Analysis of an Alternative Military Healthcare Benefit Design

Abstract

The Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission was established by the Congress in 2013 to perform a systematic review of military compensation to address rising costs and other trends. Their recommendation for reforming the TRICARE health care program was sweeping, and differed greatly from earlier proposals that focused on increasing beneficiary cost shares. Specifically, the commission proposed overhauling the current benefit delivery model and replacing it with a premium-based insurance model offering a menu of DoD-sponsored private health plans. The analysis presented here is based on work that supported the commission by estimating the budgetary impact of its proposed reforms. Results indicate that movement towards the premium-based model would produce an annual budgetary cost savings in the $2 billion to $4 billion range, with a best savings estimate of $3.2 billion.     

Tipping the scales: short-term interventions and counterinsurgency

Particularly in African operations, United Nations (UN) peacekeeping forces have faced significant problems in restoring stability. In at least a few situations, unilateral national military interventions have been launched in the same countries. In the cases of Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire, the British and French interventions respectively played a significant role in re-establishing stability. Lessons from these operations suggest that if effective coordination and liaison channels are established, such hybrid unilateral-UN missions can in fact be more successful than “pure” peace operations.     

Rising bipolarity in the South China Sea: the American rebalance to Asia and China's expansion

This article synthesizes three elements of power and balancing in the South China Sea (SCS): analytical perspectives on China's behaviour and intentions, the American rebalance to Asia and the dispositions of American allies and partners. Based on extensive interviews and theoretical analysis, it concludes that ‘soft balancing’ backed by American military power provides the optimum chance for resolving the growing dispute. Short to medium-term weakness of Malaysia, Philippines and Vietnam, as well as Japan, means the United States must provide much of the military power while working to build their forces. The most promising alternative is multilateral diplomacy through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ Regional Forum, a vehicle for negotiating a Code of Conduct and implementation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. If China remains motivated mainly by defense of realist interests, the costs imposed against expansion will eventually cause recalculation of Beijing's strategy, and soft balancing by the United States and its partners has a chance of working. The constructivist perspective, stressing self-conceptualization of Chinese strategic culture, supports Chinese confidence that patience will eventually bring dominance. If China tries offensively to change the status quo, soft balancing is less likely to influence Beijing. President Xi Jin Ping appears to be offensively asserting power, seeking regional dominance before he is due to step down in 2023. This supports the finding of enhanced risks of unintended escalation in the SCS and the East China Sea.     

The ambivalent coalition: doing the least one can do against the Islamic state

The effort to degrade and defeat the Islamic State is like many other multilateral military efforts – characterized by widely varying contributions to the effort. This article seeks to understand the patterns of contributions. Three sets of explanations are applied: the lessons of Afghanistan and Libya, variations in how potential contributors feel the threat posed by the Islamic State, and domestic political dynamics. While there may be some political processes that overlap with the big lessons and with the threat of the Islamic State, the patterns of contributions thus far suggest that the key drivers of reactions to the Islamic State are the desire not to repeat Afghanistan combined with some impetus provided by Islamic State attacks in the various homelands. The conclusion suggests some policy implications as well as some ideas for future research.     

Robustness of preallocated preferential defense with assumed attack size and perfect attacking and defending weapons

The problem is to protect a set of t targets by n perfect interceptors against an attack by m perfect weapons. If the defender solves for an optimal preallocated preferential defense and associated game value assuming m₁ attackers, and the attacker knows the assumption of the defender and utilizes m₂ attackers, he may be able to achieve significantly more damage than had the defender assumed that there would be m₂ attackers. The article treats the robustness of preallocated preferential defense to assumptions about the size of the attack and presents results of an alternative approach.     

同步电机卦限识别技术及轴角数字转换器设计

根据同步电机工作原理提出了一种新的同步电机卦限划分及轴角识别技术,并据此技术,完成了同步电机轴角-数字转换器设计.     

The Chinese and Asian impact on Russian nuclear policy

Asia, where nuclear powers already interact (including North Korea), exerts a growing influence on the thinking and policy underlying Russia's current and future nuclear (and overall defense) posture. China's rise is forcing Russia into a greater reliance on strategic offensive weapons and tactical nuclear weapons. These in turn will reinforce its opposition to US missile defenses, not only in Europe but also in Asia. Russia must now entertain the possibility of nuclear use in regional conflicts that would otherwise remain purely conventional. It cannot be postulated blindly that nuclear weapons serve no discernible purpose other than to deter nuclear attacks by other nuclear powers. The strategic equation in Asia and in the Russian Far East convincingly demonstrates the falsity of this approach. Nuclear weapons will be the essential component of Russia's regional defense policy if not of its overall policies – and this also includes contingencies in Europe.     

Large deviations of the winsorized mean of an exponential distribution

An asymptotic representation for large deviation probabilities of the Winsorized mean of a sequence of independent, identically distributed exponential random variables is derived. The Winsorized mean, a linear combination of exponential order statistics, is first transformed into a weighted sum of exponential random variables, and then a large deviation theorem for weighted sums can be applied. The representation obtained is then compared with results already known for the mean and the median, the two extreme cases of the Winsorized mean.