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Some have argued that the transatlantic rancor over the Iraq war made cooperation, especially on nonproliferation, unlikely. In contrast, this article, documents post-invasion instances of nonproliferation cooperation, with particular emphasis on the Proliferation Security Initiative and the EU-3 Initiative—the British, French, and German negotiations with Iran over its suspected nuclear activities. In addition to documenting French and British participation in these initiatives, the article analyzes why they have chosen to participate and argues that France and Britain have participated in both efforts because they are committed to avoiding future Iraq-like preventive wars.     

The Iraq Survey Group: From Weapons of Mass Destruction to Counterinsurgency

The discovery and elimination of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was a focal point of the Coalition's strategy and operations in the aftermath of Operation ‘Iraqi Freedom’. Despite the failure of the WMD mission to meet expectations after almost two years of intensive operations, the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) was able to integrate multinational and multi-agency forces to provide detailed intelligence regarding the history of Iraq's WMD programs and to assist in the battle against insurgents. The ISG's experience raises the question of whether a standing intelligence force could become a key component in future counterproliferation and counterterrorism efforts around the world.1 ¹The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Dept. of Defense, or the US Government. View all notes     

Military Debt: Perspectives from the Experience of Arab Countries

The sectoral production function model of Feder (1983) has been widely used to examine the link between defence spending and economic growth. In this paper, the model, for which too much has been claimed in some past work, is examined, and the case is made for using growth in real non‐defence output rather than growth in real aggregate output (inclusive of military spending) as the dependent variable. Attention is restricted to a small group of OECD countries for which reliable labour force and capital stock (as well as defence) data are obtainable. With non‐defence output as the dependent variable and using only high quality data, no evidence in favour of the underconsumptionist (as opposed to the defence as a burden) position is found.     

Optimal force mix in heterogeneous combat

This article presents models for determining the optimum number of Red weapons required to win a heterogeneous combat in which m(m> 1) types of Red weapons face a single type of Blue weapon under a newly defined termination policy. Red aims at either minimizing the total cost or maximizing the aggregated remaining force strength. Kuhn-Tucker and simulated annealing techniques are used for obtaining the optimal solution. The methodology is illustrated by analysing heterogeneous combat to determine (i) the feasibility of introducing new types of weapons and (ii) the number of weapons required to win if a specific type of weapon, say infantry, dominates. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

A replacement model with overhauls and repairs

This article generalizes the classical periodical replacement model with minimal repair by considering the effect of the overhaul, which is assumed to be able to rejuvenate the system. The generalization is based on the notion of the virtual age of a system introduced by Kijima, Morimura, and Suzuki [“Periodical Replacement Problem without Assuming Minimal Repair,” European Journal of Operational Research, 37 , 194–203 (1988)]. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Note: A local-search heuristic for large set-covering problems

In this note we describe a local-search heuristic (LSH) for large non-unicost set-covering problems (SCPs). The new heuristic is based on the simulated annealing algorithm and uses an improvement routine designed to provide low-cost solutions within a reasonable amount of CPU time. The solution costs associated with the LSH compared very favorably to the best previously published solution costs for 20 large SCPs taken from the literature. In particular, the LSH yielded new benchmark solutions for 17 of the 20 test problems. We also report that, for SCPs where column cost is correlated with column coverage, the new heuristic provides solution costs competitive with previously published results for comparable problems. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Capacity improvement,penalties, and the fixed charge transportation problem

Capacity improvement and conditional penalties are two computational aides for fathoming subproblems in a branch‐and‐bound procedure. In this paper, we apply these techniques to the fixed charge transportation problem (FCTP) and show how relaxations of the FCTP subproblems can be posed as concave minimization problems (rather than LP relaxations). Using the concave relaxations, we propose a new conditional penalty and three new types of capacity improvement techniques for the FCTP. Based on computational experiments using a standard set of FCTP test problems, the new capacity improvement and penalty techniques are responsible for a three‐fold reduction in the CPU time for the branch‐and‐bound algorithm and nearly a tenfold reduction in the number of subproblems that need to be evaluated in the branch‐and‐bound enumeration tree. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 46: 341–355, 1999