Territorial contestation and repressive violence in civil war

This study models the structural sources of variation in the use of selective (discriminate) repression within 89 civil wars fought between 1981 and 2005. The severity of repressive violence is modeled as a function of the amount of territory being contested by the insurgents. This idea is operationalized using measures of the location, size, and density of insurgency violence. The analysis finds evidence that the repressive behavior of both governments and rebel groups is linked to conflict geography. Governments violate physical integrity rights more frequently and kill more civilians the greater the overall amount of territory under contestation. Rebels kill more civilians in highly dispersed insurgencies that lack a clear epicenter.     

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.     

Using the Feder-Ram and Military Keynesian Models to Examine the Link Between Defence Spending and Economic Growth in Sri Lanka

This study uses the Feder-Ram model in conjunction with the military Keynesian model to examine the nexus between defence spending and economic growth in Sri Lanka. We find that the Keynesian aggregate demand model is better suited to analyse the link than the Feder-Ram model for the case of Sri Lanka. Based upon our results we expect a higher economic growth rate in Sri Lanka if more public resources are diverted from the defence to civilian sectors of the economy, now that the war between the government and separatist guerrillas has come to an end. However, recent post war events cast doubt upon whether a diversion of sources from military to non-military spending will actually occur. We conclude that the sanguine predictions of our economic analysis are entirely dependent upon the political decisions of the Sri Lankan government for their realization.     

Military Spending and Economic Growth in South Asia: A Panel Data Analysis

Despite the large number and variety of studies addressing the relationship between military spending and economic growth, a consensus regarding the exact nature of any relationship between the two has proven elusive. This study uses a panel co-integration approach to examine the relationship between military spending and economic growth in the five South Asian countries of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh over the period of 1988–2007. It finds that a 1% increase in military spending increases real GDP by only 0.04%, suggesting that the substantial amount of public expenditure that is currently directed towards military purposes in these countries has a negligible impact upon economic growth.     

INCOMPLETE ROHLFS–SULLIVAN ANALYSIS OF THE COST-EFFECTIVENESS OF ARMORED TACTICAL WHEELED VEHICLES FOR OVERSEAS US ARMY OPERATIONS

This comment addresses the Rohlfs–Sullivan analysis titled: ‘The Cost-Effectiveness of Armored Tactical Wheeled Vehicles [TWVs] for Overseas US Army Operations.’ The analysis evaluated policies to replace Type 1 and 2 TWVs with Type 3s. There is no evidence the analysis factored in fatality causes, fatality relationships to vehicles, or compared survivability of vehicles. Furthermore, it did not note when Type 3 TWVs were requested, when they impacted fatalities, or TWV use policies. It also assumed Type 3 TWVs prompted negative unit behaviors while discounting evidence of positive behaviors. In summary, the analysis is incomplete and should be revised.     

Countering global insurgency

This article suggests that the War on Terrorism is actually a campaign against a globalized Islamist 1 1 In this article, the term ‘Islamist’ describes the extremist, radical form of political Islam practiced by some militant groups, as distinct from ‘Islamic’, which describes the religion of Islam, or ‘Muslim’, which describes those who follow the Islamic religion. In this article the term is used to refer primarily to Al Qaeda, its allies and affiliates. View all notes insurgency. Therefore, counterinsurgency approaches are more relevant to the present conflict than traditional terrorism theory. Indeed, a counterinsurgency approach would generate subtly, but substantially different, policy choices in prosecuting the war against Al Qaeda. Based on this analysis, the article proposes a strategy of ‘disaggregation’ that seeks to dismantle, or break, the links in the global jihad.2 2 This article uses the short form of the Islamic term jihad to mean ‘lesser jihad’ (armed struggle against unbelievers), rather than ‘greater jihad’ (jihad fi sabilillah), i.e. moral struggle for the righteousness of God. View all notes Like containment in the Cold War, disaggregation would provide a unifying strategic conception for the war – a conception that has been somewhat lacking to date.     

A three‐stage procurement optimization problem under uncertainty

This article examines a problem faced by a firm procuring a material input or good from a set of suppliers. The cost to procure the material from any given supplier is concave in the amount ordered from the supplier, up to a supplier‐specific capacity limit. This NP‐hard problem is further complicated by the observation that capacities are often uncertain in practice, due for instance to production shortages at the suppliers, or competition from other firms. We accommodate this uncertainty in a worst‐case (robust) fashion by modeling an adversarial entity (which we call the “follower”) with a limited procurement budget. The follower reduces supplier capacity to maximize the minimum cost required for our firm to procure its required goods. To guard against uncertainty, the firm can “protect” any supplier at a cost (e.g., by signing a contract with the supplier that guarantees supply availability, or investing in machine upgrades that guarantee the supplier's ability to produce goods at a desired level), ensuring that the anticipated capacity of that supplier will indeed be available. The problem we consider is thus a three‐stage game in which the firm first chooses which suppliers' capacities to protect, the follower acts next to reduce capacity from unprotected suppliers, and the firm then satisfies its demand using the remaining capacity. We formulate a three‐stage mixed‐integer program that is well‐suited to decomposition techniques and develop an effective cutting‐plane algorithm for its solution. The corresponding algorithmic approach solves a sequence of scaled and relaxed problem instances, which enables solving problems having much larger data values when compared to standard techniques. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2013     

New results on rendezvous search on the interval

In a rendezvous search problem, two players are placed in a network and must try to meet each other in the least possible expected time. We look at rendezvous search on a discrete interval in which the players are initially placed using independent draws (usually assumed to be from the same distribution). Some optimal solutions are known if this distribution is uniform, and also for certain other special types of distribution. In this article, we present two new results. First, we characterize the complete set of solutions for the uniform case, showing that all optimal strategies must have two specific properties (namely, of being swept and strictly geodesic). Second, we relate search strategies on the interval to proper binary trees, and use this correspondence to derive a recurrence relation for solutions to the symmetric rendezvous problem for any initial distribution. This relation allows us to solve any such problem computationally by dynamic programming. Finally, some ideas for future research are discussed. © Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 60: 454–467, 2013