Counterinsurgency and the limits of state-building: An analysis of Colombia's policy of territorial consolidation, 2006–2012

Since 2002 the Colombian government has been implementing a series of policy initiatives that have sought to coordinate state resources in a neo-classical counterinsurgency approach to fight the country's main insurgent group, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), and recover and consolidate the territory. Despite impressive operational successes against the insurgency and other illegal groups, the government has been unable to reassert its control and build legitimacy via the state-building effort known as ‘Consolidación’, in some of the most recalcitrant areas of the country. This article examines two areas where government efforts at consolidation appear to be failing to discuss the limits of COIN theory and practice.     

Virtual War in the Ice Jungle: ‘We don't know how to do this’

The Cold War at sea expanded in many realms, including the frigid and treacherous waters of the Arctic Ocean. The US Navy pioneered these efforts with the visit of USS Nautilus to the North Pole in 1958. During the latter stages of the Cold War, however, Soviet naval strategists began to conceptualize the polar ice cap as a strategic asset for cloaking the operations of its nuclear missile submarines. As under-ice operations afforded the Soviet submarine fleet advantages of stealth, proximity to target and tighter lines of communications, both navies were forced to try to develop tactics for combat under these extremely complex and arduous conditions.     

Local defence forces and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan: learning from the CIA's Village Defense Program in South Vietnam

Some scholars would have us believe that the distinctions between military and policing roles, methods and objectives have become increasingly blurred by the security demands of a post-Cold War and post-11 September global and domestic order. This article explores the current state of the police–military divide through a conceptual and case study analysis. It concludes that, in this case, there is some conflation occurring at a macro-level as international and domestic affairs have become increasingly indistinct, but the article also demonstrates that the actual ethos and practice of these agencies still differs strongly. Most importantly, the article argues that this distinction is in fact a very useful one in planning for future peace support operations     

Waypoint analysis for command and control

Command and Control (C2) in a military setting can be epitomized in battles‐of‐old when commanders would seek high ground to gain superior spatial‐temporal information; from this vantage point, decisions were made and relayed to units in the field. Although the fundamentals remain, technology has changed the practice of C2; for example, enemy units may be observed remotely, with instruments of varying positional accuracy. A basic problem in C2 is the ability to track an enemy object in the battlespace and to forecast its future position; the (extended) Kalman filter provides a straightforward solution. The problem changes fundamentally if one assumes that the moving object is headed for an (unknown) location, or waypoint. This article is concerned with the new problem of estimation of such a waypoint, for which we use Bayesian statistical prediction. The computational burden is greater than an ad hoc regression‐based estimate, which we also develop, but the Bayesian approach has a big advantage in that it yields both a predictor and a measure of its variability. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2004     

Algorithms for solving the conditional covering problem on paths

Consider the conditional covering problem on an undirected graph, where each node represents a site that must be covered by a facility, and facilities may only be established at these nodes. Each facility can cover all sites that lie within some common covering radius, except the site at which it is located. Although this problem is difficult to solve on general graphs, there exist special structures on which the problem is easily solvable. In this paper, we consider the special case in which the graph is a simple path. For the case in which facility location costs do not vary based on the site, we derive characteristics of the problem that lead to a linear‐time shortest path algorithm for solving the problem. When the facility location costs vary according to the site, we provide a more complex, but still polynomial‐time, dynamic programming algorithm to find the optimal solution. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005.     

On the median residual lifetime and its aging properties: A characterization theorem and applications

This paper is devoted to study several aspects of the median residual life function (MERLF). In reliability studies, it is well known that, although the MERLF have several advantages over the mean residual life function (MRLF), the MRLF has the good property of uniquely determine a life distribution whereas either the median residual life function (MERLF) or an α‐percentile residual life do not have such good property. We shall give a characterization result where knowledge of both the MERLF and the survival function on an interval does uniquely determine the distribution. Moreover, in order to apply this characterization in practical situations, we propose a method to estimate the necessary information of the survival function. Relationships between analytical properties of the survival function and its associated MERLF are also obtained. Bryson and Siddiqui [J Am Statist Assoc 64 (1969), 1472–1483] proved relationships among seven criteria for aging, out of which two contained the MRLF (decreasing MRLF and net decreasing MRLF). In this paper, we prove that the same pattern of relationships holds if the MRLF is replaced by the MERLF. We also examine the aging criteria corresponding to an increasing MERLF and show that there is no relation between the behavior (increasing or decreasing) of the MERLF and of the MRLF. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005     

Single machine scheduling with a restricted rate‐modifying activity

In this paper we consider the problem of scheduling a set of jobs on a single machine on which a rate‐modifying activity may be performed. The rate‐modifying activity is an activity that changes the production rate of the machine. So the processing time of a job is a variable, which depends on whether it is scheduled before or after the rate‐modifying activity. We assume that the rate‐modifying activity can take place only at certain predetermined time points, which is a constrained case of a similar problem discussed in the literature. The decisions under consideration are whether and when to schedule the rate‐modifying activity, and how to sequence the jobs in order to minimize some objectives. We study the problems of minimizing makespan and total completion time. We first analyze the computational complexity of both problems for most of the possible versions. The analysis shows that the problems are NP‐hard even for some special cases. Furthermore, for the NP‐hard cases of the makespan problem, we present a pseudo‐polynomial time optimal algorithm and a fully polynomial time approximation scheme. For the total completion time problem, we provide a pseudo‐polynomial time optimal algorithm for the case with agreeable modifying rates. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005     

Commitment decisions with partial information updating

In this paper, we extend the results of Ferguson M. Naval Research Logistics 8 . on an end‐product manufacturer's choice of when to commit to an order quantity from its parts supplier. During the supplier's lead‐time, information arrives about end‐product demand. This information reduces some of the forecast uncertainty. While the supplier must choose its production quantity of parts based on the original forecast, the manufacturer can wait to place its order from the supplier after observing the information update. We find that a manufacturer is sometimes better off with a contract requiring an early commitment to its order quantity, before the supplier commits resources. On the other hand, the supplier sometimes prefers a delayed commitment. The preferences depend upon the amount of demand uncertainty resolved by the information as well as which member of the supply chain sets the exchange price. We also show conditions where demand information updating is detrimental to both the manufacturer and the supplier. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005     

Production/distribution system design with inventory considerations

This study addresses the design of a three‐stage production/distribution system where the first stage includes the set of established retailers and the second and third stages include the sets of potential distribution centers (DCs) and potential capacitated suppliers, respectively. In this problem, in addition to the fixed location/operating costs associated with locating DCs and suppliers, we consider the coordinated inventory replenishment decisions at the located DCs and retailers along with the appropriate inventory costs explicitly. In particular, we account for the replenishment and holding costs at the retailers and selected DCs, and the fixed plus distance‐based transportation costs between the selected plants and their assigned DCs, and between the selected DCs and their respective retailers, explicitly. The resulting formulation is a challenging mixed‐integer nonlinear programming model for which we propose efficient heuristic solution approaches. Our computational results demonstrate the performance of the heuristic approaches as well as the value of integrated decision‐making by verifying that significant cost savings are realizable when the inventory decisions and costs are incorporated in the production distribution system design. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 59: 172–195, 2012