Geopolitics over Proliferation: the Origins of US Grand Strategy and Their Implications for the Spread of Nuclear Weapons in South Asia

How much does the United States care about nonproliferation? Recent scholarship suggests that the fear of spreading nuclear weapons was central to the US grand strategy in the Cold War. In one important case, however, this argument does not hold. This article draws on theoretical debates and newly declassified archives to demonstrate the primacy of geopolitics over nonproliferation in Washington’s policy toward India and Pakistan. Despite their rhetoric, Democratic and Republican leaders consistently relegated nonproliferation to the backburner whenever it conflicted with other strategic goals. Moreover, they inadvertently encouraged proliferation in South Asia at three inter-connected levels: technology, security, and identity.     

Simultaneous determination of production and maintenance schedules using in‐line equipment condition and yield information

In many manufacturing environments, equipment condition has a significant impact on product quality, or yield. This paper presents a semi‐Markov decision process model of a single‐stage production system with multiple products and multiple maintenance actions. The model simultaneously determines maintenance and production schedules, accounting for the fact that equipment condition affects the yield of each product differently. It extends earlier work by allowing the expected time between decision epochs to vary by both action and machine state, by allowing multiple maintenance actions, and by treating the outcome of maintenance as less than certain. Sufficient conditions are developed that ensure the monotonicity of both the optimal production and maintenance actions. While the maintenance conditions closely resemble previously studied conditions for this type of problem, the production conditions represent a significant departure from earlier results. The simultaneous solution method is compared to an approach commonly used in industry, where the maintenance and production problems are treated independently. Solving more than one thousand test problems confirms that the combination of both features of the model—accounting for product differences and solving the problems simultaneously—has a significant impact on performance. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008     

Minimal forecast horizon procedures for dynamic lot size models

This article presents new results which should be useful in finding production decisions while solving the dynamic lot sizing problem of Wagner–Whitin on a rolling horizon basis. In a rolling horizon environment, managers obtain decisions for the first period (or the first few periods) by looking at the forecasts for several periods. This article develops procedures to find optimal decisions for any specified number of initial periods (called planning horizon in the article) by using the forecast data for the minimum possible number of future periods. Computational results comparing these procedures with the other procedures reported in the literature are very encouraging.     

Fitting Lanchester equations to the battles of Kursk and Ardennes

Lanchester equations and their extensions are widely used to calculate attrition in models of warfare. This paper examines how Lanchester models fit detailed daily data on the battles of Kursk and Ardennes. The data on Kursk, often called the greatest tank battle in history, was only recently made available. A new approach is used to find the optimal parameter values and gain an understanding of how well various parameter combinations explain the battles. It turns out that a variety of Lanchester models fit the data about as well. This explains why previous studies on Ardennes, using different minimization techniques and data formulations, have found disparate optimal fits. We also find that none of the basic Lanchester laws (i.e., square, linear, and logarithmic) fit the data particularly well or consistently perform better than the others. This means that it does not matter which of these laws you use, for with the right coefficients you will get about the same result. Furthermore, no constant attrition coefficient Lanchester law fits very well. The failure to find a good‐fitting Lanchester model suggests that it may be beneficial to look for new ways to model highly aggregated attrition. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2004.     

Quantifying optimal mesh and ring design costs

During the last decade telecommunication operators have been deploying WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexing) technology to satisfy the exponential growth in global communication. While facilitating the advanced information society of today, this has also led to a higher dependency on the networks, and furthermore the high capacity utilization of optical fibers means that a single link failure will influence many users and enterprises. For these reasons, protection of network connections has become a major competitive parameter for the operators. Currently, the most popular protection method is ring protection, due to its simplicity, requiring only basic management functionality and operating with local restoration control. While many optical rings have been deployed, little work has been published on exactly what the cost of ring networks are, compared to general mesh networks. In this article we perform a quantitative comparison between ring protection and mesh protection, using real world network data and realistic prices for network components. Extending classic LP flow models to take rings and node costs into account, and using a link‐path based mesh network LP model, we are able to perform a total cost comparison of the two architectures, and of manual ring network design. The results suggest that the price of mesh network components must be reduced significantly to be competitive with ring based networks, and also that manual network design does not necessarily lead to the most cost‐efficient designs. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005