Twittering for talent: Private military and security companies between business and military branding

Private military and security companies (PMSCs) play an increasingly important role in the provision of security-related services. In their attempts to win new clients and find suitable personnel, they take on different identities by presenting themselves as conventional businesses, military actors, and humanitarians. In this article, we examine how PMSCs deploy these identities when they recruit new personnel through social media. Our computer-assisted content analysis of Twitter messages posted by two major United States-based companies—CACI and DynCorp International—shows that while both PMSCs amplify their business and military identities to attract the most talented personnel, they construct and communicate these identities in different ways with CACI branding itself as a sophisticated, modern, and patriotic business and DynCorp as a home-grown, traditional military provider. In addition, our analysis lends force to scholars suggesting that state militaries and the private security sector compete increasingly for prospective employees using similar strategies.     

Properties of a mean residual life function arising from renewal theory

The present article discusses the properties of the mean residual life function in a renewal process. We examine the relationship this function has with the failure rate function and the conventional mean, variance and coefficient of variation of residual life. We also discuss some monotonicity properties of the mean residual life function. A partial order based on the renewal mean residual function is introduced along with its interrelationship with some existing stochastic orders. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2010     

Norms,Military Utility,and the Use/Non-use of Weapons: The Case of Anti-plant and Irritant Agents in the Vietnam War

The role of norms and military utility in the use of weapons is disputed by constructivist and realist scholars. Through an examination of US decision-making regarding anti-plant and irritant agents in the Vietnam War, I advance this debate in three key ways. First, I develop structural realism’s expectations regarding the role of military utility. Second, I demonstrate that social and material factors are at play in our understandings of both ‘norms’ and ‘military utility’, and that both played a role in US decisions. Third, I find that the dominant role – as structural realism expects – was played by military utility.     

New inequalities for finite and infinite group problems from approximate lifting

In this paper, we derive new families of facet‐defining inequalities for the finite group problem and extreme inequalities for the infinite group problem using approximate lifting. The new valid inequalities for the finite group problem include two‐ and three‐slope facet‐defining inequalities as well as the first family of four‐slope facet‐defining inequalities. The new valid inequalities for the infinite group problem include families of two‐ and three‐slope extreme inequalities. These new inequalities not only illustrate the diversity of strong inequalities for the finite and infinite group problems, but also provide a large variety of new cutting planes for solving integer and mixed‐integer programming problems. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008