Shifted Roles: Explaining Danish and Norwegian Alliance Strategy 1949–2009

During their 60 years within the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), Denmark and Norway have experienced both high and low standings within the alliance, which can be attributed to both external and internal factors influencing their alliance strategies. During the ‘first’ Cold War and Détente, 1949–79, Danish and Norwegian alliance strategy aimed to simultaneously deter and reassure the Soviet Union. During the ‘second’ Cold War, 1979–89, Danish alliance policy became driven by domestic politics, and the Danish government was forced to formally dissociate the country from NATO's policies. Norway was not uncritical, but held a much lower profile. After the Cold War this situation shifted. Denmark successfully rehabilitated itself as a loyal and dependable ally by responding to the call for focusing on out-of-area operations. Meanwhile, Norway's continued focus on the lingering Russian Threat made the country seem out-of-touch with priorities in the post-Cold War alliance, and domestic politics prevented a more active out-of-area engagement.     

A heuristic method for facility planning in telecommunications networks with multiple alternate routes

Given point-to-point demand forecasts of transmission facilities for services such as voice or data transmission in each period of a finite planning horizon, a decision has to be made as to which types of transmission facilities—together with the amounts of transmission circuits—are to be installed, if any, on each link of the telecommunications network, in each period of the planning horizon. The availability of alternative transmission systems with significantly different costs and circuit capacities necessitates the determination of a minimum (discounted) cost facility installation scheme. This combinatoric choice problem is complicated by the availability of switching equipments enabling the transmission of some of the traffic through intermediary points. This possibility of alternately routing the traffic or the facility requirements of certain point pairs further complicates the problem while creating the opportunity to benefit from economies of scale. We present here a heuristic method for finding a good solution for the general problem; namely, we consider multiple transmission systems and multiple alternate routes. Numerical examples are given and computational experience is reported.     

End effects in capacity expansion models with finite horizons

Capacity expansion models are typically formulated in the context of some finite horizon. Because the firm lasts longer than the horizon, a bias can enter into the optimal solution from the model horizon chosen. Recently, Grinold [8] has proposed a “dual-equilibrium method” for ameliorating possible distortions. Although the dual-equilibrium method has superior analytical properties to other methods, it is conceptually more complex. In this paper it is shown that there are situations where the “primal-equilibrium” approach of Manne [15] provides equivalent results and that the use of annualized capital costs in the objective function, although somewhat less efficient, results in a similar model.     

Tolerance intervals for univariate distributions

A review of univariate tolerance intervals is presented from an application-oriented point of view. Both β-content and β-expectation intervals are defined and considered. Standard problems are discussed for the distribution-free case and with various distributional assumptions (normal, gamma, Poisson) which occur most frequently in practice. The determination of sample size is emphasized. A number of examples are used to illustrate the types of problems which permit solutions with the excellent tables now available.     

A tactical warfare simulation program

The Tactical Warfare Simulation Program is a procedure by which the major interactions among opposing military units and terrain features can be treated in a tactical limited warfare situation. It is a critical-area, sequence-of-event model and is programmed in SIM-SCRIPT. In this program a military unit is described by such properties as strength, size, location, velocity, and attrition rates. Some of the events which can occur to a military unit are entering/leaving terrain features, becoming engaged/disengaged with opposing units, retreating, reaching an objective, and breaking. Following a discussion of the general features of the program, a study of a hypothetical war is presented.     

Toward a study of bidding processes part IV - games with unknown costs

This paper represents a continuation of three previous papers [1-.3] in the study of competitive bidding processes. It treats the case where a bidder's knowledge of his competitor's cost i s given by a probability distribution over a certain interval. The results obtained extend the work of Vickrey [4] to the case where the cost intervals a r e not necessarily symmetric.