Meeting the growing safeguards burden

ABSTRACT

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) faces challenges in fulfilling its safeguards mandate as a result of an expanding safeguards burden and a relatively static budget. This dilemma has been exacerbated by the additional burdens of implementing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in Iran, but would not go away if implementation of the JCPOA were to end. There are three main areas of opportunity for the Agency: (1) budgetary expansion tied to changes in staffing policies, (2) changes in safeguards approaches, and (3) technological innovation. Barriers and limitations are associated with each approach, and advancing any of them will face a difficult political environment in Vienna.     

The Ethics of Cyber Attack: Pursuing Legitimate Security and the Common Good in Contemporary Conflict Scenarios

ABSTRACT

Cyber attack against Critical National Infrastructure is a developing capability in state arsenals. The onset of this new instrument in national security has implications for conflict thresholds and military ethics. To serve as a legitimate tool of policy, cyber attack must operate in accordance with moral concerns. To test the viability of cyber attack, this paper provides a new perspective on cyber ethics. Cyber attack is tested against the criteria of the common good. This involves identifying the four core components of the common good from a conflict perspective: respect for the person; social wellbeing; peace and security; and solidarity. The fate of these components is assessed in relation to the six key characteristics of cyber attack from a moral standpoint: security; the role or absence of violence; discrimination; proportionality; cyberharm; and the threshold of conflict. It is concluded that the common good must be incorporated into developing state cyber strategies.     

Innovation for seapower: U.S. Navy strategy in an age of acceleration

ABSTRACT

A call for innovation as a means to outpace the acceleration of technological change and to bolster capabilities quickly is a central theme of contemporary U.S. Naval Strategy. The need for innovation is accepted, but the integration of readily available technologies into the Fleet is slow. Innovation unfolds according to “Navy-Time,” a cycle lasting between a long-decade and thirty-years. To accelerate the innovation process in the U.S. Navy, the article offers a Concept of Operations for Innovation that outlines how a deliberate process of analysis, weaponisation and integration can move new ideas and weapons into the Fleet in a strategically relevant time-frame.     

Level product form QSF processes and an analysis of queues with Coxian interarrival distribution

In this article, we study a class of Quasi‐Skipfree (QSF) processes where the transition rate submatrices in the skipfree direction have a column times row structure. Under homogeneity and irreducibility assumptions we show that the stationary distributions of these processes have a product form as a function of the level. For an application, we will discuss the ‐queue that can be modeled as a QSF process on a two‐dimensional state space. In addition, we study the properties of the stationary distribution and derive monotonicity of the mean number of the customers in the queue, their mean sojourn time and the variance as a function of for fixed mean arrival rate. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logisticsxs 66:57–72, 2019