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.     

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.     

From the ESS to the EU Global Strategy: external policy,internal purpose

Security strategies are important sites for narrating the EU into existence as a security actor. The unveiling of a new global strategy on foreign and security policy for the EU immediately post-Brexit could be conceived as a pledge to remain together as a Union for the purposes of contributing to global security in a particular way. This paper offers a brief stock-taking of the EU’s way of writing security from the European Security Strategy (2003) to the EU Global Strategy (2016). A concise exegesis of these documents exposes an interesting dynamic: as exercises in ordering the world, both strategic guidelines have turned out to be major exercises in ordering the self. The comparative snapshot shows the EU as increasingly anxious to prove its relevance for its own citizens, yet notably less confident about its actual convincingness as an ontological security framework for the EU’s constituent members over time.     

Landmarks in defense literature

Military operations and maritime preponderance by Charles E. Callwell, Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1905.     

An Investigation of the Weights of Pattern 1907 Bayonets made in the UK around the First World War Period

The standard issue bayonet of the British Army immediately preceding and during the First World War was the Pattern 1907. This was manufactured at different times and in varying numbers during that period by one official body, the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield, and by five private contractors. These bayonets were made according to published official specifications issued by the War Department and based on a ‘pattern example’ provided by the Royal Small Arms Factory. The specifications indicate, inter alia, the quality of metal used in making the bayonets, methods of inspection and proofing, and the required maximum and minimum weight range of the completed bayonet. However, examination of a series of these bayonets in a private collection suggested that their weights varied considerably from the mid-point values of the allowed weight ranges in the original and amended specifications (16.5 oz. and 17 oz., respectively). To establish if this was a common feature among this class of bayonet as opposed to a chance factor, the weights of other surviving Pattern 1907 bayonets were determined and compared to establish the degree of variance from the official specifications as originally set out by the Royal Small Arms Factory. Seventy-six percent of the 142 bayonets surveyed were found to be above the mid-point of the allowed weight range given in the amended manufacturing specifications, with many being at the upper end of the allowed range. This is a statistically unusual result. It is speculated that the target weight may have been deliberately set higher by the individual manufacturers to eliminate the possibility of rejection of any underweight bayonets by the Royal Small Arms Factory inspectors and so a refusal of acceptance and payment for the work.     

The Clausewitzian fallacy of absolute war

Clausewitz was much preoccupied with the apparent contradiction between real and absolute war. Why did war in history so rarely exhibit the extremes of violence and energy implied in the pure concept of war? Clausewitz’s commentators have usually followed him in thinking that this was a genuine problem in need of a solution, but I want to question that view. I will argue that Clausewitz did not have a coherent philosophy of absolute war, and therefore the contradiction he posited between real and absolute war was equally meaningless – as, too, was his effort to resolve it by claiming that some real wars approached or even attained the absolute form of war. The real problem was not the opposition of real and absolute war, but the self-contradictory theory of absolute war.     

An index policy for a stochastic scheduling model with improving/deteriorating jobs

We consider stochastic scheduling models which have the natural character that jobs improve while being processed, but deteriorate (and may possibly leave the system altogether) while processing is diverted elsewhere. Such restless bandit problems are shown to be indexable in the sense of Whittle. A numerical study which elucidates the strong performance of the resulting index policy is complemented by a theoretical study which demonstrates the optimality of the index policy under given conditions and which develops performance guarantees for the index heuristic more generally. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 49: 706–721, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/nav.10036     

Exploiting self‐canceling demand point aggregation error for some planar rectilinear median location problems

When solving location problems in practice it is quite common to aggregate demand points into centroids. Solving a location problem with aggregated demand data is computationally easier, but the aggregation process introduces error. We develop theory and algorithms for certain types of centroid aggregations for rectilinear 1‐median problems. The objective is to construct an aggregation that minimizes the maximum aggregation error. We focus on row‐column aggregations, and make use of aggregation results for 1‐median problems on the line to do aggregation for 1‐median problems in the plane. The aggregations developed for the 1‐median problem are then used to construct approximate n‐median problems. We test the theory computationally on n‐median problems (n ≥ 1) using both randomly generated, as well as real, data. Every error measure we consider can be well approximated by some power function in the number of aggregate demand points. Each such function exhibits decreasing returns to scale. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 50: 614–637, 2003.