Performance measurement in military operations: information versus incentives

We explore the impact of strategic assessment efforts on military organizations at war. To do so, we construct a model to explore the impact of a principal’s choice among imperfect performance metrics for a military operation. In doing so, the principal must consider both the incentivizing and informational properties of the metric. We show the conditions under which uncertainty regarding the nature of the agent, as well as uncertainty regarding the operational environment, drives a metric choice that induces pathological behavior from the agent. More specifically, a poor metric choice can create an overly optimistic assessment and end up prolonging the conflict. We illustrate the model’s insights in the cases of World War II and the Vietnam War.     

Gorshkov's Gambit

This article is a portrait of Admiral Sergei Gorshkov, commander of the Soviet Navy for almost three decades, from 1956–85. The author, a retired US Navy admiral with a Harvard PhD in Russian studies who served as both defense and naval attaché in Moscow, draws on numerous face-to-face interactions with Gorshkov. He also explores Gorshkov's memoirs that were published recently in Russia but have not appeared in an English translation. The paper is not only a first-hand account of an important historical figure, but also a window into the world of military-to-military diplomacy and intelligence during the Cold War.     

Printed circuit board family grouping and component allocation for a multimachine,open-shop assembly cell

This article considers a particular printed circuit board (PCB) assembly system employing surface mount technology. Multiple, identical automatic placement machines, a variety of board types, and a large number of component types characterize the environment studied. The problem addressed is that of minimizing the makespan for assembling a batch of boards with a secondary objective of reducing the mean flow time. The approach adopted is that of grouping boards into production families, allocating component types to placement machines for each family, dividing of families into board groups with similar processing times, and the scheduling of groups. A complete setup is incurred only when changing over between board families. For the environment studied, precedence constraints on the order of component placement do not exist, and placement times are independent of feeder location. Heuristic solution procedures are proposed to create board subfamilies (groups) for which the component mounting times are nearly identical within a subfamily. Assignment of the same component type to multiple machines is avoided. The procedures use results from the theory of open-shop scheduling and parallel processor scheduling to sequence boards on machines. Note that we do not impose an open-shop environment but rather model the problem in the context of an open shop, because the order of component mountings is immaterial. Three procedures are proposed for allocating components to machines and subsequently scheduling boards on the machines. The first two procedures assign components to machines to balance total work load. For scheduling purposes, the first method groups boards into subfamilies to adhere to the assumptions of the open-shop model, and the second procedure assumes that each board is a subfamily and these are scheduled in order of shortest total processing time. The third procedure starts by forming board subfamilies based on total component similarity and then assigns components to validate the open-shop model. We compare the performance of the three procedures using estimated daily, two-day, and weekly production requirements by averaging quarterly production data for an actual cell consisting of five decoupled machines. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Exposing and exploiting weaknesses in the merger of Al-Qaeda and Al-Shabaab

On 9 February 2012 the Somali terrorist organization al-Shabaab officially merged with al-Qaeda. While the significance of the merger is highly contested, it does expose internal weaknesses within the two organizations along ideological, clan, and sectarian lines. The article identifies three key weaknesses of the merger and concludes with a discussion of al-Qaeda's growing presence in trans-Saharan Africa.     

Optimal inventory policy when stockouts alter demand

An inventory model in which future demand is affected by stockouts has been considered recently by B. L. Schwartz. Some generalizations of Schwartz's model are presented in this paper and properties of the optimal policies are determined. In the case of deterministic demand, a set-up cost is included and a mixture of backlogged and nonbacklogged orders is allowed during stockout. It is proved that the optimal policy entails either no stockout or continual stockout, depending on the values of three parameters. For stochastic demand, the effect of stockouts on demand density is postulated, the resulting optimal inventory policy is discussed, and an example involving an exponential density function is then analyzed in detail.     

Minimum deterrence and missile defenses: what's new,what's true,what's arguable

Minimum deterrence is a compromise, or halfway house, between nuclear abolition or nearly zero and assured destruction, the dominant paradigm for strategic nuclear arms control during and after the cold war. Minimum deterrence as applied to the current relationship between the United States and Russia would require downsizing the numbers of operationally deployed long-range nuclear weapons to 1000, or fewer, on each side. More drastic bilateral Russian–American reductions would require the cooperation of other nuclear weapons states in making proportional reductions in their own arsenals. In addition, US plans for European-based and global missile defenses cause considerable angst in Russia and threaten to derail the Obama “reset” in Russian–American relations, despite the uncertainties about current and plausible future performances of missile defense technologies.     

Bayes adaptive control of two-echelon inventory systems,II: The multistation case

The present paper extends the results of [7] to cases of multistation lower echelon. For this purpose an algorithm for the optimal allocation of the upper echelon stock among the lower echelon stations is developed. The policy of ordering for the upper echelon is an extension of the Bayes prediction policy developed in [7]. Explicit formulae are presented for the execution of this policy. Several simulation runs are presented and analyzed for the purpose of obtaining information on the behavior of the system, under the above control policy, over short and long periods.     

Exponential size neighborhoods for makespan minimization scheduling

We investigate the quality of local search heuristics for the scheduling problem of minimizing the makespan on identical parallel machines. We study exponential size neighborhoods (whose size grows exponentially with the input length) that can be searched in polynomial time, and we derive worst‐case approximation guarantees for the local optima of such neighborhoods. The so‐called split neighborhood splits a feasible schedule into two layers, and then recombines the two layers by finding a perfect matching. We show that the makespan of every local optimum for split is at most a factor of 2 away from the globally optimal makespan. We then combine the split neighborhood with two neighborhoods from the literature. The combination of split with the jump neighborhood only marginally improves the approximation guarantee, whereas the combination with the lexicographic‐jump neighborhood decreases the approximation guarantee from 2 to 3/2. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2011     

A parametric-based heuristic program for the quadratic assignment problem

In this article we study the quadratic assignment problem by embedding the actual data in a data space which satisfies an extension of the metric triangle property. This leads to simpler computations for the determination of heuristic solutions. Bounds are given for the loss of optimality which such heuristic solutions would involve in any specific instance. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.