ALL TOGETHER NOW

Banning Weapons of Mass Destruction, by Frederick N. Mattis. Praeger Security International, 2009. 129 pages, $39.95.     

Book review

Tritium on ice: the dangerous new alliance of nuclear weapons and nuclear power by Kenneth D. Bergeron     

NUCLEAR REDUCTIONS AND MIDDLE EAST STABILITY

The United States faces a series of strategic and policy conundrums as it attempts to promote strategic stability in the Persian Gulf and the wider Middle East. This article examines the relationship between a reduced US nuclear arsenal and strategic stability in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. It argues that a series of interrelated political and military factors play a much more significant role in regional security and stability than the US strategic arsenal, which has never, with a few extraordinary exceptions, played a direct role in maintaining regional security. The United States has constructed a system of regional stability based on conventional deterrence and defense that has seen it forward base forces at various installations in the region in combination with efforts to arm, train, and equip host-nation militaries. Nuclear weapons have never played a prominent role in this regional system. Evidence presented in this article suggests that there is no compelling reason for the United States to abandon and/or modify the defensive system of conventional deterrence and defense by adding nuclear-backed guarantees to the mix.     

Modeling and analyzing multiple station baggage screening security system performance

In the aftermath of the tragic events of 11 September 2001, numerous changes have been made to aviation security policy and operations throughout the nation's airports. The allocation and utilization of checked baggage screening devices is a critical component in aviation security systems. This paper formulates problems that model multiple sets of flights originating from multiple stations (e.g., airports, terminals), where the objective is to optimize a baggage screening performance measure subject to a finite amount of resources. These measures include uncovered flight segments (UFS) and uncovered passenger segments (UPS). Three types of multiple station security problems are identified and their computational complexity is established. The problems are illustrated on two examples that use data extracted from the Official Airline Guide. The examples indicate that the problems can provide widely varying solutions based on the type of performance measure used and the restrictions imposed by the security device allocations. Moreover, the examples suggest that the allocations based on the UFS measure also provide reasonable solutions with respect to the UPS measure; however, the reverse may not be the case. This suggests that the UFS measure may provide more robust screening device allocations. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005.     

New sources of military change – armed forces as normal organizations

The literature on how European states have adapted to the post-cold war security environment ffocuses invariably on different understandings of military transformation, a process which is seen as inherently different from other forms of organizational change. However, as this paper argues, new management practices, going back to the introduction of so-called New Public Management (NPM) reforms throughout Europe in the 1980s, have eventually penetrated also the last bastion of the old state – the defense sector. Taking a critical approach to the idea of military transformation and existing theories of military change, the paper demonstrates how other international developments have pushed towards what may be seen as a “normalization” of Europe’s defense sectors. This has important implications for how we approach and understand change in contemporary defense organizations.     

Towards a new national security policy for Canada

Canada is now at a crossroads unlike any other period in its history and needs to carefully consider which path to take. With the new Trudeau government comfortably ensconced since the defeat of the Harper government in the fall of 2015, a variety of competing interests have emerged in an attempt to turn Canadian policy back to a more nostalgic period of the 1970s that some see as preferable to the institutional lash-up that existed since the rolling out of the Canada First policy in the 2000s. That nostalgic period is, however, misunderstood both willfully for political purposes but also through a lack of historical context. Firmly rooting future actions in a blunt analysis of national interests is preferable to the alternative.     

Optimal nonmyopic gambling strategy for the generalized Kelly criterion

We consider the optimal wagers to be made by a gambler who starts with a given initial wealth. The gambler faces a sequence of two-outcome games, i.e., “win” vs. “lose,” and wishes to maximize the expected value of his terminal utility. It has been shown by Kelly, Bellman, and others that if the terminal utility is of the form log x, where x is the terminal wealth, then the optimal policy is myopic, i.e., the optimal wager is always to bet a constant fraction of the wealth provided that the probability of winning exceeds the probability of losing. In this paper we provide a critique of the simple logarithmic assumption for the utility of terminal wealth and solve the problem with a more general utility function. We show that in the general case, the optimal policy is not myopic, and we provide analytic expressions for optimal wager decisions in terms of the problem parameters. We also provide conditions under which the optimal policy reduces to the simple myopic case. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 44: 639–654, 1997     

Optimal strategies for problems of simultaneous attack against an area defense without impact-point prediction

An area to be defended consists of separated point targets. These targets are subject to an attack in which the offensive weapons are assumed to arrive simultaneously. The defense has area defenders, each of which is capable of intercepting any attacker. The defense has no impact-point prediction; that is, it has no knowledge of any attacker's destination prior to allocation of area interceptors. For a given attack, the defense wishes to allocate its interceptors to maximize the total expected survival value of the targets. For a given attack size, the offense seeks a strategy to minimize total expected surviving value against best defense. We determine an optimal defensive strategy directly and develop an algorithm to determine an optimal attack and the optimal value of the min-max problem. A dynamic programming technique is used to obtain integer solutions, and illustrative computational results are provided.