Colonizing military history: A millennial view on the economics of war

We briefly illustrate the application of fundamental principles of economics to three episodes of military history for the second millennium AD. The periods, principles, and cases examined are, first, the European Middle Ages (1000-1300; opportunity cost; siege warfare); second, the Enlightenment and the Age of Battle (1618-1814; expected marginal costs/benefits; the decision to engage in battle); and third, the Cold War (1945-1989; substitution; France's nuclear force de frappe).     

Resourcing for defense: Solving the roles and missions puzzle

One of the most important issues facing the post‐Cold War U.S. defense establishment concerns the future allocation of combat tasks and responsibilities among different branches of the armed forces. The challenge is to reduce unnecessary redundancy across roles and missions when resources are highly constrained, without compromising military effectiveness. Defining the policy problem as one of resource allocation rather than operational effectiveness, we develop a methodology for allocating roles and missions. Our methodology focuses at the highest level of force aggregation and uses a mathematical programming model to produce cross‐service cross‐mission trade‐offs that will yield the best total force combat and non‐combat potential within resource consumption constraints.     

Open source intelligence (OSINT) for conflict monitoring in contemporary South Africa: Challenges and opportunities in a big data context

This article argues that aspirations of maintaining a dominant influence over sub-Saharan security issues has spurred the French and British leadership of European Union (EU) foreign and security policy integration, just as it has informed military capability expansions by the armed forces of the main EU powers. While Europe's initial African focus was on stabilising a continent marred by state failure, civil wars and genocides, changes in the global security context, especially the shift towards multipolarity manifest in China's growing engagement, has prompted a complementary focus on deterring other powers from making military inroads into the subcontinent. Hence Europe's sub-Saharan security focus is shifting from stabilisation towards deterrence. This helps explain recent military procurements which, in spite of the extremely challenging fiscal position of most EU member states, feature large-scale investments in long-range deterrence capabilities.     

‘Fighting for peace’

In Africa, most of the present conflicts are civil, intra-state wars where belligerent groups use guerrilla tactics to achieve various political, economic or ideological objectives. The atrocities and the effect of these on-going wars on innocent civilians, human suffering, poverty and development are beyond comprehension. Not surprisingly, the majority of current peace operations are in Africa, with more than 70 countries contributing forces to these conflict zones. On the continent, South Africa has come to assume a leading role in peace operations and is now a major troop-contributing country to UN and AU missions. In the past 11 years, the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) has taken part in no fewer than 14 peace missions. This article provides a brief background of the conflicts in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Sudan, the different United Nations (UN) and African Union (AU) mandates under which peacekeepers had to operate as well as their objectives, and the extent of South Africa's involvement in the various missions. In the last section, the major challenges, that these operations have posed are highlighted.     

U.S. SPACE WEAPONS

Under the administration of President George W. Bush, Pentagon rhetoric has increasingly articulated a more robust vision of space as a future battlefield. This analysis details some of the ongoing spending for research and development programs identified in current U.S. Air Force, Missile Defense Agency (MDA), and Defense Advanced Research and Planning Agency (DARPA) planning and budget documents related to “space control” and “space force projection.” This analysis finds that current support for “space superiority” and “space control” systems remains largely rhetorical—with little actual budgetary support. Unclassified technology development programs included in the six-year Future Years Defense Plan are a decade or more away from deployment. Programs related to offensive counterspace, space-based missile defense interceptors, and space-based strike total slightly less than $300 million in FY 2006 funding. We conclude significantly higher expenditures in research and development would be required to develop and deploy killer micro satellites, space-based missile defense interceptors, and military space planes.     

Soar在水面舰艇CGF防空决策行为模型构建中的应用

计算机生成兵力(CGF)的行为模型研究一直是人工智能技术应用于军事仿真的一个重要研究内容。基于综合认知架构Soar设计并实现了水面舰艇CGF的自动防空决策行为模型,并在海战CGF系统中实现了该模型,应用结果表名Soar在构建CGF行为模型的有效性和可行性。     

The view from above: how the Royal Air Force provided a strategic vision for operational intelligence during the Malayan Emergency

It has long been held that the Federation of Malaya’s counter-insurgency campaign during the First Malayan Emergency (1948–60) was determined by the use of intelligence. Special Branch — the Federation’s primary intelligence agency — dominates the prevailing paradigm of how the insurgent threat was tackled. Conversely, the role of the Royal Air Force (RAF) within this paradigm is very limited. Most observers simply dismiss the role of photoreconnaissance or airstrikes as being largely inconsequential to the counter-insurgency effort. This is perhaps understandable: the Emergency was after all a ‘policing action’ and the insurgents were largely hidden under Malaya’s jungle canopy and amongst the Chinese community. However, further scrutiny reveals that the RAF made a much more significant contribution to the intelligence element of the counter-insurgency campaign than previously realised. First, the RAF decided to locate their Advanced Headquarters with the Army’s General Headquarters. This led to the creation of the Land/Air Operations Room, through which intelligence, tasking and resources were coordinated. Moreover, the RAF put its intelligence teams into the field to provide a practical link between local units and theatre-level assets. Second, with the support of the Army, the RAF established at the beginning of the Emergency the Joint Air Photographic Intelligence Board (Far East). This coordinated all photographic intelligence requirements throughout the Emergency, which was then delivered via the Joint Air Photographic Centre (Far East). Hence, via Joint Operations Centre and JAPIB (FE), the RAF provided both the practical means for effective joint intelligence operations at theatre level throughout the Emergency.     

Reinterpreting Libya's WMD Turnaround – Bridging the Carrot-Coercion Divide

The dominant explanations of Libya's nuclear reversal in 2003 privilege either coercion or carrots treating these instruments as alternatives. Indoing so they ignore that it took a combination of coercion, carrots and confidence-building to turn Libya around. This article demonstrates this by developing and deploying a theoretical framework that integrates these three instruments into a more coherent and convincing explanation of the case. It highlights that analysts and policy-makers would do well to focus more on how different policy tools can be used in combination to achieve desired outcomes than on how individual tools can be employed with decisive effects. It also demonstrates that the Libya success will be hard to replicate.     

Delusion of Defeat: The United States and Iraq, 1990–1998

This article challenges the widely held belief that that the United States ‘won the war but lost the peace’ following the war with Iraq in 1991. Fears of a resurgent Iraq grew throughout the decade, despite abundant evidence that Iraq was becoming desperately weak and was no longer a threat to regional security. In fact, the United States won the war as well as the peace by any meaningful definition of the term. The article also discusses the reasons why US policymakers and observers convinced themselves that they had lost. The final section considers implications for strategy and policy in wars of limited objectives.     

基于网络存储技术的武警有线综合业务网存储系统研究

为解决武警有线综合业务网海量信息的存储与管理问题,本文在论述了目前比较流行的网络存储技术的基础上,结合武警有线综合业务网的特点,提出了适应武警有线综合业务网存储需要的网络存储技术方案。