Does Terrorism Increase after a Natural Disaster? An Analysis based upon Property Damage

Does an emergency such as a natural disaster lead to a surge of terrorism? This paper contributes to the emerging literature on this issue. We consider the experience of 129 countries during the period 1998–2012 to determine the effect of a natural disaster on both domestic as well as transnational terrorism. We also control for endogeneity using expenditure on health care and land area in a country as instruments. In contrast to the existing literature, we measure the extent of terrorism by the value of property damage. The results indicate that after natural disasters, (a) transnational terrorism increases with a lag, and (b) a statistically significant impact on domestic terrorism is not observed.     

Damage accumulation and probability of kill for gun and target engagements

Determination of the gunfire probability of kill against a target requires two parameters to be taken into consideration: the likelihood of hitting the target (susceptibility) and the conditional probability of kill given a hit (vulnerability). Two commonly used methods for calculating the latter probability are (1) treating each hit upon the target independently, and (2) setting an exact number of hits to obtain a target kill. Each of these methods contains an implicit assumption about the probability distribution of the number of hits‐to‐kill. Method (1) assumes that the most likely kill scenario occurs with exactly one hit, whereas (2) implies that achieving a precise number of hits always results in a kill. These methods can produce significant differences in the predicted gun effectiveness, even if the mean number of hits‐to‐kill for each distribution is the same. We therefore introduce a new modeling approach with a more general distribution for the number of hits‐to‐kill. The approach is configurable to various classes of damage mechanism and is able to match both methods (1) and (2) with a suitable choice of parameter. We use this new approach to explore the influence of various damage accumulation models on the predicted effectiveness of weapon‐target engagements.     

The New Constabularies: Planning US Military Stabilization Missions

Modern peace enforcement missions are much more akin to historical constabulary missions than they are to traditional peace operations. As such, the underlying strategic and operational bases for these missions are both more complex and have more elements that can go wrong than does classic peacekeeping. At the operational level, such issues as relations with civilian organizations, coordination with other nations' forces, and command and control of highly disparate elements become critical. The area in which the most significant problems have occurred, however, has been in translating political goals into a realistic military strategy.     

Three-machine flowshop stochastic scheduling to minimize distribution of schedule length

This article studies a special case of stochastic three-machine, permutation flowshop scheduling. It is proved that a sequence where processing times on the first and third machines are in a monotone nondecreasing and nonincreasing order of the likelihood ratio, respectively, and on the second machine are equally distributed, minimizes distribution of schedule length.     

Finding saddle points on polyhedra: Solving certain continuous minimax problems

This article reviews procedures for computing saddle points of certain continuous concave-convex functions defined on polyhedra and investigates how certain parameters and payoff functions influence equilibrium solutions. The discussion centers on two widely studied applications: missile defense and market-share attraction games. In both settings, each player allocates a limited resource, called effort, among a finite number of alternatives. Equilibrium solutions to these two-person games are particularly easy to compute under a proportional effectiveness hypothesis, either in closed form or in a finite number of steps. One of the more interesting qualitative properties we establish is the identification of conditions under which the maximizing player can ignore the values of the alternatives in determining allocation decisions. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Tabular aids for fitting weibull moment estimates

Moment estimators for the parameters of the Weibull distribution are considered in the context of analysis of field data. The data available are aggregated, with individual failure times not recorded. In this case, the complexity of the likelihood function argues against the use of maximum-likelihood estimation, particularly for relatively large sets of data, and moment estimators are a reasonable alternative. In this article, we derive the asymptotic covariance matrix of the moment estimators, and provide listings for BASIC computer programs which generate tables useful for calculation of the estimates as well as for estimating the asymptotic covariance matrix using aggregated data.     

Scheduling peacetime rotation of Pakistan army units

Because Pakistan has varying climates and terrains, the Pakistan Army rotates its units between peacetime locations so that no unit endures inequitable hardship or enjoys unfair advantage. Army policy specifies strict constraints on unit rotations, such as the length of a unit's stay in any location, the number of units moving at any time, and the allowable replacements for any moving unit. Scheduling rotations manually in accordance with these rules, as is currently practiced, is extremely difficult and time consuming. This article presents an integer programming model that finds feasible, minimum-cost schedules for the Pakistan Army's desired planning horizons. The model also ensures that the units are positioned at the end of the planning horizon so that feasible schedules exist for future planners. The model is implemented with commercially available optimization software. Schedules are obtained for realistic test problems in less than an hour on a personal computer. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Book reviews

Encyclopaedia of Modern Air Force Squadrons. By Chris Ashworth. Patrick Stephens, London (1989), ISBN 1-8526-013-6, £19.95

The Future of Sea Power. By Eric Grove. Routledge, London (1990), ISBN 0-415-00482-9, £35.00

Soviet Strategic Interests in the North. By Kirsten Amundsen. Pinter, London (1990), ISBN 0-86187-018-2, £30.00

Soviet Seapower in Northern Waters. Edited by John Skogan and Arne Brundtland. Pinter, London (1990), ISBN 0-86187-038-7, £35.00

Glasnost, Perestroika, and U.S. Defense Spending. By William W. Kaufmann, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC (1990), ISBN 0-8157-4881-7, $8.95

The Educating of Armies. Edited by Michael D. Stephens. Macmillan, London (1989), ISBN 0-333-43447-1, £35.00