Globalization's Bastards: Illegitimate Non-State Actors in International Law

The international system has great difficulty in dealing with illegitimate non-state actors such as transnational terrorist groups and organized crime syndicates. This is due to two main factors: the quality and quantity of influence these illegitimate actors have obtained in an era of globalization, and the fact that international law considers only individual criminals and terrorists as subjects, rather than the entire illegitimate enterprise, and does not adequately link individuals, enterprises and states to more nuanced and complex forms of sponsorship of illegal activities. This work offers an outline for tools that should be embedded in the fabric of international law and agreements, to sustain credibility against illegal non-state actors, to hold accountable  sponsors of illegality and to reinforce the legitimacy of globalization.     

Evaluating the Spillover Effects of the Colombian Conflict in Ecuador

The Colombian civil war lasted for nearly six decades with approximately 10 percent of its population being displaced over the same period. The implications of this conflict have transgressed international boundaries. Countries such as Ecuador experienced an exodus of victims as well as an increase in the presence of armed groups, along with the proliferation of illegal businesses. Even though the internal social and economic consequences of the Colombian conflict have been documented in the literature, there is yet to be a study addressing these issues from the perspective of impacted neighboring countries. In this work, we contribute to the literature by evaluating whether the influx of asylum seekers and the increasing presence of armed groups in the bordering provinces of Ecuador have lead to an increase in violence among these provinces. We do not find any link between the arrival of asylum seekers and the incidence of violent crimes in the Ecuadorean bordering provinces. Similarly, our results indicate that despite an increase in the presence of armed groups, these regions did not experience an increase in the homicide rates significantly different from the other provinces. The results are robust to various specifications and econometric techniques.     

War’s Horizon: Soldier-Led Adaptation in Iraq and Vietnam

Wartime adaptation is a process of adjustment from the war you planned for to the one you have. This process of adjustment is done, in part, by the practitioners of war in the theater of conflict–soldier-led adaptation. Drawing upon two case studies of gun truck development in Iraq and Vietnam I argue that soldiers created networks in order to adapt to battlefield challenges and that the pattern of those networks carries implications for the likelihood of formal adoption by the organization. Simply put, the pattern of the flow of ideas, resources, and skills across the battlefield may affect the likelihood of bottom-up adaptation.     

Minimizing weighted mean absolute deviation of flow times in single machine systems

We discuss the problem of scheduling several jobs on a single machine with the objective of minimizing the weighted mean absolute deviation of flow times around the weighted mean flow time. We first show that the optimal schedule is W-shaped. For the unweighted case, we show that all optimal schedules are V-shaped. This characterization enables us to show that the problem is NP-hard. We then provide a pseudopolynomial algorithm for the unweighted problem. Finally, we consider three heuristic algorithms for the unweighted problem and report computational experience with these algorithms. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 45: 297–311, 1998     

Inventory management under random supply disruptions and partial backorders

We explore the management of inventory for stochastic-demand systems, where the product's supply is randomly disrupted for periods of random duration, and demands that arrive when the inventory system is temporarily out of stock become a mix of backorders and lost sales. The stock is managed according to the following modified (s, S) policy: If the inventory level is at or below s and the supply is available, place an order to bring the inventory level up to S. Our analysis yields the optimal values of the policy parameters, and provides insight into the optimal inventory strategy when there are changes in the severity of supply disruptions or in the behavior of unfilled demands. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 45: 687–703, 1998     

The open shop scheduling problem with a given sequence of jobs on one machine

The paper considers the open shop scheduling problem to minimize the make-span, provided that one of the machines has to process the jobs according to a given sequence. We show that in the preemptive case the problem is polynomially solvable for an arbitrary number of machines. If preemption is not allowed, the problem is NP-hard in the strong sense if the number of machines is variable, and is NP-hard in the ordinary sense in the case of two machines. For the latter case we give a heuristic algorithm that runs in linear time and produces a schedule with the makespan that is at most 5/4 times the optimal value. We also show that the two-machine problem in the nonpreemptive case is solvable in pseudopolynomial time by a dynamic programming algorithm, and that the algorithm can be converted into a fully polynomial approximation scheme. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 45: 705–731, 1998     

Statistical Analysis as an Adjunct to Historical Research: Identification of the Likely Manufacturers of British Pattern 1907 Bayonets Supplied by the Birmingham Small Arms Company to the Siamese Government in 1920

In 1920, the Birmingham Small Arms Company supplied 10,000 Pattern 1907 bayonets to the government of Siam to accompany an order for rifles. The original maker of these bayonets was unknown, but historical research indicates that the Wilkinson Sword Co. Ltd. was a primary maker. The weights of some surviving Pattern 1907 bayonets, including twelve bayonets from the 10,000 described above, produced by the six makers in the UK before and during the Great War (1914–1918) period were available. A statistical analysis of the data was performed to compare with the historical research. The results strongly supported that the Wilkinson Sword Co. Ltd. was a primary maker. They were also sufficient to exclude from this batch of twelve bayonets the Royal Small Arms Factory (Enfield) and Vickers Ltd. as manufacturers. The statistical evidence for the presence of bayonets made by J.A. Chapman Ltd., R. Mole & Sons and Sanderson Bros. was weaker than that for the Wilkinson Sword Co. Ltd., but was nevertheless supportive of that hypothesis. Overall, the analysis was consistent with the supply to Siam of commingled bayonets from British government stores. It was noted that the bayonets for the Siam contract fell into a relatively narrow weight range, but the reason for this could not be determined.     

Landmarks in defense literature

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

‘A Better War?’ – The View from the Nixon White House

This article examines the relationship between the White House and the US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) during President Richard M. Nixon's administration. It argues that dysfunctional civil-military relations between 1969 and 1972 undermined the implementation of a sound military strategy during the United States' withdrawal from South Vietnam as Nixon attempted to achieve ‘peace with honor’ during the Vietnam War's final campaigns. By 1972, the relationship between the White House and MACV headquarters had reached the nadir of civil-military relations during the Southeast Asian conflict and had served to undercut the United States' ability to effectively disengage from a long and bitterly contested war.     

Decommissioning and paramilitary strategy in Northern Ireland: A problem compared

This study examines the problems of paramilitary decommissioning in Northern Ireland. It analyses why decommissioning has become so contentious in the Northern Ireland peace process. Decommissioning, though, is not a unique or intrinsically insurmountable problem. This is demonstrated by highlighting the issue in international context. Three examples of decommissioning in conflict resolution processes are assessed: the Lebanon, El Salvador and Mozambique. These varied examples do supply some limited lessons for Northern Ireland. This study argues that the explanation for the intractability of decommissioning in Northern Ireland resides, to a greater extent, in the tactical and strategic reasoning of the main paramilitary groupings in Northern Ireland. The factors that condition their thinking, however, can be found in the nature of the peace process itself which provides the paramilitiaries with every incentive to retain possession of their weapons.