Asymmetric information and third-party intervention in civil wars

I study a two-period model of conflict with two combatants and a third party who is an ally of one of the combatants. The third party is fully informed about the type of her ally but not about the type of her ally’s enemy. In a signaling game, I find that if the third party is unable to give a sufficiently high assistance to her ally, then there exists a unique separating equilibrium in which the third party’s expected intervention causes her ally’s enemy to exert more effort than in the absence of third-party intervention; this worsens the conflict.     

Strategic “defensivism” and post-reset blues: US–Russian nuclear arms reductions,missile defenses and minimum deterrence

US nuclear deterrence and arms control policy may be moving, by design and by inadvertence, toward a posture of strategic “defensivism”. Strategic “defensivism” emphasizes the overlapping and reinforcing impact of: (1) reductions in US, Russian and possibly other strategic nuclear forces, possibly down to the level of “minimum deterrence,” (2) deployment of improved strategic and/or theater antimissile defenses for the US, NATO allies and other partners; and (3) additional reliance on conventional military forces for some missions hitherto preferentially assigned to nuclear weapons. This article deals with the first two of these aspects only: the interaction between missile defenses and offensive force reductions in US–Russian strategy and policy. The findings are that stable deterrence as between the USA and Russia is possible at lower than New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty levels, but reductions below 1000 deployed long-range weapons for each state, toward a true minimum deterrent posture, will require multilateral as opposed to bilateral coordination of arms limitations. Missile defenses might provide some denial capability against light attacks by states with small arsenals, but they still fall short of meaningful damage limitation as between powers capable of massive nuclear strikes.     

Exact algorithms for integrated facility location and production planning problems

We consider a class of facility location problems with a time dimension, which requires assigning every customer to a supply facility in each of a finite number of periods. Each facility must meet all assigned customer demand in every period at a minimum cost via its production and inventory decisions. We provide exact branch‐and‐price algorithms for this class of problems and several important variants. The corresponding pricing problem takes the form of an interesting class of production planning and order selection problems. This problem class requires selecting a set of orders that maximizes profit, defined as the revenue from selected orders minus production‐planning‐related costs incurred in fulfilling the selected orders. We provide polynomial‐time dynamic programming algorithms for this class of pricing problems, as well as for generalizations thereof. Computational testing indicates the advantage of our branch‐and‐price algorithm over various approaches that use commercial software packages. These tests also highlight the significant cost savings possible from integrating location with production and inventory decisions and demonstrate that the problem is rather insensitive to forecast errors associated with the demand streams. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2011     

On optimal system designs in reliability‐economics frameworks

Reliability Economics is a field that can be defined as the collection of all problems in which there is tension between the performance of systems of interest and their cost. Given such a problem, the aim is to resolve the tension through an optimization process that identifies the system which maximizes some appropriate criterion function (e.g. expected lifetime per unit cost). In this paper, we focus on coherent systems of n independent and identically distributed (iid) components and mixtures thereof, and characterize both a system's performance and cost as functions of the system's signature vector (Samaniego, IEEE Trans Reliabil (1985) 69–72). For a given family of criterion functions, a variety of optimality results are obtained for systems of arbitrary order n. Approximations are developed and justified when the underlying component distribution is unknown. Assuming the availability of an auxiliary sample of N component failure times, the asymptotic theory of L‐estimators is adapted for the purpose of establishing the consistency and asymptotic normality of the proposed estimators of the expected ordered failure times of the n components of the systems under study. These results lead to the identification of ε‐optimal systems relative to the chosen criterion function. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007     

海战场态势评估问题的研究

对海战场综合态势进行态势评估和威胁分析是信息融合系统的最高层级,态势评估结果将对指挥员的指挥决策起到非常重要的作用。根据海军作战理论分析了海战场态势的表示方法,并基于模板方法设计了一种战场当前态势与模板数据库中态势进行匹配的算法。该算法特别适用于高层推理如态势或威胁评估。     

Meeting the growing safeguards burden

ABSTRACT

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) faces challenges in fulfilling its safeguards mandate as a result of an expanding safeguards burden and a relatively static budget. This dilemma has been exacerbated by the additional burdens of implementing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in Iran, but would not go away if implementation of the JCPOA were to end. There are three main areas of opportunity for the Agency: (1) budgetary expansion tied to changes in staffing policies, (2) changes in safeguards approaches, and (3) technological innovation. Barriers and limitations are associated with each approach, and advancing any of them will face a difficult political environment in Vienna.     

The Ethics of Cyber Attack: Pursuing Legitimate Security and the Common Good in Contemporary Conflict Scenarios

ABSTRACT

Cyber attack against Critical National Infrastructure is a developing capability in state arsenals. The onset of this new instrument in national security has implications for conflict thresholds and military ethics. To serve as a legitimate tool of policy, cyber attack must operate in accordance with moral concerns. To test the viability of cyber attack, this paper provides a new perspective on cyber ethics. Cyber attack is tested against the criteria of the common good. This involves identifying the four core components of the common good from a conflict perspective: respect for the person; social wellbeing; peace and security; and solidarity. The fate of these components is assessed in relation to the six key characteristics of cyber attack from a moral standpoint: security; the role or absence of violence; discrimination; proportionality; cyberharm; and the threshold of conflict. It is concluded that the common good must be incorporated into developing state cyber strategies.