Critics gone wild: Counterinsurgency as the root of all evil

The Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced a heated polemic concerning the merits and demerits of counterinsurgency – the operational approach underpinning both campaigns. The two books reviewed here provide a good summation of the arguments against counterinsurgency: it is not a strategy and will fail when mistaken as such; its theory does not make intervention and war significantly easier; and even the most successful counterinsurgency campaigns have been bloody, violent, and protracted. Yet as this review highlights, beyond these central points, criticism of counterinsurgency is too often off the mark in its approach and totalizing in its pretentions. There is much to criticize and an urgent need to learn from past campaigns, yet bold claims and broad generalizations can mislead rather than enlighten. The analysis is particularly unhelpful when the definition of the central issue at hand – counterinsurgency – is being unwittingly or deliberately distorted. In the end, these two books form a poor basis for the debate that must now take place, because they are too ideological in tone, too undisciplined in approach, and therefore too unqualified in what they finally say.     

Counterinsurgency and Operational Art

Addressing insurgency requires the same application of operational art as utilized in conventional warfare planning. Counterinsurgency strategy will be driven by the nature of the insurgent movement, with campaigns constructed to use tactics appropriately so that key facets of the insurgent campaign are neutralized. It is especially important to determine whether terror is used as a tactic (a method of action) by an insurgency or as a stand-alone strategy (a logic of action) by a challenger divorced from a mass base. Insurgencies, in turn, will normally emphasize strategically either winning allegiance of the target population or using violence as a substitute for other methods. Each of these approaches requires the weighting of the appropriate campaign elements of the counterinsurgency strategy. Sri Lanka, having faced both approaches, is an especially useful case study.     

Facility location for an extraterrestrial production/distribution system

This paper extends traditional production/distribution system analysis to address raw material, factories, and markets located beyond Earth. It explains the eventual advantages of such operations and discusses likely sites in the solar system. It furnishes a typology for production/distribution systems, assessing the fit of each type to space operations. It briefly reviews the physics of orbits. It develops transportation and inventory cost functions for the simplest case of Hohmann trajectories, and for transportation between circular orbits of similar radii using higher‐energy trajectories. These cost functions are used to derive a model of production/distribution system cost, the minimization of which selects an optimal factory location. The paper suggests potential extensions to this work, and concludes with ideas for location research on the novel reaches of extraterrestrial space. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005.     

A multi‐objective model for bank ATM networks

In this paper we present an application of the core solution concepts for multi‐objective games to a bank ATM network model. In these games, the worth of a coalition is given by a subset of vectors of the k‐dimensional space rather than by a scalar. The paper investigates how an ATM network model based on multi‐objective cooperative game theory could be used as an alternative way of setting interchange fees paid by the customer's bank to the one that owns the ATM. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005     

Influence of porosity distribution on nonlinear free vibration and transient responses of porous functionally graded skew plates

This article deals with the investigation of the effects of porosity distributions on nonlinear free vibration and transient analysis of porous functionally graded skew (PFGS) plates. The effective material properties of the PFGS plates are obtained from the modified power-law equations in which gradation varies through the thickness of the PFGS plate. A nonlinear finite element (FE) formulation for the overall PFGS plate is derived by adopting first-order shear deformation theory (FSDT) in conjunction with von Karman’s nonlinear strain displacement relations. The governing equations of the PFGS plate are derived using the principle of virtual work. The direct iterative method and Newmark’s integration technique are espoused to solve nonlinear mathematical relations. The influences of the porosity distributions and porosity parameter indices on the nonlinear frequency responses of the PFGS plate for different skew angles are studied in various parameters. The effects of volume fraction grading index and skew angle on the plate’s nonlinear dynamic responses for various porosity distributions are illustrated in detail.     

The role of covariate balance in observational studies

Observational data are prevalent in many fields of research, and it is desirable to use this data to make causal inferences. Because this data is nonrandom, additional assumptions are needed in order to construct unbiased estimators for causal effects. The standard assumption is strong ignorability, though it is often impossible to achieve the level of covariate balance that it requires. As such, researchers often settle for lesser balance levels within their datasets. However, these balance levels are generally insufficient to guarantee an unbiased estimate of the treatment effect without further assumptions. This article presents several extensions to the strong ignorability assumption that address this issue. Under these additional assumptions, specific levels of covariate balance are both necessary and sufficient for the treatment effect estimate to be unbiased. There is a trade‐off, however: as balance decreases, stronger assumptions are required to guarantee estimator unbiasedness. These results unify parametric and nonparametric adjustment methods for causal inference and are actualized by the Balance Optimization Subset Selection framework, which identifies the best level of balance that can be achieved within a dataset. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 64: 323–344, 2017     

Is Britain a force for good? Investigating British citizens’ narrative understanding of war

It is commonly assumed in the foreign policy literature that narratives are uniquely persuasive and thus integral to obtaining public support for war. Yet, empirical research on “strategic narrative” is often vague on both the concept of narrative and how it persuades. Moreover, the stories publics use to interpret war are rarely examined. This paper offers a novel approach to studying “from the ground up” the war stories of individual British citizens. It examines public interpretations of war through emplotment: the way people select and link events to create a coherent story. Examining the wars people include and those they silence, it illustrates how a diverse range of citizens morally evaluates Britain’s military role, be it as a Force for Good, a Force for Ill or a country Learning from its Mistakes. In doing so, the paper offers an alternative methodological approach to studying how individual citizens understand war.     

Expected waiting time rankings in extended machine-repair models

The present paper studies the relative magnitudes of expected waiting times in extended machine-repair models, when processing times are of two Erlang types. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 46: 864–870, 1999     

Analysis of production lines with Coxian service times and no intermediate buffers

This paper uses the holding time model (HTM) method to derive an approximate analytic formula for the calculation of the mean throughput of a K-station production line with no buffers between any two successive stations. Service times follow the two-stage Coxian (C²) distribution at all stations. The paper provides a formula that relates the third moment of the service completion (or virtual service) time with the respective parameters of the service time, the repair time and the time to breakdown (the latter is assumed to follow the exponential distribution). In this way, it concludes that under certain conditions the two-stage Coxian distribution can be used to approximate any general distribution matching the first three moments of the service completion time distribution. The mean holding times (consisting of the service and blocking periods) of all stations of the line are obtained in an analytical form. Numerical results are provided for the mean throughput of lines with up to 20 stations. These results are shown to have a good accuracy compared against results obtained from the Markovian state method (for short lines) and results from simulation (for longer lines). © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 45: 669–685, 1998     

Combat modeling of remotely targeted vehicles and a battery against a moving target

This paper considers a combined system composed of multiple stand-by remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs) and a single battery against a single passive enemy target, where the target, if not killed, is allowed to change its location after each attack. The RPV has the duty to report on target acquisition, to confirm a target kill, and to pass information on any change in target location after each battery attack. The battery has the duty to attack the target on the basis of the target location information provided to it by the RPV. We develop a closed-form expression for the time-dependent state probabilities of the system, which can be used to compute several important combat measures of effectiveness, including (a) the time-varying mean and variance of the number of the RPVs being alive and of the surviving enemy target, (b) the mission success, mission failure, and combat draw probabilities, and (c) the mean and variance of the combat duration time. Illustrative numerical examples are solved for these combat measures, and sensitivity analyses are performed with respect to target acquisition time and target kill probability. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 45: 645–667, 1998