‘Kadyrovtsy’: Russia’s Counterinsurgency Strategy and the Wars of Paramilitary Clans

This article analyses the steps taken by the Russian government, with the aid of a powerful local clan, the so-called Kadyrovtsy, to subdue the Chechen insurgency. It highlights the strategy used by Russia, under whose patronage former anti-Russian guerrilla fighters were transformed into paramilitary allies of the Russian government; later these former insurgents were incorporated into the regular Russian army and other state security forces. The article also identifies problems that are connected with the activities of the Kadyrovtsy in Chechnya and Russia, and the spillover into the diaspora; it also contextualises the issues faced by the contemporary Chechen ruling clan and the geopolitics of the Caucasus within the research framework of paramilitarism and counterinsurgency.     

The loss‐averse newsvendor problem with supply options

In this article, we consider a loss‐averse newsvendor with stochastic demand. The newsvendor might procure options when demand is unknown, and decide how many options to execute only after demand is revealed. If the newsvendor reserves too many options, he would incur high reservation costs. Yet reserving too few could result in lost sales. So the newsvendor faces a trade‐off between reservation costs and losing sales. When there are multiple options available, the newsvendor has to consider how many units of each to reserve by studying the trade‐off between flexibility and costs. We show how the newsvendor's loss aversion behavior affects his ordering decision, and propose an efficient algorithm to compute his optimal solution in the general case with n options. We also present examples showing how the newsvendor's ordering strategy changes as loss aversion rises. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 62:46–59, 2015     

Women and the military

Debates about the relationship between women and the military have become common within Western societies. These debates primarily centre on the issue of the place, fitness and desirability of a female presence within institutions designed for national war making. There are those who claim that equality betwen the sexes demands the full integration of women into national militaries, including in combat roles, others however argue that women are ill‐equipped for the traditional tasks required of ‘warriors’. This article argues that these debates are increasingly irrelevant. Future wars are increasingly less likely to be fought only by clearly defined national combat forces and more likely to be ‘virtual’ wars involving the deployment of Western technologies against militarily inferior opponents. This too is an age in which Western states will be engaged not just in virtual wars but in ‘humanitarian intervention’, peacekeeping, enforcement and postwar reconstruction. This allows, even encourages, a rethinking of traditional notions and debates over the place of women within the military sphere.     

The concept of logistics derived from Clausewitz: All that is required so that the fighting force can be taken as a given

This article assesses the existing literature on logistics in war, concluding that there is no satisfactory conceptual definition of logistics. It proposes a concept of logistics derived from Clausewitz's theory of war to fill that void. This is presented as a derivation because Clausewitz's distinction between (1) the use of the fighting forces (tactics and strategy) and (2) all other activities in war that were required so that forces could be taken as a given. The latter, left unnamed by Clausewitz, corresponds to a concept of logistics that proves to be an analytical peer to Clausewitz's categories of politics, tactics and strategy.     

Supplier certification and quality investment in supply chains

Global sourcing has made quality management a more challenging task, and supplier certification has emerged as a solution to overcome suppliers' informational advantage about their product quality. This article analyzes the impact of certification standards on the supplier's investment in quality, when a buyer outsources the production process. Based on our results, deterministic certification may lead to under‐investment in quality improvement technology for efficient suppliers, thereby leading to potential supply chain inefficiency. The introduction of noisy certification may alleviate this under‐investment problem, when the cost of information asymmetry is high. While allowing noisy certification always empowers the buyer to offer a menu to screen among heterogeneous suppliers, the buyer may optimally choose only a limited number of certification standards. Our analysis provides a clear‐cut prediction of the types of certifiers the buyer should use for heterogeneous suppliers, and we identify the conditions under which the supplier benefits from noisy certification. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2013     

Book reviews

Book Review: The Future of the Defence Firm: New Challenges, New Directions. Edited by Andrew Latham and Nicholas Hooper NATO ASI Series, Kluwer Academic Publishers ISBN 0–7923–3268–7

James E. Payne and Anandi P. Sahu (eds.) Defense Spending &; Economic Growth, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993.     

Missile systems: “Flexible modularity” and incremental technological change in military production∗

It is often stated that technological change in the military field is characterised by the introduction of radical innovations rather than by incremental processes of technological change. This article illustrates the diversity of military innovation by arguing that technological change in missiles systems is dominated by incremental change. While some large weapons platforms display the design rigidities normally associated with complex systems, missiles are characterised by “flexible modularity”. Flexible modularity facilitates the continuous introduction of upgrades, and makes missile systems amenable to gradual technological change. Besides, it has significant implications for the future role of missile systems, and poses special problems for missile disarmament and technology control initiatives.