AFRICAN SECURITY REVIEW

As an institution of state, the military in Lesotho was marred by controversy and steeped in intrigue from the start. For much of the post-colonial period the military was used as a politicised and partisan tool, which even seized power and governed in its own name. The current problem, as this brief history aims to demonstrate, is essentially two-pronged. It involves putting in place structures, mechanisms and philosophies designed to promote the military's acceptance of civil supremacy. The process should also include alterations to political society's perception of the military as a tool to be used in partisan games that almost always have calamitous outcomes. Lesotho's political development is classified in this article into four broad phases and the type of civil-military relations is assessed under each phase. The reasons for the military coup in 1986 are analysed, the emergence of a democratic order and the challenges facing this order are highlighted, and the reform measures that have thus far been instituted are evaluated. The essay concludes with a few projections into the future course of events.     

INTERNATIONAL SECURITY ON THE ROAD TO NUCLEAR ZERO

The disappointingly slow pace of progress on efforts to prevent proliferation, reduce nuclear weapons, and eliminate nuclear risks has many causes. The factor that might be easiest for individuals in the arms control and nonproliferation community to change stems from their own ambivalence about major questions that must be addressed on the road to reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world to zero. This essay explores how ambivalence about four key issues—strategic stability, alliance relations, institution-building, and nuclear energy—often leads community members to take positions that play well at home and within their like-minded group but raise unintended impediments to achieving their own long-term goals. The author suggests alternative ways to handle these questions to improve the prospects for domestic and international agreement on practical measures that would eliminate, not perpetuate, nuclear risks.     

MILITARY SPENDING AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN SOUTH ASIA: COMMENT AND RECONSIDERATION

In a recent paper in this journal, Wijewerra and Webb study the connection between military spending and gross domestic product (GDP) in a group of five South Asian countries, finding a small but statistically significant positive relationship between military spending and GDP. This paper reviews their approach and proposes an alternative which tries to deal with the problems of omitted variables and variable construction. It finds, in contrast, that a higher share of military spending in GDP is associated with lower growth of GDP per capita.     

Interval scheduling: A survey

In interval scheduling, not only the processing times of the jobs but also their starting times are given. This article surveys the area of interval scheduling and presents proofs of results that have been known within the community for some time. We first review the complexity and approximability of different variants of interval scheduling problems. Next, we motivate the relevance of interval scheduling problems by providing an overview of applications that have appeared in literature. Finally, we focus on algorithmic results for two important variants of interval scheduling problems. In one variant we deal with nonidentical machines: instead of each machine being continuously available, there is a given interval for each machine in which it is available. In another variant, the machines are continuously available but they are ordered, and each job has a given “maximal” machine on which it can be processed. We investigate the complexity of these problems and describe algorithms for their solution. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007     

A dynamic allocation heuristic for centralized safety stock

An inventory system that consists of a depot (central warehouse) and retailers (regional warehouses) is considered. The system is replenished regularly on a fixed cycle by an outside supplier. Most of the stock is direct shipped to the retailer locations but some stock is sent to the central warehouse. At the beginning of any one of the periods during the cycle, the central stock can then be completely allocated out to the retailers. In this paper we propose a heuristic method to dynamically (as retailer inventory levels change with time) determine the appropriate period in which to do the allocation. As the optimal method is not tractable, the heuristic's performance is compared against two other approaches. One presets the allocation period, while the other provides a lower bound on the expected shortages of the optimal solution, obtained by assuming that we know ahead of time all of the demands, period by period, in the cycle. The results from extensive simulation experiments show that the dynamic heuristic significantly outperforms the “preset” approach and its performance is reasonably close to the lower bound. Moreover, the logic of the heuristic is appealing and the calculations, associated with using it, are easy to carry out. Sensitivities to various system parameters (such as the safety factor, coefficient of variation of demand, number of regional warehouses, external lead time, and the cycle length) are presented. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005.