The Dutch COIN approach: three years in Uruzgan, 2006–2009

Rarely has a military commitment led to such intense discussion in the Netherlands as the Task Force Uruzgan (TFU) mission in Afghanistan. In February 2010, the Netherlands' coalition government even collapsed after the two largest parties failed to agree on the withdrawal of Dutch troops from Afghanistan later this year. This article deals first of all with the difficult discussion over the Afghanistan mission of the TFU. The authors then subject three ISAF operations to close scrutiny. The authors provide some suggestions to help understand better this pivotal point in the execution of the whole operation and thus give a fuller picture of the Dutch counterinsurgency approach in Uruzgan.     

Air Power in the Six-Day War

In the aftermath of Israel's stunning victory over Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian forces during the 1967 Six-Day War, accolades for the victory were often showered upon the Israeli Air Force (IAF). Indeed, many believed that it had been Israeli air power that had been the decisive element in the war by first eliminating the Arab air forces and then obliterating the Arab armies in turn. While the IAF did play an extremely important role in the fighting, it was not the decisive element of Israeli victory, and its impact was felt in very different ways from the common perception. Indeed, an appreciation of the true role of Israeli air power in the war reinforces both the importance of psychological factors in combat, and the ability of air forces to have a psychological impact disproportionate to their physical impact.     

Bomboozled: How the U.S. Government Misled Itself and Its People into Believing They Could Survive a Nuclear Attack

Bomboozled: How the U.S. Government Misled Itself and Its People into Believing They Could Survive a Nuclear Attack, by Susan Roy. Pointed Leaf Press, 2011. 176 pages, $45.     

Technical note – operational statistics: Properties and the risk‐averse case

Consider a repeated newsvendor problem for managing the inventory of perishable products. When the parameter of the demand distribution is unknown, it has been shown that the traditional separated estimation and optimization (SEO) approach could lead to suboptimality. To address this issue, an integrated approach called operational statistics (OS) was developed by Chu et al., Oper Res Lett 36 (2008) 110–116. In this note, we first study the properties of this approach and compare its performance with that of the traditional SEO approach. It is shown that OS is consistent and superior to SEO. The benefit of using OS is larger when the demand variability is higher. We then generalize OS to the risk‐averse case under the conditional value‐at‐risk (CVaR) criterion. To model risk from both demand sampling and future demand uncertainty, we introduce a new criterion, called the total CVaR, and find the optimal OS under this new criterion. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 62: 206–214, 2015     

An MX/G/1 queueing system with disasters and repairs under a multiple adapted vacation policy

We consider a queueing system with batch Poisson arrivals subject to disasters which occur independently according to a Poisson process but affect the system only when the server is busy, in which case the system is cleared of all customers. Following a disaster that affects the system, the server initiates a repair period during which arriving customers accumulate without receiving service. The server operates under a Multiple Adapted Vacation policy. The stationary regime of this process is analyzed using the supplementary variables method. We obtain the probability generating function of the number of customers in the system, the fraction of customers who complete service, and the Laplace transform of the system time of a typical customer in stationarity. The stability condition for the system and the Laplace transform of the time between two consecutive disasters affecting the system is obtained by analyzing an embedded Markov renewal process. The statistical characteristics of the batches that complete service without being affected by disasters and those of the partially served batches are also derived. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 62: 171–189, 2015