Book Reviews

Iain McCallum, Blood Brothers Hiram and Hudson Maxim: Pioneers of Modern Warfare. London: Chatham, 1999. Pp. 224, 33 illus., 2 maps, biblio., index. £20. ISBN 1–86176–096–5.

Eric Ash, Sir Frederick Sykes and the Air Revolution, 1912–1918. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1999. Pp.xviii + 268, 20 illus., 3 maps, biblio., index. £42.50/$59.50 (cloth), £18.50/$27.50 (paper). ISBN 0–7146–4828–0 and ‐4382–3.

Azar Gat, Fascist and Liberal Visions of War: Fuller, Liddell Hart, Douhet, and other Modernists. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Ppviii + 334, biblio., index. £45. ISBN 0–19–820715–8.

David B. Woolner (ed.), The Second Quebec Conference Revisited: Waging War, Formulating Peace: Canada, Great Britain, and the United States in 1944–1945. Basingstoke; London: Macmillan Press, 1998. Pp.xiii + 210, index. £32.50. ISBN 0–333–75970–2.

Jeffrey Grey. Up Top: The Royal Australian Navy and Southeast Asian Conflicts 1955–1972. St Leonards NSW: Allen &; Unwin in association with the Australian War Memorial, 1998. Pp.xx + 380, 110 illus., 12 tables, 23 maps &; diagrams, appendices, notes, biblio., index. NP. ISBN 1–86448–290–7.

Susan L Carruthers, The Media at War. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. Pp.321, biblio., index. £14.99 (paper). ISBN 0–333–69143–1, also available in hardback.

Edward J. Marolda and Robert J. Schneller Jr, Shield and Sword: The United States Navy and the Persian Gulf War. Washington DC: Naval Historical Center, 1998. Pp.xxi + 517, 120 illus., 14 maps, biblio., index. NP. ISBN 0–1604–9476–1.

Marvin Pokrant, Desert Shield at Sea: What the Navy Really Did and Desert Storm at Sea: What the Navy Really Did. Both Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Pp.xxiii + 265,9 illus., biblio., index. £44.95. ISBN 0–313–31023–8. Pp.xxiv + 329,12 illus., biblio., index. NP. ISBN 0–313–31024–6.

David Kaularich and Ronald C. Kramer, Crimes of the American Nuclear State: At Home and Abroad. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999. Pp.xviii + 195, biblio., index. £42.75. ISBN 1–55553–371‐X.

Stanley Hoffmann, World Disorders: Troubled Peace in the Post‐Cold War Era. Lanham, MD: Rowman &; Littlefield, 1998. Pp.viii+279, notes, index. $29.95. ISBN 0–8476–8574–8.

Lawrence Freedman (ed.), Strategic Coercion: Concepts and Cases. Oxford: Oxford‐University Press, 1998. Pp.400, index. £48. ISBN 0–19–829–349–6.

Stephen J. Cimbala, Coercive Military Strategy. College Station, TX: Texas A&;M University Press, 1998. Pp.229, biblio, index; $39.95. ISBN 0–89096–836–5     

Printed circuit board family grouping and component allocation for a multimachine,open-shop assembly cell

This article considers a particular printed circuit board (PCB) assembly system employing surface mount technology. Multiple, identical automatic placement machines, a variety of board types, and a large number of component types characterize the environment studied. The problem addressed is that of minimizing the makespan for assembling a batch of boards with a secondary objective of reducing the mean flow time. The approach adopted is that of grouping boards into production families, allocating component types to placement machines for each family, dividing of families into board groups with similar processing times, and the scheduling of groups. A complete setup is incurred only when changing over between board families. For the environment studied, precedence constraints on the order of component placement do not exist, and placement times are independent of feeder location. Heuristic solution procedures are proposed to create board subfamilies (groups) for which the component mounting times are nearly identical within a subfamily. Assignment of the same component type to multiple machines is avoided. The procedures use results from the theory of open-shop scheduling and parallel processor scheduling to sequence boards on machines. Note that we do not impose an open-shop environment but rather model the problem in the context of an open shop, because the order of component mountings is immaterial. Three procedures are proposed for allocating components to machines and subsequently scheduling boards on the machines. The first two procedures assign components to machines to balance total work load. For scheduling purposes, the first method groups boards into subfamilies to adhere to the assumptions of the open-shop model, and the second procedure assumes that each board is a subfamily and these are scheduled in order of shortest total processing time. The third procedure starts by forming board subfamilies based on total component similarity and then assigns components to validate the open-shop model. We compare the performance of the three procedures using estimated daily, two-day, and weekly production requirements by averaging quarterly production data for an actual cell consisting of five decoupled machines. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Exposing and exploiting weaknesses in the merger of Al-Qaeda and Al-Shabaab

On 9 February 2012 the Somali terrorist organization al-Shabaab officially merged with al-Qaeda. While the significance of the merger is highly contested, it does expose internal weaknesses within the two organizations along ideological, clan, and sectarian lines. The article identifies three key weaknesses of the merger and concludes with a discussion of al-Qaeda's growing presence in trans-Saharan Africa.     

Expedients for solving some specially structured mixed-integer programs

In this paper we consider dual angular and angular structured mixed integer programs which arise in some practical applications. For these problems we describe efficient methods for generating a desirable set of Benders' cuts with which one may initialize the partitioning scheme of Benders. Our research is motivated by the computational experience of McDaniel and Devine who have shown that the set of Benders' cuts which are binding at the optimum to the linear relaxation of the mixed integer program, play an important role in determining an optimal mixed integer solution. As incidental results in our development, we provide some useful remarks regarding Benders' and Dantzig-Wolfe's decomposition procedures. The computational experience reported seems to support the expedients recommended in this paper.     

Optimal inventory policy when stockouts alter demand

An inventory model in which future demand is affected by stockouts has been considered recently by B. L. Schwartz. Some generalizations of Schwartz's model are presented in this paper and properties of the optimal policies are determined. In the case of deterministic demand, a set-up cost is included and a mixture of backlogged and nonbacklogged orders is allowed during stockout. It is proved that the optimal policy entails either no stockout or continual stockout, depending on the values of three parameters. For stochastic demand, the effect of stockouts on demand density is postulated, the resulting optimal inventory policy is discussed, and an example involving an exponential density function is then analyzed in detail.     

Optimal schedules for special structure flowshops

This paper considers the problem of scheduling a given number of jobs on a specified number of machines in a flowshop where the objective function is to minimize the total throughput time in which all jobs complete processing on all machines. Based on the combinatorial analysis of the problem, several simple algorithms are developed for solving special structure flowshop scheduling problems where the process times are not completely random, but bear a well-defined relationship to one another. The proposed algorithms are both simple and computationally efficient and can optimally solve large-sized problems even with manual computational devices.     

Supporting allies in counterinsurgency: Britain and the Dhofar Rebellion

From 1964 to 1975 a small group of British officers, advisors, and trainers guided the forces of the Sultanate of Oman to victory in their conflict with the Marxist insurgents of the People's Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG). This campaign provides a clear example of how to effectively support an ally's counterinsurgency efforts with a minimal commitment of men and material. In particular, the critical assistance provided by the British consisted of experienced leadership and skilled technical support personnel as well as a viable strategy for victory. However, more important for the ultimate success of the counterinsurgency campaign was the emergence of new progressive leadership with the accession of Sultan Qaboos. The most important lesson from this study is that while security assistance can reinforce positive political efforts, it is not enough on its own to bring about a victory in an unfavourable political environment.     

MSPWVD-HOUGH变换的多目标分辨和雷达回波参数估计

传统的时频分析方法,如Winger Ville Distribution,smoothed pseudo Wigner-Ville distribution等在多目标分辨的时候,无法同时在时频分辨率和抑制交叉项两方面同时达到较好的效果,所提出的MSPWVD解决了这一问题,MSPWVDHOUGH还可在低信噪比的情况下检测出多目标,并估算其参数,可利用来进行雷达成像的运动补偿.     

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