Modeling the performance of a scanning radio communications sensor

A model which allows the prediction of long-term average report rates against an array of radio emitters by a scanning sensor is presented. The model is based on Markov renewal theory.     

Ideology,ballots, and alliances: Canadian participation in multinational military operations

The decision to employ force abroad is often a contentious political decision, where partisanship plays a crucial role. Prior to military intervention, political parties usually make their ideologically distinctive preferences clear and seek to implement them once in power. What remains unclear, however, is how ideology affects the decision to use military force. This article contends that alliance and electoral calculations constrain the ability of political parties to implement their ideological preferences with regards to the use of force. It examines a “most likely” case for the partisan theory of military intervention, namely Canada’s refusal to take part in the invasion of Iraq and its decision to commit forces to the war against the Islamic State. It finds that only in combination with alliance and electoral calculations does executive ideology offer valuable insights into Canada’s military support to U.S.-led coalition operations, which contributes to our understanding of allied decision-making.     

Disrupt and restraint: The evolution of cyber conflict and the implications for collective security

In the last decade, cyber conflict has become a main feature of international politics and a growing concern for strategic stability and collective security. Unfortunately, cyber conflict suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity about its impact on collective security and a lack of consensus among international actors on how to interpret it. This article proposes to understand cyber conflict as an evolving process driven by two factors: the way in which digital space is configured and the way in which tactical, organizational, strategic, and doctrinal characteristics related to cyber have been included in the field of national and international security. Both tend to encourage offensive behavior but also demonstrate features pointing to restraint.     

The poverty of power in military power: how collective power could benefit strategic studies

Strategic studies deals intimately with the topic of power. Most scholars in the discipline work with a concept of power as an adversarial zero-sum competition. This is natural and necessary. However, other conceptions of power developed within political science and sociology could enrich strategic studies. Approaching two typical, traditional tasks of strategy – alliance building and war-fighting – this article demonstrates the heuristic mileage of theories of collective power. In particular, we can shed new light on the post-Cold War transformation of NATO as well as state-building as a strategy in counter-insurgencies with new ideas of power. Broadening the palette of theories of power is thus valuable if strategic studies is to prosper as an independent field of study.     

The Just Warrior Ethos: A Response to Colonel Riza

In 2014, Colonel M. Shane Riza published an article in this journal arguing that remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) and robotic weapons threaten the US Air Force’s warrior ethos. Riza has clearly articulated the sentiments of one side of a vibrant debate within our service. This paper presents an alternative view; a view held by some who have experienced these new forms and tools of war, and who have wrestled with their implications first-hand. In this paper, we address some methodological concerns with Riza’s approach and then engage some misunderstandings about RPA’s relationship to military history and to risk. The second part of this paper takes a close look at some of the early Just War thinkers to determine what implications the tradition may have on the warrior ethos. We propose, as an alternative to Riza’s position, a return to an ethos grounded in humility, charity, and a conception of war as a last resort; in short, a return to the Just Warrior Ethos.     

Realignment in the National Football League: Did they do it right?

The National Football League (NFL) in the United States expanded to 32 teams in 2002 with the addition of a team in Houston. At that point, the league was realigned into eight divisions, each containing four teams. We describe a branch‐and‐cut algorithm for minimizing the sum of intradivisional travel distances. We consider first the case where any team can be assigned to any division. We also consider imposing restrictions, such as aligning the AFC (American Football Conference) and the NFC (National Football Conference) separately or maintaining traditional rivalries. We show that the alignment chosen by the NFL does not minimize the sum of intradivisional travel distances, but that it is close to optimal for an alignment that aligns the NFC and AFC separately and imposes some additional restrictions. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 50: 683–701, 2003.     

The stochastic U‐line balancing problem

A U‐line arranges tasks around a U‐shaped production line and organizes them into stations that can cross from one side of the line to the other. In addition to improving visibility and communication between operators on the line, which facilitates problem‐solving and quality improvement, U‐lines can reduce the total number of operators required on the line and make rebalancing the line easier compared to the traditional, straight production line. This paper studies the (type 1) U‐line balancing problem when task completion times are stochastic. Stochastic completion times occur when differences between operators cause completion times to vary somewhat and when machine processing times vary. A recursive algorithm is presented for finding the optimal solution when completion times have any distribution function. An equivalent shortest path network is also presented. An improvement for the special case of normally distributed task completion times is given. A computational study to determine the characteristics of instances that can be solved by the algorithms shows that they are able to solve instances of practical size (like the 114 Japanese and U.S. U‐lines studied in a literature review paper). © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2003