Book reviews

Frank Zimmer, Bismarcks Kampf gegen Kaiser Franz Joseph Konigsgratz und seine Folgen. Graz, Vienna, Cologne: Styria Verlag 1996. Pp.203,49 illus., 1 map. OS 350/DM 49. ISBN 3–222–12377–2.

Saul Zadka, Blood in Zion: How the Jewish Guerrillas drove the British out of Palestine. London and Washington: Brassey's, 1995. Pp.227, chron., illus., index. £19.95. ISBN 1–85753–136–1.

Theodore L. Gatchel, At the Water's Edge: Defending against the Modern Amphibious Assault. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1996. Pp.xvi+217, notes, biblio, index. $36.95. ISBN 1–55750–308–7.

Max G. Manwaring and William J. Olson (eds.) Managing Contemporary Conflict: Pillars of Success. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. Pp.269, no index. $65 (cloth); $25 (paper). ISBN 0–8133–8969 and 9978–5

Chris Seiple, The US Military/NGO Relationship in Humanitarian Interventions, Carlisle Barracks, PA: The

Richard L. Millett and Michael Gold‐Biss (eds.) Beyond Praetorianism: The Latin American Military in Transition. University of Miami: North/South Center Press; Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1996. Pp.xv +317, index. $24.95. ISBN 1–5745–000–9.

Rudolph C. Barnes Jr, Military Legitimacy: Might and Right in the New Millennium. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1996. Pp.199, select biblio., index. £27.50/$39.50, ISBN 0–714–4624–5.     

Countering Insurgent-terrorism: Why Nato Chose The Wrong Historical Foundation For Cimic

History teaches that counterinsurgency and counterterrorism campaigns have never been won through purely military action. Defeating an opponent who avoids open battle, but who uses force to reach his goals, including terrorist action, requires a combination of police, administrative, economic and military measures. As a counterinsurgency campaign should pursue a comprehensive political objective, it requires high levels of civil–military cooperation. However, current NATO doctrine for Civil–Military Cooperation (CIMIC) as it emerged from the 1990s is founded in conventional war-fighting and outdated peacekeeping doctrine. CIMIC's focus is on supporting military objectives rather than enabling the military to make a coherent contribution to political objectives. This makes CIMIC unfit for the Alliance's main operational challenges that have expanded from peace operations on the Balkans to countering insurgent terrorism in Afghanistan. When developing CIMIC, the Alliance obviously neglected the historical lessons from counterinsurgency campaigns.     

Rhetoric versus reality: Canadian defence planning in a time of austerity

As Canada's military mission in Afghanistan winds down and the country faces several years of fiscal austerity, all of Canada's major political parties are agreed that Canadian defence budgets must stay level or be cut. This comes at a time when the defence department is slated to replace the Canadian Forces’ (CF) major equipment fleets. Canada's defence establishment thus faces some critical decisions. One option is to try to maintain its expeditionary capabilities across all three services: army, navy and air force. Absent substantial new infusions of funds, however, this approach is likely to lead to an overall and largely chaotic reduction of capabilities. Another option is to make some difficult choices as to which expeditionary capabilities to maintain as part of a strategic review of Canada's future military needs. Such an option would ensure that Canada has at least some military capacities which can reliably be devoted to the most demanding international operations, while maintaining those capabilities required for domestic duties and North American defence. Pursuing this option would accord with the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization Strategic Concept and the call for “Smart Defense” within the Alliance. This article assesses the arguments for and against the option of specialising Canada's future defence capabilities and explores scenarios as to what a future CF may look like.     

A generalized assignment model for dynamic supply chain capacity planning

We consider a generalization of the well‐known generalized assignment problem (GAP) over discrete time periods encompassed within a finite planning horizon. The resulting model, MultiGAP, addresses the assignment of tasks to agents within each time period, with the attendant single‐period assignment costs and agent‐capacity constraint requirements, in conjunction with transition costs arising between any two consecutive periods in which a task is reassigned to a different agent. As is the case for its single‐period antecedent, MultiGAP offers a robust tool for modeling a wide range of capacity planning problems occurring within supply chain management. We provide two formulations for MultiGAP and establish that the second (alternative) formulation provides a tighter bound. We define a Lagrangian relaxation‐based heuristic as well as a branch‐and‐bound algorithm for MultiGAP. Computational experience with the heuristic and branch‐and‐bound algorithm on over 2500 test problems is reported. The Lagrangian heuristic consistently generates high‐quality and in many cases near‐optimal solutions. The branch‐and‐bound algorithm is also seen to constitute an effective means for solving to optimality MultiGAP problems of reasonable size. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2012     

Modeling the operation of multireservoir systems using decomposition and stochastic dynamic programming

Stochastic dynamic programming models are attractive for multireservoir control problems because they allow non‐linear features to be incorporated and changes in hydrological conditions to be modeled as Markov processes. However, with the exception of the simplest cases, these models are computationally intractable because of the high dimension of the state and action spaces involved. This paper proposes a new method of determining an operating policy for a multireservoir control problem that uses stochastic dynamic programming, but is practical for systems with many reservoirs. Decomposition is first used to reduce the problem to a number of independent subproblems. Each subproblem is formulated as a low‐dimensional stochastic dynamic program and solved to determine the operating policy for one of the reservoirs in the system. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2006     

Analysis of a new vehicle scheduling and location problem

We consider a container terminal discharging containers from a ship and locating them in the terminal yard. Each container has a number of potential locations in the yard where it can be stored. Containers are moved from the ship to the yard using a fleet of vehicles, each of which can carry one container at a time. The problem is to assign each container to a yard location and dispatch vehicles to the containers so as to minimize the time it takes to download all the containers from the ship. We show that the problem is NP‐hard and develop a heuristic algorithm based on formulating the problem as an assignment problem. The effectiveness of the heuristic is analyzed from both worst‐case and computational points of view. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 48: 363–385, 2001     

Naval policy and national strategy in France, 1933–1937

This article argues that French naval policy‐makers were slow to adjust to the changed strategic landscape of the 1930s. During the 1920s France did not face a serious land or air threat. Defence policy‐makers were therefore able to devote a large portion of the defence budget to rebuilding French maritime power. But when the Depression and the rise of Nazi Germany overturned the strategic situation in Europe, policy‐makers adjusted by giving priority to land and air rearmament and by placing ever greater emphasis on securing an alliance with Great Britain. The French naval establishment resisted this trend unsuccessfully. The frustration of naval planning increased the resentment and mistrust of both the Third Republic and Great Britain that characterised naval attitudes before and particularly during the Second World War.