Budget allocation,national security,military intelligence,and human capital: a dynamic model

This study develops a dynamic model that integrates military intelligence into the defense capability of the country and the optimal allocation of its government budget. We assert that the effectiveness of the country’s military intelligence is contingent on the quality of its human capital, which, in turn, implies a long-term positive relationship between the government’s various civilian expenditures and its capacity to achieve a cost-effective intelligence and, hence, military capability. This relationship is developed within a multiple-period arms race model between two rivals. Using this model and stylized data for the Israeli–Syrian arms race, we show that an appropriate budget shift from defense to civilian expenditures during the initial periods of the planning horizon will gradually (over a decade, say) increase the quality of human capital in the country and, thus, the effectiveness of its intelligence, which, in turn, will increase the country’s future security and welfare.     

Missile Strategy in a Post-Nuclear Age

While the arrival of nuclear weapons coincided roughly with the development of short, medium, intermediate, and eventually intercontinental missiles, the contribution of missile technology to the deterrence equation is often lost. If nuclear weapons were eliminated, even new generation missiles with conventional payloads could struggle to render effective deterrence. But some of the physical and psychological effects commonly ascribed to nuclear weapons could still be in play. And in a world without nuclear weapons, thinking about the use and control of force from the nuclear age would also deserve renewed attention.     

Country survey IX: Spain

From the early 1980s Spain embarked on a wide‐ranging process of military reform, from organisational changes to defence industrial policies. Investment in military equipment was set to grow, policies were drawn up to foster the domestic defence industrial base, defence R&D rocketed, and Spain joined a myriad of international arms development programmes. Yet, by 1991 the process of reform had run out of steam. Expenditure planning proved unreliable, and firms suffered from sharp cutbacks in procurement expenditure. The model of defence industrial growth sketched in the mid‐1980s had floundered. The Spanish case provides an example of how the quest to maximise defence procurement from domestic sources can fall victim to industrial and budgetary constraints. Spanish defence producers are now becoming increasingly intertwined with foreign defence companies.     

Is there a Greek‐Turkish arms race?: Evidence from cointegration and causality tests†

Greece and Turkey are both members of NATO and are two of the principal players in the Balkan region. Their respective defence burdens (i.e. the share of military expenditure to GDP) are the highest in NATO. Their bilateral relations are marred by serious friction and conflict of interest and have on a number of occasions come close to an armed confrontation. Their strategic interaction and mutual weapons build‐up has recently attracted the attention of researchers in the field testing the hypothesis of a Greek‐Turkish arms race with conflicting results. This paper, using cointegration and causality tests, finds evidence of a systematic armaments competition between the two countries provided that a defence policy regime shift estimated to occur in 1985 is explicitly taken into consideration. This policy regime change is associated with the stagnation of defence spending in Greece owing to the gradual deterioration of Greek public finances over the last decade.     

THE EXERCISE OF NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY

Skeptics of the Bush administration have castigated its strong aversion to formal international agreements in responding to the threat of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), citing unilateral actions as the default alternative. Yet this critique misses the growing emergence of a conscious framework guiding the administration's actions: an emphasis on the exercise of national sovereignty and the corollary principle of sovereign responsibility. Rejecting the paradigm of arms control as the answer to WMD proliferation, the current administration instead advocates a toolkit of alternative mechanisms based on the full exercise by individual nation, states of their domestic authorities and rights under international law, acting in their capacities as responsible citizens of the global community. This paper will examine that philosophical approach and its concrete application through the following policies: (1) the Proliferation Security Initiative; (2) enforcement of national laws and regulations as exemplified by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540 and the U.S. proposals for consideration by Biological Weapons Convention signatories; and (3) preemptive warfare to disarm the WMD programs of a threatening state.     

Arms Racing and the Costs of Arms Imports: A Stochastic Model

The paper draws on the demand for arms imports model of Levine and Smith (1995, 1997) using stochastic processes of the birth-death type in steady state. It assumes two antagonistic regional players engaged in an armaments race satisfying their demand for military hardware through imports from the international market. The paper examines the effects that arms imports have on the military balance between the two recipient countries. It constructs a state space of possible outcomes in terms of the military balance/imbalance between the two countries involved. A new variable is introduced which tries to encapsulate the absolute difference in their respective security functions at any moment in time. This variable affects the transition from one state of affairs to the other.     

The economic effects of international trade in armaments in the major western industrialized and developing countries†

We have used the Michigan Model of World Production and Trade to assess the impact of exports and imports of armaments (based on 1980 data) on sectoral trade and employment and other economic variables in the major Western trading countries. If the United States were to place a unilateral embargo on its arms exports and imports, we calculate that it would experience a comparatively small amount of employment displacement in the aggregate and that most of this displacement would occur in the transport equipment and electric machinery sectors. If all the major Western countries were to place a multilateral embargo on their arms trade, the sectoral effects on the United States would be similarly small. But the sectoral effects in several other industrialized and developing countries measured as a percentage of sectoral employment, would be larger, indicating potential short‐run adjustment problems in labor markets in some cases.     

A simple and untraditional analysis of western alliance burden‐sharing

The original Olson and Zeckhauser model of alliance burden‐sharing was based on the following four assumptions: (1) alliance defence is a pure public good; (2) allied nations make their security contribution decisions without consulting the other allies; (3) alliances produce only a single public good; and (4) alliance defence is produced with equal degrees of efficiency in all alliance nations. But while the first of these assumptions has received a great deal of attention in the alliance literature, the remaining ones have received comparatively less attention, particularly in terms of empirical analyses. This paper synthesizes a varied literature developed around these four assumptions, both substantively and theoretically, and shows that when these assumptions are brought closer to real world approximations, hypotheses regarding the potential for security cooperation with less free‐riding result. This article also provides a simple test of Western alliance burden‐sharing in the areas of military spending, development resources spending, and research and development spending that supports the hypothesis positing more equitable burden‐sharing.     

ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVES FOR ARMS CONTROL

The efforts of President Barack Obama and his administration to restore the United States as a driving force of multilateral arms control and nonproliferation negotiations are commendable, yet the lack of progress on such issues over the last eight years has ensured that U.S. policy has not kept pace with changes in the geostrategic environment and the evolving security agenda. Meanwhile, an alternative agenda has been articulated by non-Western countries. This article focuses on the arms control perspectives of Non-Aligned Movement states and others that have begun to embrace the idea of “disarmament as humanitarian action.” It explores this idea in the context of recent initiatives and argues that if the Obama administration wants to make progress on its arms control and nonproliferation priorities, it should consider a multifaceted approach that incorporates this emerging alternative agenda.     

一个通用数据库管理工具的研究与实现

目前我国行业信息化建设已经跨越了初级阶段,但在许多行业的信息化应用中还存在着烟囱效应和信息孤岛效应。为了将行业信息化引向深入,需要对原有系统进行数据集成。文中首先对数据集成的基本概念进行了探讨,并进一步对数据集成的一个重要工具——通用数据库管理工具的功能及实现方法进行了研究。文中所讨论的通用数据库管理工具与其他工具的区别在于:能够对物理上分布的、异构的多个数据库进行管理,还能够在更高的层次上对多个数据库中的数据进行逻辑上的重新组织。文中所讨论的通用数据库管理工具是为最终用户服务的,而不是一个开发工具。