I Will Follow: Smart Power and the Management of Wartime Alliances

Abstract

This paper employs the concept of smart power to construct an analytical framework for assessing wartime alliance management. It makes two arguments. First, wartime sources of soft power differ from those obtaining during peacetime. Second, the coerciveness with which an alliance leader wields hard power towards actual or prospective allies should vary inversely with the amount of soft power it possesses. The smart power framework illuminates three types of alliance management failure. The paper’s key contentions are illustrated with examples furnished from the record of US alliance leadership since World War II.     

Missile Strategy in a Post-Nuclear Age

While the arrival of nuclear weapons coincided roughly with the development of short, medium, intermediate, and eventually intercontinental missiles, the contribution of missile technology to the deterrence equation is often lost. If nuclear weapons were eliminated, even new generation missiles with conventional payloads could struggle to render effective deterrence. But some of the physical and psychological effects commonly ascribed to nuclear weapons could still be in play. And in a world without nuclear weapons, thinking about the use and control of force from the nuclear age would also deserve renewed attention.     

Minimum violations and predictive meta‐rankings for college football

This article presents two meta‐ranking models that minimize or nearly minimize violations of past game results while predicting future game winners as well as or better than leading current systems—a combination never before offered for college football. Key to both is the development and integration of a highly predictive ensemble probability model generated from the analysis of 36 existing college football ranking systems. This ensemble model is used to determine a target ranking that is used in two versions of a hierarchical multiobjective mixed binary integer linear program (MOMBILP). When compared to 75 other systems out‐of‐sample, one MOMBILP was the leading predictive system while getting within 0.64% of the retrodictive optimum; the other MOMBILP minimized violations while achieving a prediction total that was 2.55% lower than the best mark. For bowls, prediction sums were not statistically significantly different from the leading value, while achieving optimum or near‐optimum violation counts. This performance points to these models as potential means of reconciling the contrasting perspectives of predictiveness versus the matching of past performance when it comes to ranking fairness in college football. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 61: 17–33, 2014     

Supply licensing when the manufacturer strategically commits to invest in R&D

This article proposes a strategic reason for a proprietary component supplier to license her technology to a competitor or a manufacturer: her anticipation of the manufacturer's strategic commitment to invest in research and development (R&D). We address this phenomenon with a game theoretic model. Our results show that the manufacturer's full commitment to invest in R&D enables the supplier to license, sell a larger quantity through the supply chain, and charge lower prices. These results are robust to the type of demand uncertainty faced by the manufacturer within the class of increasing generalized failure rate distributions. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 61: 341–350, 2014     

Some aging properties of parallel and series systems with a random number of components

In this article, we study aging properties of parallel and series systems with a random number of components. We show that the decreasing likelihood ratio property is closed under the formation of random minima. We also show, by counterexamples, that other aging properties are not closed under the formation of random minima or maxima. Some mistakes in the literature are corrected. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 61: 238–243, 2014     

Violence and the state: Lessons from Colombia

Whether or not Colombia has improved is a controversial topic. If improvement has occurred, what, if any, lessons from the Colombian model can be learned? The first lesson is that Colombia's problems were caused more by a weak state than by drugs. The second lesson is that improving state capacity requires more than just increased security. The state must also provide the basic social services that citizens require to gain and maintain their support. Additionally, government institutions need to improve their professionalism, protect human rights, and root out impunity and corruption. The alternative is to suffer from new cycles of violence as old foes are vanquished, but new ones emerge.     

Counterinsurgency American style: Considering David Petraeus and twenty-first century irregular war

This article examines the complex legacy of David Petraeus who was a key figure in the emergence of the US military shift towards counterinsurgency doctrine in the years after 2006. Although Petraeus has been perceived by critics as a publicity seeker, he can be credited with laying the foundations for a more serious commitment to COIN involving in particular in integrating conventional and Special Forces in arenas like village stability operations. The article looks a Petraeus's role in both Iraq and Afghanistan: it concludes that, in the case of Afghanistan, it is too early to assess whether counterinsurgency has had a decisive impact of the outcome of the war against the Taliban.     

Optimal service‐capacity allocation in a loss system

We consider a loss system with a fixed budget for servers. The system owner's problem is choosing the price, and selecting the number and quality of the servers, in order to maximize profits, subject to a budget constraint. We solve the problem with identical and different service rates as well as with preemptive and nonpreemptive policies. In addition, when the policy is preemptive, we prove the following conservation law: the distribution of the total service time for a customer entering the slowest server is hyperexponential with expectation equal to the average service rate independent of the allocation of the capacity. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 62: 81–97, 2015