Landmarks in defense literature

The Weapons Acquisition Process: An Economic Analysis By M.J. Peck and F.M. Scherer Boston: Harvard University Press, (1962).     

Identifying the challenges to defence reform in Central and Eastern Europe: observations from the field

The authors have over 50 years' experience of working on defence in Central and Eastern Europe. They have been intimately involved in trying to reform over 10 national defence organisations including Ukraine. During this work, they often faced intractable resistance and scepticism or conversely, apparent unbounded support, but following this, a complete lack of any actual implementation work by officials. This paper addresses some of the findings and observations identified by the authors that appear to cause these responses and the consequent failure of reform. A new research approach has been taken by using the business and culture tools from Schein, Hofstede and Kotter to try and unravel the underlying causality of that failure. The second part of the paper produces a new process for change based upon the research conclusions to help other advisers and consultants working on reform in the post communist defence arena.     

Optimizing the US Navy's combat logistics force

We study how changes to the composition and employment of the US Navy combat logistic force (CLF) influence our ability to supply our navy worldwide. The CLF consists of about 30 special transport ships that carry ship and aircraft fuel, ordnance, dry stores, and food, and deliver these to client combatant ships underway, making it possible for our naval forces to operate at sea for extended periods. We have modeled CLF operations to evaluate a number of transforming initiatives that simplify its operation while supporting an even larger number of client ships for a greater variety of missions. Our input is an employment schedule for navy battle groups of ships operating worldwide, extending over a planning horizon of 90–180 days. We show how we use optimization to advise how to sustain these ships. We have used this model to evaluate new CLF ship designs, advise what number of ships in a new ship class would be needed, test concepts for forward at‐sea logistics bases in lieu of conventional ports, demonstrate the effects of changes to operating policy, and generally try to show whether and how the CLF can support planned naval operations. Published 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 2008     

The Millenials’ war: dilemmas of network dependency in today’s military

This work is about how the United States military has become dependent on networked technology. As arguably the largest contributor to national security, it has become so dependent that its chief doctrine integrates networked technology into nearly every specialty, with particularly intense focus on Network Centric Warfare. As the military’s old guard is replaced by the highly technical Millenial Generation, there is cause to pause when assuming this techno-acuity brings nothing but advantage and success. Vulnerabilities stemming from such extensive dependence offer opportunities for exploitation that have not gone unnoticed. The first step to moving forward from this point is to fully understand the extent to which the military has become dependent on computer networks. It might be the Millenials’ war today, but it would be quite unwise for the United States military to think about it and fight it in a purely Millenial way.     

Aircraft weapon budgeting

This article considers the problem of allocating a fixed budget among alternative air-to-ground weapons. The weapon-budgeting problem is high-dimensional, involving all feasible combinations of aircraft, weapons, and targets. The decision maker's utility function is defined over kills of the various target types, but it is unrealistic to expect him to write down the mathematical formula for this function. The article suggests two procedures for reducing the dimension of the maximization problem and operating without exact knowledge of the utility function. The first procedure uses successive linear approximations to generate the set of “efficient” or undominated weapon allocations. The second procedure applies separability restrictions to the utility function, thereby reducing the overall maximization problem to a sequence of low-dimensional subproblems.