neo-classical thought and presents itself as a more sophisticated appreciation of current security problems. An examination of the evolution of these two schools of counter-insurgency reveals how the interplay between them ultimately leaves us with a confused and contradictory understanding of the phenomenon of insurgency and the policies and strategies necessary to combat it.     

Winning the ‘War on Terror’? Roy Mason's Contribution to Counter-Terrorism in Northern Ireland

Roy Mason's tenure as Northern Ireland Secretary marked a watershed, yet it has provoked little analysis. Contrary to his popular image, security policy under Mason remained within the limits that had determined the formulation of British counter-terrorism ever since 1972. It was precisely because of this strategic environment that Mason's contribution was little more than a change in rhetoric, the implications of which were contradictory. Likewise, his key political idea of promoting ‘constitutional security’ negated its stated purpose by furthering instability, and – in the longer term – by making Dublin's permanent inclusion in the government of the province a political imperative.     

Reviews

Ian Castle and Ian Knight, Fearful Hard Times: The Siege and Relief of Eshowe, 1879. Greenhill Books, London 1994, Pp.256, 85 illus, 6 maps, index. £17.95. ISBN 1–85367–180–0.

Michael E. Brown (ed.), Ethnic Conflict and International Security. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, Pp.263, selected biblio, index. $45/£30 (cloth); $14.95/£12.95 (paper). ISBN 0–691–03368 and 00068–9.

Deborah Poole and Gerardo Renique, Peru: Time of Fear. London: Latin American Bureau (Research and Action) Ltd., 1992. Pp.212, 7 maps, photographs, glossary, sources/further reading, index. £17.99 ISBN 0–906156–70‐X and ‐71–8.

David A. Charters (ed.), Peacekeeping and the Challenge of Civil Conflict Resolution. Center for Conflict Studies, University of New Brunswick, 1994. Pp.viii+220. NP.

Joachim Remak, A Very Civil War: The Swiss Sonderbund War of 1847. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1993. Pp.xvi+221, 6 map's, 68 illus, biblio, index. $24.95/£16.95.     

Book reviews

Norman Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of “Ethnic Cleansing”. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 1995. Pp.xiv + 247; app., map, notes, cartoon.

Maria Jose Moyano, Argentina's Lost Patrol: Armed Struggle, 1969–1979. New Haven: Connecticut Yale University Press, 1995. Pp.xiii + 226, biblio., abbreviations, 10 figures, 1 map, tables, index; $25/£16.95. ISBN 0–300–01622–6.

Donald E. Schulz and Deborah Sundloff Schulz, The United States, Honduras, and the Crisis in Central America, Westview Thematic Studies in Latin America, Boulder, Co: Westview, 1994. Pp.368, map, figure, select biblio., abbreviations, index. $52.50/£37.50; (cloth) $17.95/£11.95 (paper). ISBN 0–8133–1324–4 and 1323–6.

Joseph H. Alexander and Merrill L. Bartlett, Sea Soldiers in the Cold War: Amphibious Warfare 1945–1991. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 1995. Pp.iii + 178, 1 map, 29 illus, biblio, index. $32.95. ISBN

Gary P. Cox, The Halt in the Mud: French Strategic Planning from Waterloo to Sedan. Westview Press, 1994. Pp.258, maps, notes, biblio, index. £33.50. ISBN 0–133–1536–0.     

Webs of Smoke: Drugs and Small Wars

War and drugs share many characteristics – both are destructive of human life, highly profitable to some, and efforts to regulate them have failed. In fact, at various times throughout history, war and drugs have been intertwined, prolonging human suffering, bedeviling political leaders and enriching a select few. The pernicious role of drugs in organized political violence is often overlooked. Drugs have been the cause of war, the funding for military operations, used by combatants and a part of the post-war political landscape. The insidious nature of drugs is especially visible in a certain type of war – small wars – yet is virtually unexamined by scholars and decision-makers.     

A produce‐to‐stock system with advance demand information and secondary customers

We consider a manufacturer (i.e., a capacitated supplier) that produces to stock and has two classes of customers. The primary customer places orders at regular intervals of time for a random quantity, while the secondary customers request a single item at random times. At a predetermined time the manufacturer receives advance demand information regarding the order size of the primary customer. If the manufacturer is not able to fill the primary customer's demand, there is a penalty. On the other hand, serving the secondary customers results in additional profit; however, the manufacturer can refuse to serve the secondary customers in order to reserve inventory for the primary customer. We characterize the manufacturer's optimal production and stock reservation policies that maximize the manufacturer's discounted profit and the average profit per unit time. We show that these policies are threshold‐type policies, and these thresholds are monotone with respect to the primary customer's order size. Using a numerical study we provide insights into how the value of information is affected by the relative demand size of the primary and secondary customers. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007     

On optimal system designs in reliability‐economics frameworks

Reliability Economics is a field that can be defined as the collection of all problems in which there is tension between the performance of systems of interest and their cost. Given such a problem, the aim is to resolve the tension through an optimization process that identifies the system which maximizes some appropriate criterion function (e.g. expected lifetime per unit cost). In this paper, we focus on coherent systems of n independent and identically distributed (iid) components and mixtures thereof, and characterize both a system's performance and cost as functions of the system's signature vector (Samaniego, IEEE Trans Reliabil (1985) 69–72). For a given family of criterion functions, a variety of optimality results are obtained for systems of arbitrary order n. Approximations are developed and justified when the underlying component distribution is unknown. Assuming the availability of an auxiliary sample of N component failure times, the asymptotic theory of L‐estimators is adapted for the purpose of establishing the consistency and asymptotic normality of the proposed estimators of the expected ordered failure times of the n components of the systems under study. These results lead to the identification of ε‐optimal systems relative to the chosen criterion function. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007     

Exact expected values of variance estimators for simulation

We formulate exact expressions for the expected values of selected estimators of the variance parameter (that is, the sum of covariances at all lags) of a steady‐state simulation output process. Given in terms of the autocovariance function of the process, these expressions are derived for variance estimators based on the simulation analysis methods of nonoverlapping batch means, overlapping batch means, and standardized time series. Comparing estimator performance in a first‐order autoregressive process and the M/M/1 queue‐waiting‐time process, we find that certain standardized time series estimators outperform their competitors as the sample size becomes large. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007