Case Study Commentary and Analysis: The Moral Sword of Damocles

Case summary, by James Cook (Case Study Editor):

In the final issue of the 2015 volume of the Journal of Military Ethics, we published a case study entitled “Coining an Ethical Dilemma: The Impunity of Afghanistan’s Indigenous Security Forces”, written by Paul Lushenko. The study detailed two extra-judicial killings (EJKs) by Afghan National Police (ANP) personnel in an area stabilized and overseen by a US-led Combined Task Force (CTF). To deter further EJKs following the first incident, the CTF’s commander reported the incidents up his chain of command and used the limited tools at his disposal to influence local indigenous officials directly. Apparently, the ANP unit took no notice. In his commentary on the case study, Paul Robinson considered moral compromise in war more generally. Coalition troops in Afghanistan, for instance, have encountered not just EJKs but also sexual abuse of minors, killing of non-combatants, kidnapping, torture, and widespread corruption. What should the soldier on the ground do if indigenous personnel violate Laws of Armed Conflict (LOAC) with impunity? Refusing to serve will not right or prevent moral wrongs, while staying on to fight the good but futile fight will mire the soldier in moral compromise. “?… [S]oldiers faced with this dilemma have no good options. The systemic failings surrounding them mean that it is probable that nothing they do will help”. In a concluding note, I suggested that while an individual soldier may indeed have no good options, as Paul Robinson suggests, that soldier’s military and nation at large are obliged to do what they can. At least, they must keep to the moral high ground so as not to give indigenous security forces an excuse to misbehave, and determine the nature of crimes such as EJKs: are they outlaw acts or in fact endorsed by the indigenous culture and perhaps even government? Below Colonel Dave Barnes, himself a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom, analyzes Paul Lushenko’s case study at “?…?the local, tactical level: If a commander is in this situation – where her unit witnesses an EJK or other war crime – what should she do?”     

Reactor-grade plutonium and nuclear weapons: ending the debate

The claim that reactor-grade plutonium cannot or will not be used to produce nuclear weapons has been used to justify non-nuclear-weapon states’ large stockpiles of plutonium that has been separated from highly radioactive spent fuel. However, by using reduced-mass plutonium cores, it is possible to manufacture reliable nuclear weapons with reactor-grade plutonium. These weapons can have the same design, size, weight, and predetonation probability as weapons using weapon-grade plutonium and would require no special cooling. The increased radiation from reactor-grade plutonium could be easily managed by shielding and operational procedures. Weapons using plutonium routinely produced by pressurized-water reactors could have a lethal area between 40 percent and 75 percent that of weapons using weapon-grade plutonium. In the past, both Sweden and Pakistan considered using reactor-grade plutonium to produce nuclear weapons, and India may be using reactor-grade plutonium in its arsenal today. Despite claims to the contrary, the United States used what was truly reactor-grade plutonium in a successful nuclear test in 1962. The capability of reactor-grade plutonium to produce highly destructive nuclear weapons leads to the conclusion that the separation of plutonium, plutonium stockpiling, and the use of plutonium-based fuels must be phased out and banned.     

Optimal interdiction policy for a flow network

This paper analyzes the problem faced by a field commander who, confronted by an enemy on N battlefields, must determine an interdiction policy for the enemy's logistics system which minimizes the amount of war material flowing through this system per unit time. The resource utilized to achieve this interdiction is subject to constraint. It can be shown that this problem is equivalent to determining the set of arcs Z* to remove subject to constraint from a directed graph G such that the resulting maximal flow is minimized. A branch and bound algorithm for the solution to this problem is described, and a numerical example is provided.     

Compromise allocation in multivariate stratified sampling: An integer solution

The problem of determining the sample sizes in various strata when several characteristics are under study is formulated as a nonlinear multistage decision problem. Dynamic programming is used to obtain an integer solution to the problem. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Minimization of expected variance of completion times on single machine for stochastic jobs

This article deals with the problem of scheduling jobs with random processing times on single machine in order to minimize the expected variance of job completion times. Sufficient conditions for the existence of V-shaped optimal sequences are derived separately for general and ordered job processing times. It is shown that when coefficient of variation of random processing times are bounded by a certain value, an optimal sequence is V-shaped. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Joint determination of preventive maintenance and safety stocks in an unreliable production environment

In this article we formulate an analytical model of preventive maintenance and safety stock strategies in a production environment subject to random machine breakdowns. Traditionally, preventive maintenance and safety stocks have been independently studied as two separate strategies for coping with machine breakdowns. Our intent is to develop a unified framework so that the two are jointly considered. We illustrate the trade-off between investing in the two options. In addition, we provide optimality conditions under which either one or both strategies should be implemented to minimize the associated cost function. Specifically, cases with deterministic and exponential repair time distributions are analyzed in detail. We include numerical examples to illustrate the determination of optimal strategies for preventive maintenance and safety stocks. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Optimizing submarine berthing with a persistence incentive

Submarine berthing plans reserve mooring locations for inbound U.S. Navy nuclear submarines prior to their port entrance. Once in port, submarines may be shifted to different berthing locations to allow them to better receive services they require or to make way for other shifted vessels. However, submarine berth shifting is expensive, labor intensive, and potentially hazardous. This article presents an optimization model for submarine berth planning and demonstrates it with Naval Submarine Base, San Diego. After a berthing plan has been approved and published, changed requests for services, delays, and early arrival of inbound submarines are routine events, requiring frequent revisions. To encourage trust in the planning process, the effect on the solution of revisions in the input is kept small by incorporating a persistence incentive in the optimization model. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 44: 301–318, 1997.     

Demand shuffle—A method for multilevel proportional lot sizing and scheduling

This contribution acquaints the reader with a model for multilevel single-machine proportional lot sizing and scheduling problems (PLSPs) that appear in the scope of short-term production planning. It is one of the first articles that deals with dynamic capacitated multilevel lot sizing and scheduling, which is of great practical importance. The PLSP model refines well-known mixed-integer programming formulations for dynamic capacitated lot sizing and scheduling as, for instance, the DLSP or the CSLP. A special emphasis is given on a new method called demand shuffle to solve multilevel PLSP instances efficiently but suboptimally. Although the basic idea is very simple, it becomes clear that in the presence of precedence and capacity constraints many nontrivial details are to be concerned. Computational studies show that the presented approach decidedly improves recent results. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 44: 319–340, 1997