The US NATO and military burden sharing: post-Cold War accomplishments and future prospects

NATO burden sharing has become an especially timely issue in the past several years as a result of a number of factors, including Russian annexation of Crimea and destabilization of eastern Ukraine in 2014. This article argues that alliance unity among the great democracies of Europe and North America is indispensable to peace and stability on the Eurasian continent. A fractured NATO, and especially, a large divide in purposes or commitments as between the United States and its European security partners, invites aggression and the possibility of inadvertent escalation. Past successes and failures in US-involved multinational peace and stability operations, within and outside of Europe, show that mission accomplishment requires give and take, including the occasional acceptance of unequal costs and benefits among the members, in order to achieve peace and security objectives.     

Drone Strikes and Grand Strategy: Toward a Political Understanding of the Uses of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Attacks in US Security Policy

This article analyzes the political utility of US drone strikes theoretically and deductively. Placing strikes within the context of the theorized political functions of force and considering how they fit into two grand strategies, restraint and selective engagement, I argue that these strikes buy the United States relatively little in the way of political effects assuring its own security because the terrorism threat they are intended to combat is a limited one within the skein of US global interests. Furthermore, their contribution to counter-terrorism efforts is likely to diminish with the adoption of armed drones by non-state actors. Drone strikes can, however, provide leverage over recalcitrant US client states while reassuring liberal partners and giving them some leverage over US choices. In addition, within the counter-terrorism sphere, drone strikes are less likely to inflame popular opinion than are alternative uses of force. This analysis contributes to an increasingly rigorous examination of the strikes’ role in US foreign and security policy.     

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.     

An interactive optimization system for bulk-cargo ship scheduling

This article considers the efficient scheduling of a fleet of ships engaged in pickup and delivery of bulk cargoes. Our optimization system begins by generating a menu of candidate schedules for each ship. This menu can contain all feasible solutions, which guarantees we will find an optimal solution or can be heuristically limited to contain only those schedules likely to be in an optimal solution. The problem of choosing from this menu an optimal schedule for the fleet is formulated as a set-packing problem and solved with a dual algorithm. Computational experience is presented based on real data obtained from the Military Sealift Command of the U. S. Navy. Run times for this data were reasonable and solutions were generated with the potential of saving up to about $30 million per year over the manual system currently in place. We also describe a color-graphics interface developed to facilitate interaction with the optimization system.     

On the robustness of the modified beta distribution for acceptance sampling in statistical quality control

The purpose of this article is to examine the robustness of the modified Beta distribution as a probability distribution of lot fraction defectives in Bayesian acceptance sampling for statistical quality control. In complex manufacturing systems, a production process may consist of multiple production stages in a serial or nonserial fashion. Hence, inputs to a production station can be a result of subassembly of several inputs, or outputs of some inspection stations for some prior work stages. We investigate the effectiveness of the modified Beta distribution as an approximation to the lot fraction defectives probability of inputs at intermediate work stations. The robustness of the modified Beta distribution simplifies both the determination of the optimal sampling plan for acceptance sampling, and the calibration of distributions resulted from subassembly or inspection operations in complex manufacturing systems.     

Approximate semieconomic design of control charts with multiple control limtis

Statistical quality control of complicated production processes subject to a multiplicity of assignable causes may require the utilization of control charts with multiple control limits. This article presents an approximate semieconomic design of such charts, which is easily implementable in practical situations. Evaluations of the semieconomic control chart design show that the proposed approximate method results in solutions that are very close to the true optima and can be obtained with minimal computational effort.