Lessons in airpower projection: Indochina and Algeria

The lessons from the two French counterinsurgencies, Indochina and Algeria, give rise to a new understanding of the projection of airpower in remote and hostile environments and the purpose, design, and use of aircraft in counterinsurgency. In both Indochina and Algeria, the campaigns were ones of poverty, and it is their imaginative management under severe resource constraints that provides thoughtful and applicable lessons for today. In both cases, airpower held the promise of delivering victory and solving the resource issue. In Indochina, acquisition of the needed aircraft, operating knowledge, and experience came too slowly to realize this promise. In Algeria, the French embraced the lessons from Indochina and were quite successful and innovative in the use of airpower. The lessons can be reduced to four requirements: (1) a network of airfields for liaison, ground-support, and intra-theater airlift to enable effective air support of ground forces; (2) a solid, reliable, and simple ground-support aircraft capable of operating from forward airfields within range of ground engagements; (3) a capable intra-theater heavy-lift transport to supply the extended ground forces; and (4) helicopter capability to enhance tactical troop mobility and support.     

The Hunt for Martín Caballero

While the success of Colombia's fight against illegal armed groups, led by Fuerzas armadas revolucionarias de Colombia – ejército del pueblo (FARC-EP), is generally lauded as evidence of the effectiveness of both COIN doctrine and security assistance, the configuration of Colombia's counter-insurgency effort remains largely unstudied. This article will explain the success of one of those campaigns carried out principally by the Colombian marines (Colmar) in an area of northern Colombia known as the Montes de María. Contingent factors shaped the success of this campaign, beginning with the fact that the Montes de María forms an area where insurgents, relative late comers to the region, found it difficult to put down deep roots. However, operations to eradicate them were complicated by the inexperience of the Colmar, and by constraints placed by Colombia's Constitutional Court on COIN methods modeled on those successfully applied by the British in Malaya and Kenya. Therefore, Colmar officers initiated their five-year campaign by building up a base of popular support in the towns and targeting insurgent logistical networks. This bought time to strengthen the Colmar's combat and intelligence capabilities, and take the offensive that eventually isolated and killed the leader of the FARC in the Montes de María, Martín Caballero. Unfortunately, the failure of the Colombian government to follow up the Colmar victory by installing a regional and local governments viewed as legitimate by the population, and to resolve long standing land tenure issues, has meant that, so far, the Colmar looks to have delivered a tactical victory in a strategic vacuum.     

India and Israel: emerging partnership

The absence of formal diplomatic relations between India and Israel from India's hesitant recognition of Israel in 1950 and the establishment of full relations in January 1992, was the result of a complex interplay between two sets of tensions. The first involved the Arab–Israeli dispute, and India's sympathies with a post-colonial Arab world and with the Non-Aligned Movement; the second involved accommodating Muslim opinion within India. Normalization has proceeded more strongly as the growth of Hindu nationalism has weakened Muslim leverage on Indian foreign policy.     

The case for Azawad

Since Mali achieved independence from France, the marginalised Tuareg population of Mali has sought independence and the right to form their own nation, ‘Azawad’. These efforts have continuously been frustrated by the Tuaregs' neighbours, due to competing nationalist pride and interests in the mineral resources believed to lie under the northern Malian soil. Thus far, the Tuaregs of northern Mali have been largely neglected and denied both inclusive and effective governance by the various Malian governments from the southern Malian capital of Bamako. When negotiations have failed, Tuareg attempts to seize their own independence through violence have been brutally crushed by the Malian government. The Malian government will neither advance the interests of the Tuaregs nor allow them the freedom to pursue their own path in the world. The advent of the ‘Arab Spring’ in Libya provided another opportunity for the Tuaregs to pursue their dreams of an independent Azawad. Tuareg fighters returning from Libya carried with them both considerable combat experience and stockpiles of arms that they used to temporarily free their homeland. Unfortunately, the Tuaregs' whirlwind conquest of northern Mali was undone by the emergence of a new transnational threat in the Sahel. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) supplanted the previously victorious Tuaregs and attempted to turn Azawad into a Taliban-esque caliphate. French intervention defeated AQIM, but set the stage for a continuation of the cycle of violence and instability borne from the unwillingness of the international community to support the Tuaregs' legitimate right to self-determination.     

The causal nexus between military spending and unemployment in the G7: a bootstrap panel causality test

We revisit the causal relationship between military spending and unemployment in the G7 countries applying a bootstrap panel causality analysis that accounts for both cross-sectional dependence and for heterogeneity across countries. Using per capita real GDP as a controlled variable, we found a unidirectional causality running from military spending to unemployment for Canada, Japan, and the US, one-way causality running from unemployment to military spending for France and Germany, and bidirectional causality for Italy and the UK. The empirical evidence does not seem to provide consistent results regarding the causal relationship between military spending and unemployment in G7 countries.     

Optimal patrol to uncover threats in time when detection is imperfect

Consider a patrol problem, where a patroller traverses a graph through edges to detect potential attacks at nodes. An attack takes a random amount of time to complete. The patroller takes one time unit to move to and inspect an adjacent node, and will detect an ongoing attack with some probability. If an attack completes before it is detected, a cost is incurred. The attack time distribution, the cost due to a successful attack, and the detection probability all depend on the attack node. The patroller seeks a patrol policy that minimizes the expected cost incurred when, and if, an attack eventually happens. We consider two cases. A random attacker chooses where to attack according to predetermined probabilities, while a strategic attacker chooses where to attack to incur the maximal expected cost. In each case, computing the optimal solution, although possible, quickly becomes intractable for problems of practical sizes. Our main contribution is to develop efficient index policies—based on Lagrangian relaxation methodology, and also on approximate dynamic programming—which typically achieve within 1% of optimality with computation time orders of magnitude less than what is required to compute the optimal policy for problems of practical sizes. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 61: 557–576, 2014