Search and the introduction of improved technologies

Modeling R&D as standard sequential search, we consider a monopolist who can implement a sequence of technological discoveries during the technology search process: he earns revenue on his installed technology while he engages in R&D to find improved technology. What is not standard is that he has a finite number of opportunities to introduce improved technology. We show that his optimal policy is characterized by thresholds ξ_i(x): introduce the newly found technology if and only if it exceeds ξ_i(x) when x is the state of the currently installed technology and i is the number of remaining introductions allowed. We also analyze a nonstationary learning‐by‐doing model in which the monopolist's experience in implementing new technologies imparts increased capability in generating new technologies. Because this nonstationary model is not in the class of monotone stopping problems, a number of surprising results hold and several seemingly obvious properties of the stationary model no longer hold. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2011     

军事文化:一个范式的转换(节选)

本篇译稿节选了美国空军中校卡伦·O·杜尼文《军事文化——一个范式的转换?》一书的部分内容,作者考察了美国军事文化中的社会性变化,探究了美国军事文化中一种介于军事的传统与非传统之间的,介于男性战士为主的范式或信仰体系和以平等主义与兼容并蓄为特征的充满矛盾的进化军事文化模式之间的斗争。这是一场旧思想和新思想之间的竞赛。译者选编了作者战斗部队中的女性(战争中的女性)这一典型案例来阐述美国军事文化中范式与模式之间的差异。杜尼文中校在本书中还考察了美国军事文化中存在的长期冲突,她建议美国军方现在开始需再一次进行文化范式的转换———从传统的以男性士兵为主的排他性价值观向一种兼容并蓄的从军观念转变。作者强调美国军方必须在其发展过程中,削减其分离主义和排外性的倾向。她提出实施这一范式转换的三个对策(战略部署):改变军方的占主导地位的关于“战斗着的,充满阳刚之气”的具有排他性而非包容性的标准和想法;主动接受并控制正在持续的主要的社会性变化;同时接受与个人和组织对范式转换的职责。范式转换的先驱们必须特别地推崇一种兼容并蓄与平等主义的文化。杜尼文中校也强调了美国高级军事将领是产生美国军事范式转换的最佳催化剂———他们是真正的先驱,他们能够使兼容并蓄的文化范式制度化。杜尼文中校提出如下结论:如果美国希望其军方成为美国社会的一面镜子,无疑要接受一种兼容并蓄的文化范式。     

Homes for heroes? Assessing the impact of the UK’s Military Covenant

The British Military Covenant can be located in and from many sources and from 2011 onwards in primary legislation. This article argues that the provision of military housing amounts to an early test of how the military covenant is understood and used by those involved in defence policy, and those in the armed forces affected by it. It finds that housing was a prominent feature of how service personnel understood how they were valued, but was not explicitly understood as a covenant issue by those personnel or the officials in charge of the Defence Estates. We locate three reasons for this: (1) the covenant has been poorly translated from aspiration into policy practice, (2) the covenant is unevenly understood across its stakeholders which has the effect of generating disappointment through misaligned expectations, (3) those engaged in the reform process surrounding the Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO) saw the covenant as a means to energise reform. Ultimately housing was seen as a dry and technocratic business area and thus an issue ripe for being refracted through the covenant was ultimately left outside of its remit.     

Note: Facility location with closest rectangular distances

This paper considers the problem of locating one or more new facilities on a continuous plane, where the destinations or customers, and even the facilities, may be represented by areas and not points. The objective is to locate the facilities in order to minimize a sum of transportation costs. What is new in this study is that the relevant distances are the distances from the closest point in the facility to the closest point in the demand areas. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 47: 77–84, 2000     

Applying Lanchester's linear law to model the Ardennes campaign

In modern warfare, many believe the decisive factor in winning a battle is seizing the right moment to shift from defense to attack, or vice versa. This paper attempts to bring that perspective to Lanchester's differential equations of warfare, and continues the application of Lanchester's linear law to the analysis of the World War II battle of Ardennes, as reported in earlier issues of Naval Research Logistics by Bracken and by Fricker. A new variable, shift time, accounting for the timing of the shift between defense and attack is explicitly included in our version of the model, and it helps obtain improved goodness of fit to historical data. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 48:653–661, 2001     

Military autonomy: its origins,limits, and the politico-military dialectic of war

Military officers often oppose political interference in the conduct of war. Political leaders respond by citing Clausewitz’s contention that “war is the continuation of politics with the addition of other means.” Scholarship in security studies and civil-military relations argues that civilians are right to oppose military autonomy because it serves the parochial interests of the military. However, through the dialectical relationship between the violent essence of war and its political nature, Clausewitz provides an alternative explanation for military demands for autonomy. He shows that military and political leaders are prone to an incomplete understanding of war that can undermine strategy and policy.     

Risk pooling in a two-period,two-echelon inventory stocking and allocation problem

The object of this article is to investigate the risk-pooling effect of depot stock in two-echelon distribution system in which the depot serves n retailers in parallel, and to develop computationally tractable optimization procedures for such systems. The depot manager has complete information about stock levels and there are two opportunities to allocate stock to the retailers within each order cycle. We identify first- and second-order aspects to the risk-pooling effect. In particular, the second-order effect is the property that the minimum stock available to any retailer after the second allocation converges in probability to a constant as the number of retailers in the system increases, assuming independence of the demands. This property is exploited in the development of efficient procedures to determine near-optimal values of the policy parameters.