Robust preallocated preferential defense

The problem is to protect a set of T identical targets that may come under attack by A identical weapons. The targets are to be defended by D identical interceptors, which must be preallocated to defend selected targets. The attacker is aware of the number of interceptors, but is ignorant of their allocation. The size of the attack is chosen by the attacker from within a specified range. The robust strategies developed in this article do not require the defender to assume an attack size. Rather, the defender chooses a strategy which is good over a wide range of attack sizes, though not necessarily best for any particular attack size. The attacker, knowing that the defender is adopting a robust strategy, chooses the optimal attack strategy for the number of weapons he chooses to expend. The expected number of survivors is a function of the robust defense strategy and optimal attack strategy against this robust defense.     

Revisiting the Naga conflict: what can India do to resolve this conflict?

Soon after India attained its independence from British colonial administration in 1947 the Nagas started waging an armed conflict against India to establish a sovereign independent state in Nagaland in the country's Northeast region. The conflict is today one of the world's longer running and little known armed conflicts. India's central government has tried unsuccessfully to tackle the problem through political reconciliation, use of force, and several development measures. Over the years, it has also undergone several changes in which the situation of conflict deepened whenever India's central government intervened. And yet, the road ahead also faces severe challenges because the demand for bringing the Nagas of India together into a single political entity will not go unchallenged from other ethnic groups. Moreover, a bitter leadership battle divides the Naga rebels and hence any future agreement is likely to be difficult due to factional politics as have happened in the past. Thus one way to satisfy the aspirations of different ethnic groups while protecting the boundaries of the existing states in India is to explore the option of cultural autonomy. This idea is not entirely new, but has lost significance over the years.     

Dynamic programming approaches to the multiple criteria knapsack problem

We study the integer multiple criteria knapsack problem and propose dynamic‐programming‐based approaches to finding all the nondominated solutions. Different and more complex models are discussed, including the binary multiple criteria knapsack problem, problems with more than one constraint, and multiperiod as well as time‐dependent models. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 47: 57–76, 2000     

The Imperfect Peace: Explaining Paramilitary Violence in Northern Ireland

This article examines why paramilitary campaigns in Northern Ireland have continued despite the current peace process. In advancing three instrumental explanations of paramilitary violence, the author provides a useful analytical framework which shows that while organizational interpretations are dominating the public discourse, republicans and loyalists continue to use paramilitary violence as a strategic means of threat and coercion. Furthermore, even though policy implications are not discussed in detail, it will be demonstrated that the dominance of organizational imperatives has resulted in excessive leniency by the state, which - in turn - has contributed to the fragility of the peace process.     

Technical note: Traffic intensity estimation

This note examines estimation of the traffic intensity in an M/G/1 queue. We show that the ratio of sample mean service times to the sample mean interarrival times has undesirable sampling properties. To remedy this, two alternative estimators are introduced. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 2009     

Reinterpreting western use of coercion in Bosnia‐Herzegovina: Assurances and carrots were crucial

This article demonstrates that assurances and carrots accompanied credible threats every time Western coercion succeeded in Bosnia. This finding is hardly surprising as it merely confirms earlier research on coercive diplomacy, but it is nevertheless important because the crucial role played by assurances and carrots has been completely ignored in most analyses to date. It also has important policy implications at a time when Western, and particularly American, policy‐makers tend to ignore this fact at their peril. US policy towards Iraq and Western policy towards Yugoslavia have been based almost exclusively on the stick in recent years, and its lack of success is therefore not surprising. If Western policy‐makers had learned the right lessons from Bosnia, they would have known that strategies coupling credible threats with credible assurances and carrots would have been more likely to succeed.