Sharing the load: factors in supporting local armed groups in insurgencies

Most counterinsurgency campaigns have featured the use of some form of local defense forces. Such forces have had a somewhat mixed record, both in their usefulness in actually countering insurgents and in their longer-term impact on internal security. This article focuses on historical cases that provide lessons for the best operational and strategic uses of local defense forces and measures to control their activities.     

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.     

An economic selective assembly procedure for two mating components with equal variance

An economic procedure of selective assembly is proposed when a product is composed of two mating components. The major quality characteristic of the product is the clearance between the two components. The components are divided into several classes prior to assembly. The component characteristics are assumed to be independently and normally distributed with equal variance. The procedure is designed so that the proportions of both components in their corresponding classes are the same. A cost model is developed based on a quadratic loss function and methods of obtaining the optimal class limits as well as the optimal number of classes are provided. Formulas for obtaining the proportion of rejection and the unavailability of mating components are also provided. The proposed model is compared with the equal width and the equal area partitioning methods using a numerical example. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 46: 809–821, 1999     

The value of observing the condition of a deteriorating machine

We examine a small lot production setting in which a machine may go out of control and begin producing defective units. Traditionally, managers have had to rely upon observations of the quality of the output to determine whether the machine is in or out of control. However, with advances in technology such as vibration analysis, it is increasingly possible to obtain much more accurate information about the state of the machine. In this paper, we model and analyze a deteriorating machine in order to gain insight into the conditions under which investments in such technology are most beneficial. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 46: 790–808, 1999     

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     

Integrated capacity,demand, and production planning with subcontracting and overtime options

Models for integrated production and demand planning decisions can serve to improve a producer's ability to effectively match demand requirements with production capabilities. In contexts with price‐sensitive demands, economies of scale in production, and multiple capacity options, such integrated planning problems can quickly become complex. To address these complexities, this paper provides profit‐maximizing production planning models for determining optimal demand and internal production capacity levels under price‐sensitive deterministic demands, with subcontracting and overtime options. The models determine a producer's optimal price, production, inventory, subcontracting, overtime, and internal capacity levels, while accounting for production economies of scale and capacity costs through concave cost functions. We use polyhedral properties and dynamic programming techniques to provide polynomial‐time solution approaches for obtaining an optimal solution for this class of problems when the internal capacity level is time‐invariant. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007