Military spending and economic growth in South Africa

This paper undertakes an empirical analysis of the economic effects of military spending on the South African economy. It estimates a neo‐classical model common in the literature at the level of the macroeconomy and at the level of the manufacturing sector. An attempt is made to improve upon the model by allowing the data to determine the dynamic structure of the model through an ARDL procedure. No significant impact of military spending is found in aggregate, but there is a significant negative impact for the manufacturing sector. This suggests that the cuts in domestic military procurement that have occurred since 1989 could lead to improved economic performance in South Africa through their impact on the manufacturing sector.     

The impact of arms production on the South African manufacturing industry

The 1977 UN arms embargo was one of the main factors which led South Africa to establish a largely self sufficient import‐substituting arms industry capable of meeting the apartheid state's demand for sophisticated weaponry. While macroeconomic studies suggest that high military spending had a damaging effect on economic growth, no studies have investigated the disaggregated impact of military expenditure on industrial development. This paper applies panel data methods to the Industrial Development Corporation's Sectoral Database in order to analyse the level effects of military spending.     

When are observed failures more informative than observed survivals?

A framework involving independent competing risks permits observing failures due to a specific cause and failures due to a competing cause, which constitute survival times from the cause of primary interest. Is observing more failures more informative than observing survivals? Intuitively, due to the definitiveness of failures, the answer seems to be the former. However, it has been shown before that this intuition holds when estimating the mean but not the failure rate of the exponential model with a gamma prior distribution for the failure rate. In this article, we address this question at a more general level. We show that for a certain class of distributions failures can be more informative than survivals for prediction of life length and vice versa for some others. We also show that for a large class of lifetime models, failure is less informative than survival for estimating the proportional hazards parameter with gamma, Jeffreys, and uniform priors. We further show that, for this class of lifetime models, on average, failure is more informative than survival for parameter estimation and for prediction. These results imply that the inferential purpose and properties of the lifetime distribution are germane for conducting life tests. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2013     

A note on combined job selection and sequencing problems

We investigate the solvability of two single‐machine scheduling problems when the objective is to identify among all job subsets with cardinality k,1≤k≤n, the one that has the minimum objective function value. For the single‐machine minimum maximum lateness problem, we conclude that the problem is solvable in O(n²) time using the proposed REMOVE algorithm. This algorithm can also be used as an alternative to Moore's algorithm to solve the minimum number of tardy jobs problem by actually solving the hierarchical problem in which the objective is to minimize the maximum lateness subject to the minimum number of tardy jobs. We then show that the REMOVE algorithm cannot be used to solve the general case of the single‐machine total‐weighted completion time problem; we derive sufficient conditions among the job parameters so that the total weighted completion time problem becomes solvable in O(n²) time. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 60: 449–453, 2013     

A view from Berlin: Colonel Frederick trench and the development of British perceptions of German aggressive intent, 1906–1910

This essay traces the image of Germany that emerges from the reports of Colonel Frederick Trench (1857–1942), British military attache in Berlin from 1906 to 1910. At this time, the British Army possessed only the most limited intelligence‐gathering apparatus and had to rely heavily on the reports of military attaches for information about their continental rivals. Trench, who believed that Germany planned to wage war against Britain and said so categorically in his reports, was the main source of data on the German Army. From the limited surviving records of who read these reports and how they responded to them, this essay posits that Trench's views contributed to the growing British perception of a German threat, a perception that did much to influence British strategic planning in this period.     

Building A New Luftwaffe: The United States Air Force and Bundeswehr Planning for Rearmament, 1950–60

Rearming Germany was a long and complicated process. It was especially difficult to create a new German air force. The army generals who dominated the Bundeswehr cadre did not even want an air force but rather a small arm air corps. Moreover, Adenauer's defense staff failed to adequately budget or plan for a new air force. As rearmament began, US Air Force leaders, working closely with the small Luftwaffe staff in West Germany's shadow Defense Ministry, basically took charge of the process to ensure that the Germans built a new Luftwaffe on the American model – a large, multipurpose force organized as an independent service and fully integrated into NATO. The first Bundesluftwaffe commanders allied themselves to the Americans, often in opposition to their army comrades, to overcome the political problems caused by Adenauer's poor defense planning and create a modern air force on American lines.