‘Mowing the Grass’: Israel’sStrategy for Protracted Intractable Conflict

‘Mowing the Grass’, Israel’s strategy in the twenty-first century against hostile non-state groups, reflects the assumption that Israel finds itself in a protracted intractable conflict. The use of force in such a conflict is not intended to attain impossible political goals, but a strategy of attrition designed primarily to debilitate the enemy capabilities. Only after showing much restraint in its military responses does Israel act forcefully to destroy the capabilities of its foes, hoping that occasional large-scale operations also have a temporary deterrent effect in order to create periods of quiet along its borders. The Israeli approach is substantively different from the current Western strategic thinking on dealing with non-state military challenges.     

Clash of counterterrorism-assistance-seeking states and their super power sponsors: Implications on the war against Boko Haram

ABSTRACT

Decade-long security cooperation and counterterrorism engagements in Nigeria have failed to bring down Boko Haram or at least weaken its terrorist structures and transnational spread. I argue that disconnects between counterterrorism-assistance seeking states and their superpower sponsors are implicated in the intractability of Boko Haram's insurgency in Nigeria. Why is the U.S. counterterrorism intervention to individual MNJTF countries (i.e. troop contribution, military funding and intelligence support) ‘lopsided’, ‘fragmented’ and ‘unevenly distributed;’ and how are these implicated in the fight against Boko Haram terrorism? This has impacted negatively on MNJTF countries – lack of cooperation, divisiveness and individualism in coordinating and forging offensives against Boko Haram. These concerns interface several blind spots in the picture of external influences on military’s approach to Boko Haram. I elicit primary data from top military officers. I conclude by predicting the implications and consequences of these counterterrorism complexities, and their potency to defeat or encourage Boko Haram terror.     

防空作战仿真态势显示成员通用性研究

针对防空装备作战仿真中态势显示成员在防空武器作战仿真联邦中的通用性需求,本文进行了防空装备作战仿真态势显示成员通用性研究,并提出了基于语义映射的态势成员通用性实现方法,该方法依赖于数据模型模块,配置模块,动态公布订购模块,发送模块和接收模块。通过配置模块生成的配置文件记录公布订购信息,动态公布订购模块负责对信息的动态公布订购,发送和接收模块负责对数据的发送和接收,数据模型模块是介于态势显示成员中仿真模型和HLA/RTI数据接口之间的模块,主要负责在发送前和接收后对数据进行存储和管理,成功的解决了通用性问题。     

Dynamic Winner-Take-All Conflict

This paper empirically investigates the importance of financial and political variables in determining debt rescheduling probabilities in Turkey for 1955–2000. The problem of sovereign debt default and rescheduling has been the subject of substantial academic research during the last two decades. There has been criticism of models of developing countries’ indebtedness and rescheduling that rely solely on some economic or financial predictors related to country debt, the foreign exchange sector or the domestic economic situation. Using probit analysis, this paper indicates that financial variables are important determinants of rescheduling probabilities. However, political variables are not significant in our models.     

The future of the defence firm in small and medium countries

The Western European defence industry used to be characterized by numerous constraints, especially in the small countries, subject to uneconomic defence production policies. It faces, since the end of the Cold War, a succession of new challenges such as budget restrictions, armament reductions and geopolitical upheavals. The EU is pushing in the direction of a cohesive foreign policy, including security and defence. Today, the emergence of a more consolidated European defence industry and the presence of oligopolistic European companies imply the definition of new roles for the EU and for its European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP). The solution is not protectionism, but more co‐operation to ensure effective defence production at a socially acceptable cost. In the framework of this co‐operation, defence companies in small and medium countries have a role to play as part of the supply chain to major weapon system integrators.     

The defence firm of the future

This paper offers the personal view of a senior executive in the Defence Procurement Agency about the future requirements of the defence industry’s principal UK customer. The focus here is on trying to identify the type of corporate behaviour and range of skill sets that the UK Government will need from defence suppliers, both primes and supply chain companies in the future. The concluding message from this ‘Customer View’ is that there is likely to be a continuing market for the company that specializes in delivering defence capability. It will be a company that will be looking for a long‐term relationship, with a specialist knowledge of its various national customers and a willingness to work openly and closely with them. It will be agile in its ability to bring together diverse technologies, to package them as a system and to deliver them either as hardware or as a service. Such suppliers will also need to innovate and to adapt at least as rapidly as the threats that they seek to counter.     

NON‐LINEARITY IN THE DEFENCE EXPENDITURE – ECONOMIC GROWTH RELATIONSHIP IN TAIWAN

As we enter the 21st Century, technologies originally developed for defense purposes such as computers and satellite communications appear to have become a driving force behind economic growth in the United States. Paradoxically, almost all previous econometric models suggest that the largely defense‐oriented federal industrial R&;D funding that helped create these technologies had no discernible effect on U.S. industrial productivity growth. This paper addresses this paradox by stressing that defense procurement as well as federal R&;D expenditures were targeted to a few narrowly defined manufacturing sub‐sectors that produced high tech weaponry. Analysis employing data from the NBER Manufacturing Productivity Database and the BEA’ s Input Output tables then demonstrates that defense procurement policies did have significant effects on the productivity performance of disaggregated manufacturing industries because of a process of procurement‐driven technological change.     

Defence spending and economic growth in South Africa: A supply and demand model*

This paper provides a contribution to the growing corpus of knowledge and understanding of the interaction between economic growth and defence spending in South Africa by specifying a Keynesian simultaneous equation model and estimating the system for the period 1961 to 1997. The model contains a growth equation, a savings equation, a trade balance equation and a military burden equation and when estimated by single equation and systems estimation methods is relatively well specified. There is evidence of an overall negative effect of military spending on the economy over this period, though the significance of individual coefficients is low. There is certainly no evidence of any positive impact, suggesting that cuts in military spending do present an opportunity for improved macroeconomic performance.     

Country survey IV: Pakistan

This paper examines the role of the military in Pakistan, particularly in regard to civil‐military relations and defence industrialisation. Pakistan's military expenditure is relatively high, but apart from investment multipliers, little of this spending filters through to the civil sector. Pakistan's defence‐industrial strategy centres on rebuild and Chinese technological collaboration. However, while this ‘capital‐saving’ approach has merit, the strategy has thus far failed to stimulate broader civil development linkages. A conclusion of this paper is that Pakistan is failing to maximise the strategic dual‐use benefits of integrating civil‐military activity.     

The rising unit cost of defence equipment — The reasons and the results

This paper constructs a conceptual model for the selection of defence equipment providing best value for money. It then shows how the unit cost of the chosen equipment increases between one generation of equipment and its successor because of developments in the perceived threat, the available technology and industrial productivity, and demonstrates that unit cost increases can arise from a logical and rational procurement policy and are not necessarily caused by technological chimeras and military vainglory. The resulting persistent rise in unit cost is unlikely to be significantly slowed by any of the counter‐measures yet proposed.

The paper then discusses the policies which nations have adopted to accommodate past increases in unit cost, and the options which confront any nation at the point when it can no longer afford to re‐equip a particular element of its armed forces.