An historical review of US defense strategy from Vietnam to operation Iraqi freedom

Facing nearly half a billion dollars in spending cuts over the next five years, US defense planners and strategists must simultaneously rebuild a war-weary Army weakened from over a decade of war, build new sea and air capabilities for the Pacific theater, and reduce manpower, procurement, and contractor budgets while promoting innovation. The US defense department is embarking on what may be the most sweeping period of defense transformation in recent memory. This article reviews the history of American defense transformation, focusing on an important but largely overlooked period of military innovation that began in the shadow of Vietnam and ended with troops fighting through blinding sandstorms at night on the road to Baghdad. The multifaceted transformation strategy conceived in the 1970s paved the way for a military revolution in the 1990s and enabled unprecedented battlefield adaptation in the 2000s. After reviewing the revolutionary changes that led to American dominance in conventional warfare in the 1990s, the article examines US transformation policies in the 2000s to inform defense strategy and planning efforts in the 2010s.     

An exact ceiling point algorithm for general integer linear programming

We present an algorithm called the exact ceiling point algorithm (XCPA) for solving the pure, general integer linear programming problem (P). A recent report by the authors demonstrates that, if the set of feasible integer solutions for (P) is nonempty and bounded, all optimal solutions for (P) are “feasible 1-ceiling points,” roughly, feasible integer solutions lying on or near the boundary of the feasible region for the LP-relaxation associated with (P). Consequently, the XCPA solves (P) by implicitly enumerating only feasible 1-ceiling points, making use of conditional bounds and “double backtracking.” We discuss the results of computational testing on a set of 48 problems taken from the literature.     

Noncombatant Immunity and the Ethics of Blockade

This article counters Michael Walzer's argument against tight blockades. It shows that the interdiction of food shipments need not violate the principle of noncombatant immunity. Whether it is morally permissible to impose a strict blockade depends on the circumstances of the target state. The more self-sufficient a country is, the more acceptable it should be for a belligerent to cut the enemy's external lines of supply. The Allied blockade of Germany during the First World War illustrates the argument. Fault in this case should be assigned to the German government for the loss of civilian lives.     

The initial provisioning decision for insurance type items

Initial provisioning decisions (inventory stocking requirements) for low demand items often have to be made without much knowledge of what future demand rates will be. When the nature of an item is such that little demand for it is expected, the problem of whether to stock initially or risk not stocking the item is most critical. This report discusses this problem and presents decision procedures which can be used to handle this aspect of initial provisioning. The procedures relate an item's provisioning desirability to its provisioning characteristics, such as expected cost, expected resupply time, current information on its likely demand rate, and to an overall operating policy or criterion. The criterion function measures the total system degredation as a function of the events of having items out of stock when demand occurs. Several different policy functions are discussed and the provisioning decision rules which apply to each are presented. Demand rate information is handled through a Bayesian type approach. The decision rules presented in this report can be utilized to either determine stocking requirements within a budgetary constraint, or determine the relative stocking desirability on an item-by-item basis.     

A theory of ideal linear weights for heterogeneous combat forces

Detailed combat simulations can produce effectiveness tables which measure the effectiveness of each weapon class on one side of an engagement, battle, or campaign to each weapon class on the other. Effectiveness tables may also be constructed in other ways This paper assumes that effectiveness tables are given and shows how to construct from them a system of weapon weights each of which is a weighted average of the effects of a given weapon against each of the enemy's weapons. These weights utilize the Perron- Frobenius theory of eigenvectors of nonnegative matrices. Methods of calculation are discussed and some interpretations are given for both the irreducible and reducible cases.     

Multiple resource leveling in construction systems through variation of activity intensities

The resource leveling problem for a construction system producing a stream of output units is considered. The system is modeled using a critical-path-analysis activity network, from which an extended network is developed for an integrated planning effort of all output units. Activity intensity variables are defined which measure activity demand rates for resources and consequent activity durations for the production of each output unit. A heuristic approach consisting of an iterative nonlinear programming procedure is presented which computes activity durations (intensities) for the minimization of resource capacity costs subject to meeting construction due dates. The application to a major ship overhaul project is described, in which the procedure was used to level workloads of the various labor–trade shops.     

On the distribution of the optimal value for a class of stochastic geometric programs

An approach is presented for obtaining the moments and distribution of the optimal value for a class of prototype stochastic geometric programs with log-normally distributed cost coefficients. It is assumed for each set of values taken on by the cost coefficients that the resulting deterministic primal program is superconsistent and soluble. It is also required that the corresponding dual program has a unique optimal point with all positive components. It is indicated how one can apply the results obtained under the above assumptions to stochastic programs whose corresponding deterministic dual programs need not satisfy the above-mentioned uniqueness and positivity requirements.