Defense Firms Adapting to Major Changes in the French R&D Funding System

The structural changes inside the French innovation system have impacted the role of defense firms since the late 1980s. Major changes have affected the defense budget and public R&D funding system in particular. The aim of this article is to understand French defense firms’ repositioning within the National Innovation System (NIS) based on an analysis of their R&D behavior over a long period of time (1987–2010). We show that French defense firms remain major players in the NIS and faced up to these major changes by adapting the funding of their R&D and their research priorities and rolling out new innovation capabilities. Additionally, they developed new innovation models to take advantage of new collaborative partnerships developed for civil and military markets.     

An Opportunity Structure for Terrorism: Moderate Leadership Departures in Nationalist Movements

Why does terrorist violence escalate from some ethnic groups but not others? According to theoretical insights, many groups endure conditions that should spur on terrorist campaigns, but in reality only some carry them out. In contrast to studies emphasising motivations, this article constructs a framework centred on opportunity structures that contributes to our understanding of the rise of terrorism waged along ethnic lines. It argues that beyond grievances or other motivations, terrorist campaigns develop from communities when moderate political leaders depart from their positions in nationalist movements, causing terrorists to fill the subsequent power vacuum, while little terrorism occurs when leaders do not relinquish the nationalist agenda. This argument is evaluated with evidence from the Tamil and Muslim cases in the context of the Sri Lankan Civil War. Tamil United Liberation Front leaders left the Tamil nationalist movement in the early 1980s, enabling the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’s rise to dominate the nationalist agenda for three decades, while the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress did not relinquish the Muslim cause, which in part precluded the normalisation of violence in the community.     

When the Going Gets Tough… Monitoring Missions and a Changing Conflict Environment in Sri Lanka, 2002–2008

This article analyzes how the conflict environment in which a civilian monitoring mission is deployed influences the monitors' assessment of the operation. It draws on unique empirical material from the experience of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM), deployed to oversee a ceasefire agreement in Sri Lanka 2002–2008. With material from a survey and in-depth interviews, experiences of the monitors are analyzed and changes over time are traced in relation to the monitors' assessment of the mandate and organizational set-up of the mission. The study points to the difficulty of monitoring missions to address escalation during an ongoing peace process. Its function is dependent on the goodwill of the parties. In essence, monitoring missions have the potential to strengthen peace when there is momentum in favor of progress, but when relations between the parties turn sour and the conflict escalates a civilian monitoring mission basically loses its potential. During the final stages of the war, which saw a very large number of civilian casualties, the war-torn areas were closed to international observers. Moreover, international pressure for a short-term ceasefire to alleviate the humanitarian situation was dismissed by the Sri Lankan government, which also saw the backing of several important actors, not the least China.     

Optimal versus required defence expenditure: The case of the Greek-Turkish arms race

The aim of this paper is to indicate the extent to which the arms race against Turkey, in which Greece and Cyprus have been entangled, imposes a defence expenditure burden that is tough for the two allies to bear. To do so we have resorted to evaluating the optimal military expenditure for the two countries, allied in the context of the Integrated Defence Doctrine, which is compatible with the constraints imposed by the resources of their economies. All experiments and scenarios examined lead to the conclusion that the current defence burden of the two allies seems to be driving their economies beyond capacity limits. The fact remains, however, that under the circumstances, a one-sided disarmament policy like the one currently followed by Greece, is a risky choice given that the long-term armament programmes pursued by Turkey, whose role in this arms race has been proven as leading, leave very small room to the Greek and Cypriot sides to reduce their own defence expenditure.     

A LONG‐RUN ANALYSIS OF DEFENCE SPENDING IN THE NATO COUNTRIES (1960–99)

This paper analyses the long‐run demand for defence output through a homogeneous treatment of 15 NATO member countries between 1960 and 1999. We carry out a progressive study of the interactions between either defence spending or defence burden and their main determinants: income, external threat and allied military spending. To that end, we use time‐series analysis with endogenously determined structural breaks. We further consider individual country functions related to one another through a common correlated effects method, in order to take into account explicitly the connections between members of an alliance.     

Securing a border under asymmetric information

We study a stochastic interdiction model of Morton et al. IIE Transactions, 39 (2007):3–14 that locates radiation sensors at border crossings to detect and prevent the smuggling of nuclear material. In this model, an interdictor places sensors at customs checkpoints to minimize a potential smuggler's maximum probability of crossing a border undetected. We focus on a model variant in which the interdictor has different, and likely more accurate, perceptions of the system's parameters than the smuggler does. We introduce a model that is tighter and uses fewer constraints than that of Morton et al. We also develop a class of valid inequalities along with a corresponding separation procedure that can be used within a cutting‐plane approach to reduce computational effort. Computational results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.Copyright © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 61: 91–100, 2014     

A mathematical formulation and efficient heuristics for the dynamic container relocation problem

The container relocation problem (CRP) is concerned with emptying a single yard‐bay which contains J containers each following a given pickup order so as to minimize the total number of relocations made during their retrieval process. The CRP can be modeled as a binary integer programming (IP) problem and is known to be NP‐hard. In this work, we focus on an extension of the CRP to the case where containers are both received and retrieved from a single yard‐bay, and call it the dynamic container relocation problem. The arrival (departure) sequences of containers to (from) the yard‐bay is assumed to be known a priori. A binary IP formulation is presented for the problem. Then, we propose three types of heuristic methods: index based heuristics, heuristics using the binary IP formulation, and a beam search heuristic. Computational experiments are performed on an extensive set of randomly generated test instances. Our results show that beam search heuristic is very efficient and performs better than the other heuristic methods.Copyright © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 61: 101–118, 2014     

The Odyssey of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty

This study examines the failures of the William J. Clinton and Barack Obama administrations to secure ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT). It applies an integrated analytical framework for assessing treaty ratification that builds upon previous research in order to understand why the Clinton administration failed to achieve CTBT ratification in 1999 and why the Obama administration has so far failed to advance the treaty in the Senate. The study concludes that CTBT ratification, despite Obama administration pledges of support, remains highly unlikely. Finally, the study analyzes the common domestic political factors present in both cases and suggests areas for further research.