The political and military effectiveness of Commonwealth forces in Confrontation 1963–661

Low-intensity conflicts such as counterinsurgencies tend to be characterized by a large number of contacts. The sheer number and often inconclusive nature of these incidents makes it difficult to determine whether military operations are effective. This article uses Confrontation as a case study, first building a database of incidents (including contacts) and then analysing the database statistically to identify patterns. This process shows that the British Commonwealth security forces succeeded in controlling the number of incidents and the space to force ratio. They also dominated the contact battle. The article helps to account for the British Commonwealth success at the operational and tactical level.     

Negotiating regional security and arms control in the Middle East: the ACRS experience and beyond

In this contribution, Jones focuses initially on the experience of Arms Control and Regional Security (ACRS) and the reasons why this group stalled. The sources of tension that emerged in ACRS, and which ultimately led to its suspension, derived mainly from different views on the relationship between the nuclear and other issues in these talks, as well as the composition of ACRS and its role as a group of the multilateral track of the peace process. Jones emphasizes that regional security discussions in the Middle East must address multiple threats on multiple levels, and ACRS was never politically equipped to do so. Thus, despite the real, if limited, success of ACRS, any real security regime in the Middle East will be the product of a much more inclusive process which recognizes the essential importance of cooperatively addressing multiple security challenges, including those related to the problems of social and economic upheaval in the region. Jones concludes with an argument that the time may be ripe to embark on such a process in the wake of the war in Iraq and other far-reaching indicators of change in the region.     

Military spending and economic growth in South Africa

This paper undertakes an empirical analysis of the economic effects of military spending on the South African economy. It estimates a neo‐classical model common in the literature at the level of the macroeconomy and at the level of the manufacturing sector. An attempt is made to improve upon the model by allowing the data to determine the dynamic structure of the model through an ARDL procedure. No significant impact of military spending is found in aggregate, but there is a significant negative impact for the manufacturing sector. This suggests that the cuts in domestic military procurement that have occurred since 1989 could lead to improved economic performance in South Africa through their impact on the manufacturing sector.     

Book review

Jacques Fontanel, Les dépenses militaires et le désarmement, Editions Publisud, Paris, 1995, 136 pages.

Jean‐Paul Hébert ’Production d'armement — Mutilation du systéme français’, Paris 1995 La documentation française, 221 pages.     

The Requirements of Nuclear Stability in South Asia

While recent history arguably demonstrates a high level of nuclear stability in South Asia, this article argues that this stability has historically been a function of India's relative weakness. It argues that, as India becomes stronger, attention must be paid to the technical and political requirements of nuclear stability: the reliability of weapons and command and control and the political conditions that underpin stable relations between nuclear-armed states. It concludes by recommending the United States aim to modify the perceptions of regional elites about their various intentions and decision-making processes and the role of the United States as crisis manager.     

Mandated defence offsets: can they ever deliver?

Defence offsets are elements of defence procurement deals additional to the primary content. Offsets are usually expected to yield technological or industrial benefits to the purchasing country (e.g. countertrade, technology transfers, or additional jobs) and military buyers often require suppliers to make offsets available “cost-free.” The authors argued previously that such strategies achieve little of value to buyers that lack market power and are unnecessary otherwise, since purchasers with the market power to extract more value for money from foreign suppliers can do so anyway. This article also focuses on the supply side of offset deals. The USA is the world's largest defence offsets supplier but the US government opposes offsets demands as economically inefficient and trade distorting. Even if offsets are inefficient and trade distorting, they may still benefit a materiel-exporting country such as the USA as they may induce exports and create associated benefits for the offsets provider.     

Facility location for an extraterrestrial production/distribution system

This paper extends traditional production/distribution system analysis to address raw material, factories, and markets located beyond Earth. It explains the eventual advantages of such operations and discusses likely sites in the solar system. It furnishes a typology for production/distribution systems, assessing the fit of each type to space operations. It briefly reviews the physics of orbits. It develops transportation and inventory cost functions for the simplest case of Hohmann trajectories, and for transportation between circular orbits of similar radii using higher‐energy trajectories. These cost functions are used to derive a model of production/distribution system cost, the minimization of which selects an optimal factory location. The paper suggests potential extensions to this work, and concludes with ideas for location research on the novel reaches of extraterrestrial space. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005.     

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