“Disarmament Market” Effects of Information Disclosures

In yet another wave of discussion on nuclear disarmament among political scientists and practitioners, one of the topical issues concerns the problem of transparency, its mechanisms, costs, and benefits. Numerous—though often abstract—calls for greater transparency of nuclear arsenals and postures when promoting the idea of nuclear disarmament, however, do not give a clear rationale for states possessing nuclear weapons to pursue greater transparency. Meanwhile, many other research fields—such as economics and psychology—attempt to address problems related to the lack of exact information on the counterpart's activities and intentions. Economics offers one probable analog for the transparency problem: the issue of information asymmetry and its consequences. This article is an attempt to apply the classical model of a market with information asymmetry to the analysis of the transparency problem within the nuclear disarmament process. Such an approach could help pave the way for closer cooperation between economic and political scientists in the nuclear disarmament field.     

A lost work of El Lobo: Lieutenant-Colonel Charles T.R. Bohannan's unpublished study of guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency in the Philippines, 1899–1955

Charles Ted Rutledge Bohannan (1914–1982) became an integral agent of US counterinsurgency operations during the early Cold War, contributing to both the success of the COIN effort to defeat the communist Huk insurgents in the Philippines and the stalled COIN efforts in Vietnam. In the early 1960s, he wrote a short and compact analysis of the US and Filipino experience of guerrilla warfare, from the Philippine–American war until the defeat of the Huk Rebellion. It was never published. Reprinted here, Bohannan's analysis of lessons learned makes a substantial contribution to the history of American ideas of unconventional warfare by an expert who contributed these lessons to the successful defeat of an insurgency in South East Asia.     

The Renaissance of Pre-First World War Naval History

In the 1990s no-fly zones were introduced as a new way to utilize airpower in the context of Peace Support Operations (PSOs). During that time, they were put to use over Iraq and over Bosnia. However, it is unclear to what extent the no-fly zones were successful in those two instances. This article examines the capabilities of no-fly zones and analyzes the Iraq and Bosnia cases of enforcement. It concludes that no-fly zones can be very effective if properly implemented and offers guidance for policy-makers on how to achieve maximum efficacy.     

Applying Lanchester's linear law to model the Ardennes campaign

In modern warfare, many believe the decisive factor in winning a battle is seizing the right moment to shift from defense to attack, or vice versa. This paper attempts to bring that perspective to Lanchester's differential equations of warfare, and continues the application of Lanchester's linear law to the analysis of the World War II battle of Ardennes, as reported in earlier issues of Naval Research Logistics by Bracken and by Fricker. A new variable, shift time, accounting for the timing of the shift between defense and attack is explicitly included in our version of the model, and it helps obtain improved goodness of fit to historical data. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 48:653–661, 2001     

Variables inspection for SPC‐quarantined production

When a control chart signals an out‐of‐control condition for a production process, it may be desirable to “quarantine” all units produced since the last in‐control SPC sample. This paper presents an efficient procedure for variables inspection of such “SPC quarantined” product. A Bayesian sequential inspection procedure is developed which determines whether the out of control production is of acceptable quality. By inspecting the units in reverse of the order in which they were produced, the procedure is also capable of detecting the point at which the process went out of control, thus eliminating the need to inspect units produced prior to the onset of the out of control condition. Numerical examples are presented, and the performance characteristics of the procedure are demonstrated using Monte Carlo simulation. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 48: 159–171, 2001     

An approximation to the stationary distribution of a multiechelon repairable-item inventory system with finite sources and repair channels

We consider a multiechelon repairable-item inventory system where several bases are supported by a central depot. Unlike METRIC-based models, there are only a finite number of repairmen at each base and the depot, and the failure rates at the bases depend on the current number of items online. The principal objective of this article is to develop a quick and accurate approximation to the steady-state distribution of this system. A secondary objective is to compare the solution of this system with a comparable METRIC solution.     

Interactive solution of bi-criteria mathematical programs

In this paper, we develop efficient interactive methods for the solution of bicriteria nonlinear programming problems. The methods do not require trade-off information from the decision maker, pose less cognitive burden and converge to the “best compromise solution” fast. Two methods, called the paired comparison method and comparative trade-off method, are presented with examples. A real application of the interactive method to a bicriteria problem that arose in the planning of the cardiovascular disease control program in the U.S. Air Force is also presented.     

China's Nuclear Forces and Their Significance to India

The Indian nuclear program is a response to a perceived politico-strategic threat from China as opposed to a military-operational one that New Delhi began after perceiving an “ultimatum” from China in 1965. Consequently, India is in the process of acquiring an assured second-strike capability vis-à-vis China to meet the requirements of general deterrence. While India has always been concerned about the Sino-Pakistani nuclear/missile nexus, China has become wary of the growing military ties between the United States and India in recent years, especially because of the military implications of the US-India civil nuclear deal. Given the growing conventional military gap between the two states, India is not lowering its nuclear threshold to meet the Chinese conventional challenge. Instead, India is upgrading its conventional military strategy from dissuasion to deterrence against China. While the overall Sino-Indian nuclear relationship is stable, it will be challenged as China acquires advanced conventional weapons that blur the distinction between conventional and nuclear conflict.     

Another inventory model with a mixture of backorders and lost sales

This article presents another inventory model for situations in which, during the stockout period, a fraction b of the demand is backordered and the remaining fraction 1 ? b is lost. By defining a time-proportional backorder cost and a fixed penalty cost per unit lost, a unimodal objective function representing the average annual cost of operating the inventory system is obtained. The optimal operating policy variables are calculated directly.