The Reluctant Atlanticist: France’s Security and Defence Policy in a Transatlantic Context

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the key tenets of French foreign and security policy during the Cold War, and illustrates the deep challenges to the French consensus raised by the emergence of a unipolar system. There is a growing gap between the rhetoric of French security policy, emphasizing ‘autonomy’ and ‘sovereignty’ out of habit from the Cold War, and the actual security practices showing a gradual embedding within the transatlantic security structures. In the absence of a new transpartisan grand narrative relevant for the contemporary international system, such embedding is easily portrayed in France as a ‘treason’ from a romanticized Gaullist foreign policy.     

A Revolution Too Far? US Defence Innovation,Europe and NATO’s Military-Technological Gap

The United States is launching another defence innovation initiative to offset the growing military-technological might of countries such as China, Russia and Iran. However, by utilising emerging technologies from the commercial sector to achieve greater military power the US may further open up the technology gap within NATO. This raises serious questions for NATO’s European allies. This article probes the nature of the US’s latest innovation strategy and sets it within the strategic context facing Europe today. Whether European governments, firms and militaries will join the US in its new defence innovation drive will hinge on politico-military and industrial considerations.     

气溶胶灭火装置在工业供电系统中的应用

分析工业供电系统的火灾特点和原因 ,结合部分工程实例和气溶胶灭火装置的特性 ,提出该类产品在工业供电系统应用中的优势和施工中的注意事项 ,并展望其应用前景     

高等教育产业化趋势剖析

分析了教育能否实现产业化以及教育产业化是否会导致教育不公平和丧失教育的公益性等问题。指出了高等教育产业化的必要性 ,并提出了如何规范和促进教育产业化发展的一些观点。     

毫米波制导武器及其防护

介绍了毫米波制导武器的特点以及国外已经装备或正在研制的毫米波制导武器。基于毫米波辐射及传输特点,讨论了对毫米波制导武器进行防护的方法。     

嵌入式计算机PC/104在陆地导航系统中的应用

随着现代导航技术的发展,嵌入式计算机技术已成为陆地导航系统中不可分割的重要组成部分。介绍了嵌入式工控机PC/104的结构特点及其应用开发特点;基于PC/104的系统设计思想,提出了以PC/104工控机为核心的陆地导航系统的设计方案,重点介绍了该系统的组成、各部件的作用、工作原理以及软件设计流程。这种嵌入式计算机软硬件相辅相成的有机构成,能集中统一地完成各部件的控制与信号处理,使整个陆地导航系统的性能与可靠性得到进一步提高。     

Defence Spending and Income Inequality in Taiwan

The rising trend in income inequality has recently attracted a renewed interest in the determinants of this growing trend across many countries. This article adds to the debate by investigating the impact of defence expenditure as a possible determinant of inequality in Taiwan, a country once was considered to be a poster child of an equitable growth, but now income inequality has become one of the Taiwan’s growing challenges. Applying the bounds test approach to cointegration and four long-run estimators for the period from 1976–2011, we found a long-run relationship between the various measures of inequality and defence expenditure where defence expenditure exerts a positive and a statistically significant impact on the worse income inequality in Taiwan. Further application of the lag-augmented causality test procedure also reveals a unidirectional causality running from defence expenditure to income inequality with defence expenditure causing income inequality to rise.     

The Serbian defence institution: the need for clear policy guidance to improve the Serbian defence planning,management, and command processes

ABSTRACT

The uncritical layering of western liberal defence governance norms and concepts on top of existing legacy concepts has impeded achieving coherent military capabilities and capacities when Serbia’s political and military leadership tried to reform the defence system using Western benchmarking principles and Western countries’ best practices. The process of this change has been more valuable than its actual output, as defined by increased capabilities. Such outcomes should be reflective of policy guidance, and can be thought of as closing the trinity loop of a defence planning system: plans, money and execution. This article addresses two key functional areas of the Serbian defence institution. First, it assesses the current state of defence planning to discern its strengths and weaknesses to ascertain if plans are tied to financial decision-making. Second, a full examination of current Serbian defence management is conducted to discern whether weaknesses exist that distract from producing operational capabilities. Both areas are analyzed thoroughly and some solutions for change are proposed. Also, the article analyzes the appearance of two negative phenomena in the planning process – economization and managerialism.     

弹道导弹防御系统效能分析与措施研究

简要介绍了弹道导弹防御系统的组成 ,提供了系统作战效能计算的主要思想、方法 ,给出了概率计算模型。根据分析结果 ,结合现代战争的作战方式和导弹防御系统的作战特点 ,提出了提高弹道导弹防御系统作战效能的技术和战术措施。     

Optimal production ramp-up in the smartphone manufacturing industry

Motivated by challenges in the smartphone manufacturing industry, we develop a dynamic production ramp-up model that can be applied to economically satisfy nonstationary demand for short-life-cycle products by high-tech companies. Due to shorter life cycles and more rapid evolution of smartphones, production ramp-up has been increasingly critical to the success of a new smartphone. In the production ramp-up, the key challenge is to match the increasing capacity to nonstationary demand. The high-tech smartphone manufacturers are urged to jointly consider the effect of increasing capacity and decreasing demand. We study the production planning problem using a high-dimensional Markov decision process (MDP) model to characterize the production ramp-up. To address the curse of dimensionality, we refine Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithm and theoretically analyze its convergence and computational complexity. In a real case study, we find that the MDP model achieves revenue improvement by stopping producing the existing product earlier than the benchmark policy. In synthetic instances, we validate that the proposed MCTS algorithm saves computation time without loss of solution quality compared with traditional value iteration algorithm. As part of the Lenovo production solution, our MDP model enables high-tech smartphone manufacturers to better plan the production ramp-up.